Think of a golden eagle soaring overhead.
Around you is green field and wind.
Nothing beats the wind, you think.
So you watch how the eagle uses the currents to glide effortlessly.
Then, the eagle suddenly makes a dive, cutting through the air to catch its prey.
Attention fixed entirely on its mid-day snack,
Allowing nothing to distract it
Forgetting that it is in a wind farm…
Lunging to save this innocent creature, you realize:
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Bird mortality is a real concern around wind farms, where the rotating blades pose a serious threat for birds of prey and migratory birds alike (recently proven to be less than adept at avoiding turbines). A report to the California Energy Commission in 2005, for instance, counted 4000 bird deaths per year caused by windmills. But there are also other problems with wind generation. Wind is primarily caused by two components: the forces resulting from the earth spinning with its atmosphere and the movement of air in temperature gradients. The wind is harnessed using spinning blades, and the great irony is that, in order to satisfy conservation of energy, the wind must necessarily be changed in order for it to be converted into energy. This change can manifest itself in a different magnitude or direction of the wind. Having many of these windmills in a close array can, therefore, lead to complex turbulent relationships, with the potential to radically alter climate. Putting the windmills in the oceans does not solve our problems either because the turbulence causes the ocean water to “turn over,” and thereby heat up. So windmills could cause the climate change (albeit in a different form) that it is put in place to avoid.
Speaking of water, what about hydroelectric plants? These cost-efficient plants (in terms of market equilibrium, not social cost), harness the power of stored water, usually controlled by dams and reservoirs, to spin turbines. The problem with water, however, is that it is extremely heavy in the quantities collected in the reservoirs. For illustration’s sake, Hoover Dam on the Colorado River holds on the order of quadrillions of kilograms spread out over 157,900 acres (approximately 438 Wesleyans). If these gigantic orders of magnitude are baffling, consider the pressure at the bottom of the ocean and double it and that is about the pressure exerted on the many small fault lines of Nevada by the Hoover Dam’s reservoir. If that isn’t terrestrial engineering, I don’t know what is. Now, while this may not be a problem for Nevada, it could present a real danger for areas with larger fault lines, like China’s Sichuan province. In fact, a recent study links China’s May, 2008 earthquake, which claimed at least 8000 lives, with the massive Three Gorges Damn.
Earthquakes are not just a product of hydroelectric plants, however. Geothermal power has been heralded as the next redeemer of the world, but it has costs just like the others. This energy is produced by tapping into the earth’s reservoir of heat and using it either by extracting naturally occurring steam or pumping water through to be heated into steam. The steam then spins the turbines, etc. Unfortunately, the areas with the best geothermal reservoirs often correspond with the areas of large faults and tectonic motion. Failing to control steam and pumping cold water into active tectonic regions begs for disaster. Iceland’s Minister of Industry and Energy Mr Össur Skarphéðinsson , for instance, conceded that they “have learned to live with the earthquakes” caused by their geothermal stations. The only location on the mainland United States remotely comparable to Iceland’s volcanic topology is the Northern Californian geyser parks. In addition to the moral qualms I have about harnessing Old Faithful, one of last great bastions of Californian naturalism, doing so just might turn California into an island.
Furthermore, the earth’s heat flux (the amount of energy traveling through the earth annually from turns in the magma) is 2500 times smaller than the sun’s. In fact, solar energy, in this regard, seems to be the most viable option, but it has largely fallen off the map because of the inefficiencies of the photo-voltaic cells. We could always turn our efforts back to finding the Northwest Passage of clean energy – cold fusion, but that may not be worth its cost, either.
I recognize this has been a largely one-sided analysis of the costs of what have been called renewable energy, but it seems clear the decision between energy sources is anything but clear. All of these solutions are similarly temporary, require similar kinds of costs, and some form of “earth remodeling.”