Green Energy

Let’s tell the truth. The wind power industry, and the politicians profiting from that industry, love to tell us that if we went to so-called “green energy” it would end our reliance on Middle Eastern oil. The simple fact is, we generate just 1.4% of our electricity using oil. How's that going to end our reliance on foreign oil?

Take a look at the chart below to see where most of the energy in northern Illinois comes from. (Information for this chart was provided by Commonwealth Edison.) Do you see wind power anywhere on the chart? And you won't, either. Wind power is, plain and simple, just too unreliable for ComEd - or you - to depend on.

Under a plan by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, electric utilities would provide 2% of their power from renewable energy sources by the end of 2006, increasing to 8% by 2012. Mind you, that's ALL renewable energy sources, not just wind power. The state's two largest electric utilities, Commonwealth Edison and Ameren Corporation, endorsed the plan, but they will not be obligated to purchase electricity from a specific wind farm or other renewable energy provider.

Because nuclear power plants produce a lot of electricity in a small space, they require far less land for siting and operation than all other energy sources. To build the equivalent of a 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant, a solar park would have to be larger than 35,000 acres, and a wind farm would have to be 150,000 acres or larger. By contrast, the Millstone Units 2 and 3 nuclear power plants in Connecticut have an installed capacity of over 1,900 megawatts of power on a 500-acre site.
Source: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Energy Institute

Investor's Business Daily
Running Against The Wind
Thursday July 14, 2005

Energy: Sen. Lamar Alexander lost his bid to block tax credits for what he considered noisy and unsightly wind farms. But there are valid reasons for opposition other than they may block your view.

Alexander fought a plan to force large utilities to generate 10% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020 and sought to block a proposed $3.7 billion tax credit in the recently passed energy bill, most of which would go to subsidize wind-power producers.

Alexander was dismayed by thoughts of giant wind turbines "with their flashing red lights atop the blue ridges of Virginia" and in other scenic areas sounding like "a brick wrapped in a towel tumbling in a clothes dryer."

There are valid reasons other than esthetics to question this faith in wind power. That giant sucking sound you hear is taxpayer dollars being sucked from our wallets to subsidize what continues to be an uneconomical, land-consuming and, yes, environmentally dangerous source of power.

Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out that after three decades and over $14 billion in taxpayer subsidies, so-called renewable energy -- wind, solar and biomass fuels -- together supply only 3% of U.S. electricity, with wind and solar providing less than 0.2%.

A modern wind generator stands on a tower between 300 and 400 feet high with flashing red lights that can be seen for more than 20 miles. Its blades are 95 feet long and, when the wind is blowing and at sufficient speed, can generate enough electricity to power about 500 homes. But that's only 35% of the time.

Touted as a means of protecting the environment from pollution, giant wind farms threaten birds and even food production.

The Center for Biological Diversity has sued wind farm operators in California's Altamont Pass, where it is estimated that as many as 44,000 birds have been killed over the past 20 years, including an average of 50 golden eagles annually, by what the Sierra Club has called "the Cuisinarts of the air."

A single 555-megawatt gas-fired power plant on 15 acres generates more electricity each year than all 13,000 of California's wind turbines --which dominate 106,000 acres of once-scenic hill country.

In Wisconsin, anti-oil groups support building 133 gigantic Cuisinarts on 32,000 acres (16 times the ANWR operations area) near Horicon Marsh.

This magnificent wetland is home to millions of geese, ducks and other migratory birds and just miles from an abandoned mine that houses 140,000 bats. At 390 feet high, the turbines would tower over the Statue of Liberty (305 feet), U.S. Capitol (287 feet) and Arctic oil production facilities (50 feet).

All these Horicon turbines would produce about as much power as Fairfax County, Va., gets from one facility that burns garbage to generate electricity. And they would likely crank out an amazing amount of goose liver pate.

A recent study by scientists at Princeton and Duke universities indicates massive wind farms in agriculture areas would significantly increase local surface drying and soil heating, harming agriculture and perhaps making it harder to grow corn for that other energy boondoggle, ethanol.

Meanwhile, our dependence on foreign oil is reduced by not a single gallon, while domestic oil resources go unexploited and clean and continuous energy from nuclear power is ignored and opposed.

Perhaps a good place for one of those wind turbines would be right on the Senate floor.

Did you know that massive wind farms significantly increase local surface drying and soil heating, which in turn would impact agricultural or range use on or near the wind farm? To learn more, click here.

When I think about clean energy, I think about wind turbines and solar power. Coal power is certainly not the first thing that comes to mind. But coal power plants provide over a quarter of our energy in Massachusetts (and over half of our energy nationwide). So while researching alternative energy sources is important, cleaning up our existing plants will have a much bigger and more immediate effect on the environment. The Clean Air Act has greatly reduced the amount of aerial pollutants released by coal power plants, but much of it is instead just sent to landfills. So I was intrigued when I learned about a new industry that has sprung up, an industry that uses a waste product from coal power plants to help mix better cement.

Now for most of us, making cement isn't very complicated. When I do backyard cement work, I mix two buckets of sand, one bucket of portland cement, and enough water to hold it all together. And that works just fine for home construction projects. But big industrial projects, like bridges, skyscrapers, and dams, need really high quality cement. There are a wide variety of mixes out there, depending on the kind of concrete required, but most formulas include fly ash: the fine residue created in the combustion of coal.

This is not a new discovery: the Romans made cement with a similar kind of ash, and Americans have been using fly ash for more than half a century. Today fly ash is used to supplement portland cement, as is slag cement, which is ground granulated slag (the byproduct of metal smelting). When portland cement, fly ash and slag cement are combined, the result is cheaper than pure portland cement, more malleable when poured, slower to set, and stronger in its hardened form. Using less portland cement also has an environmental benefit; it reduces the energy use and gas emissions of the mixing process.

Before the passage of the 1990 update to the Clean Air Act, some fly ash was separated for cement production, but most of the ash was just released into the air. This changed in 1990 due to the Clean Air Act's nitrogen oxide restrictions, which mandated that fly ash be filtered out of coal power plant emissions. So instead of releasing it into the air, power plants dispose of their ash in landfills. While this is an improvement, it still has economic and environmental costs.

The good news is that this excess fly ash is a great new supply for cement companies, and power plants would rather sell it than truck it to landfills. But you can't use fly ash straight from power plants, because it is often contaminated with carbon from the burning coal (the carbon interferes with the chemical bonding process of the cement). Some plants use air scrubbers or baghouses to remove the carbon. More recently, several companies have developed a more efficient technique for purifying fly ash, a process called electrostatic separation.

As the fly ash is fed between two oppositely charged electrode plates, the unburned carbon particles take on a positive charge, while the fly ash particles become negatively charged. Particles are attracted to the oppositely charged plates, and mesh conveyer belts carry each type to different destinations. The electrostatic separator can process 40 tons of fly ash an hour and only uses 1-2 KWh of electricity per ton of ash. Besides selling the purified fly ash, coal power plants can also re-burn the leftover carbon, creating additional energy and resulting in almost no waste.

A whole new recycling industry, including one company here in Needham, has developed in the past decade, by installing technology like electrostatic separators in coal power plants and helping to market fly ash to cement companies. Though critics often assert that cleaning up power plants would be too costly and would result in higher electricity prices, this unlikely union between coal power plants and cement companies demonstrates that you can turn a waste product into a useful commodity, and make both economic and environmental sense in the process.