WIND ENERGY VS. COAL - INTERESTING DEBATE

(We have received interesting comments on the long item on "the state of the art" in responding to wind farm applications.  We hereby publish a few of these. - Ed.)

On 14 July Adam Welz writes:

Hi Anton

If that second link is the 'state of the art', well, that objection is going nowhere. It's long-winded, contains piles of irrelevancies, and makes very few solid points. Handwaving deluxe.

IMHO, you need to stick to the topic, make directly relevant arguments, and keep it as short as you can.

I also think that birders should be spending their time fighting govt and industry's new coal plans rather than fighting wind farms. Prioritisation of effort is paramount here. Coal fired power stations and their associated mines & infrastructure are already destroying major rivers (see Andre Botha's latest data on massive declines of fish-eating species on the Olifants in KNP, for example) and threaten to destroy MANY thousands of hectares of habitat in the coming 2 decades (take a look at the strip mining applications for Mpumalanga to see what I mean).

In addition, the new data from eastern Siberia indicates that we are within 15 years of massive methane releases from permafrost, which will result in rapid and probably irreversible climate change. We need to stop coal, and stop it fast.

Quit wasting your time tilting at windmills. There are more important battles to fight.

Cheers

Adam

(On 15 July Adam adds:)

Also, Anton, I note that your material enthusiastically links to the so-called Climate Realists website (http://climaterealists.com/) which is a well-known platform for oil and coal industry-funded denialists such as Marc Morano, who has a long history here in the US as one of the most mendacious and well paid PR flacks for the dirty energy industry and some particularly corrupt US politicians. (I notice one of the pieces you link to says that the wind industry is blocking the use of vertical shaft turbines -- a quick read of the literature will show you that this is not the case and companies are already building large prototypes of vertical shaft designs.)

Please get your story straight before you start trumpeting this nonsense all over the birdnets. Although certain wind turbines do kill birds in some cases, most of the thorough studies I have read indicate that these impacts can usually be mitigated very easily by careful placement of the turbine towers. I would also urge you to look in to the study done of bird mortality at the small installation near Darling: Although many large birds fly through that general area, a draft report I saw indicated that not a single bird mortality was found to be caused by those turbines within their first year of operation.

As for the so-called scenic impact of wind turbines: Have you ever been to an opencast coal mine? Do you have the foggiest clue of what is being planned for Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces wrt to coal mines?

Transmission lines are another story -- there is growing evidence that these may be causing real problems for some bird species, e.g. large bustards. We need to urgently look at a) the scale of the problem and b) ways of mitigating it. Note, however, the enormously long distances of transmission line that new coal power stations will require, and how producing more power for Cape Town near Cape Town instead of thousands of kilometres away will reduce the demand for long transmission lines.

By all means promote solar water heaters, decent ceiling insulation, eating no beef and other methods of reducing our energy demand/global warming pollution output.

But don't be another breathless amateur climate change denialist peddling out of date information for the benefit of the coal and oil industry -- the time for that has long passed.

Cheers

Adam

(Tony Rebelo adds:)

But see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10618344

Red Kite dead at wind farm.

I cannot help feeling that something is missing. Wind Farms are free energy? There has to be a catch somewhere? Nothing in nature is free. What is the environmental impact of a wind farm apart from the footprint of the infrastructure and the bird and bat deaths? Wind is important for our Benguella upwelling, for cooling Fynbos seedlings, etc. But how much energy can we take out of the airstreams before there are effects “downstream”? Call it a mere “hunch”, but I suspect we are missing something important.

And before you compare it to coal mines: the wind farms I have seen in California are no better than agriculture (micro-scale mining) or mine dumps for all the environmental damage they cause, after the tower foundations, the wires and maintenance roads to each turbine, have been put in. Wind farms on old lands are acceptable, but they are not compatible with biodiversity conservation and could not be put into nature reserves for instance.

Ta

Tony

(And Adam reacts):

Hi Tony

Good points -- I've been wondering myself what it means to take that energy out of the airstream, particularly when you see large wind installations e.g. in Europe -- will we see climatic shifts as a result of that? Will they be sufficiently localised so as not to have huge effects? Will they mess up certain airstreams that migrating birds need? Etc. I've not seen anything serious written on that topic, but at the moment I think it's fair to presume that the total energy subtracted from global windstreams by windfarms is negligible. And we do know that certain turbines at critical points (usually on heavily used migration corridors) can kill a lot of birds and bats, so I'm not suggesting that wind farms have NO impact. (Interestingly, new research on bird-friendly microturbines is advancing rapidly. See here: http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2294 )

My point with respect to coal mines still stands, though. The plans for opencast coal prospecting & expansion of mining in Mpumalanga (and the rapidly decaying Olifants River, being killed inter alia by coal mine pollution that cannot be controlled) are horrifying. Individual mines here are planning to stripmine thousands of hectares each -- and there are many individual mines planned. A 4 000 hectare stripmine gives even the Californian windfarms a run for their money in terms of negative impact -- visual, ecological and otherwise. What the planned expansion of coal mining in SA does to habitat & water security is alarming -- never mind the climate change, acid rain and mercury pollution that result from burning the coal. And we haven't even started talking about he HUGE new mines planned for the Zambezi valley area of Mozambique...

If arctic temps rise even a little more and we see outgassing of only a small percentage the methane currently being held in the eastern Siberian permafrost, we're in a huge amount of trouble -- the habitat changes we can expect will be so rapid that we're likely to see a wave of extinction that none of us can currently imagine. Forget the birds -- it's about the survival of basic human civilisation.

Birders should, as a matter of priority, be campaigning against coal mining and coal burning (and other hugely polluting processes such as Sasol's coal-to-oil) before wind.

Cheers

Adam

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