New Geography

Tag: Wind energy

  • Fracktivists for Global Warming: How Celebrity NIMBYism Turned Environmentalism Against Natural Gas

    Over the last year, celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Robert Redford, Mark Ruffalo, Mario Batali, Scarlett Johansson, Alec Baldwin, and Matt Damon have spoken out against the expansion of natural gas drilling. “Fracking kills,” says Ono, who has a country home in New York. “It threatens the air we breathe,” says Redford. 

    In fact, “gas provides a very substantial health benefit in reducing air pollution,” according to Daniel Schrag, director of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. There have been “tremendous health gains” from the coal-to-gas switch, MIT economist Michael Greenstone told The Associated Press. Indeed, air pollution in Pennsylvania has plummeted in recent years thanks to the coal-to-gas switch. "Honestly," added Greenstone, "the environmentalists need to hear it."

    Fracktivism might be dismissed as so much celebrity self-involvement had it not reversed the national environmental movement’s longstanding support of natural gas as a bridge to zero-carbon energy — and kept shale drilling out of New York state. Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo was set to green-light 40 demonstration gas wells in a depressed part of New York until Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Bobby Kennedy Jr. called him and asked him not to.

    Bill McKibben and his organization 350.org have made common cause with the anti-fracking movement, as has the Sierra Club. NRDC went from being supportive of a coal-to-gas switch to opposing the expansion of gas production. Even the Environmental Defense Fund’s chief, Fred Krupp, said in a debate last month that he opposes the expansion of natural gas.

    All of this comes at a time when carbon emissions are declining in the US more than in any other country in the world. The USA is the global climate leader, while Europe and Germany are returning to coal. The main reason is gas, which increased last year by almost the exact same amount that coal declined. 

    Just a few years ago, environmental leaders were saying that we faced a climate emergency, that emissions must start declining rapidly, and that enemy number one was coal. Now the same leaders are saying we have to stop shale fracking even though it is crushing coal and driving down American carbon emissions.

    Of course, the fractivism isn’t really about the fracking. Matt Damon’s anti-natural gas movie was originally an attack on wind farms. In 2005, Bobby Kennedy Jr. helped lead a campaign to stop the Cape Wind farm from being built because it will be visible from the Kennedy compound. Meanwhile, he was championing the construction of a massive solar farm in the Mojave Desert, 3,000 miles away — itself opposed by local environmentalists.

    Fracktivists like Mark Ruffalo protest that his NIMBYism isn’t pro-coal. He told AP that we don’t need natural gas; we can easily switch from coal directly to solar panels, like the ones Ruffalo installed on his Catskills house. 

    But when the sun isn’t shining on Ruffalo’s roof, he’s mostly getting his electricity from natural gas. In order to accommodate the intermittent nature of solar and wind, utilities rely on natural gas plants, which can be quickly ramped up and down to keep the lights on. Contra Gasland’s Josh Fox’s claims about using "compressed air" in a recent debate with Ted at Salon.com — cheap, utility-scale energy storage simply doesn’t exist.

    Privately, scientists and analysts within national environmental organizations are appalled that celebrity fractivism could get in the way of the coal-to-gas shift. They say the fracktivists undermine green credibility, and are disturbed by the failure of their movement’s leadership. 

    But there’s little reason to expect national green leaders will become, well, leaders. They will likely continue to follow donors who demonstrate time and again that what matters most to them — whether in the case of a nuclear plant in Long Island, a wind farm in Cape Cod, or a gas well in the Catskills — is the view from their solar-plated eco-compounds, not the potentially catastrophic impact of global warming on the planet.

    This post first appeared at TheBreakthrough.org.

  • Gas Crushes Coal

    Coal electricity declined by 12.5 percent in 2012, mostly driven by the switch to natural gas, which increased by almost the exact same amount (217 terrawatt-hours) as coal declined (216 TWh), according to new annual numbers released by the US Energy Information Administration.

    Wind electricity increased as well — by about one-tenth (20.5 TWh) as much as gas. Solar increased a little more than one-hundredth as much as gas (2.5 TWh).

    The figures come at a time when renewable energy advocates have claimed that wind and solar have been responsible for the big declines in coal — claims that do not stand up to scrutiny, according to a new Breakthrough Institute analysis.

    Indeed, the new numbers highlight the key difference between gas and solar and wind. Where taxpayers subsidized unconventional gas exploration from 1980 to 2002 to the tune of $10 billion, natural gas in recent years has been replacing coal without subsidies.

    Wind and solar, by contrast, remain almost wholly dependent on public support. Uncertainty last year over whether Congress would renew the key wind subsidy meant that less than half as much new wind will be installed in 2013 as was installed in 2012.

    Where the problem for wind has been its high cost, the problem for gas is that it has become too cheap. Natural gas production slowed last year in the face of unprofitably low prices caused by overproduction.

    This does not mean that subsidies for solar and wind should be cut, only that they should be reformed. Instead of subsidizing the production of electricity from the same old technologies, we need the kind of innovation that allowed natural gas to become cheaper than coal.

    This piece first appeared at The Breakthrough.

  • Can Wind Power be a Reliable Long Term Source of British Power?

    The wind of change is blowing, but for once, that change might be affecting the wind.

    Wind, often championed as a viable alternative-energy source in the United Kingdom, might not be as energy efficient as it was once thought to be. Independent reports of the wind-energy efforts in the UK “have consistently revealed an industry plagued by high construction and maintenance costs, highly volatile reliability and a voracious appetite for taxpayer subsidies.”

    The cost for the energy alternative is sizable. Over the course of fiscal year 2007-2008, UK electricity customers paid a total of over $1 billion to the owners of wind turbines. That number is only expected to rise by 2020 to $6 billion a year as the government builds a national infrastructure of 25 gigawatts of wind capacity.

    Currently, wind produces only 1.3 percent of the U.K.’s energy needs while a 2008 report from Cambridge Energy Research Associates warns that over-reliance on offshore wind farms would only further create supply problems and drive up investor costs.

    Additionally, the average load factor for wind turbines in the UK was about 27.4 percent, meaning a typical 2-megawatt turbine only produced 0.54 megawatt of power on average. Dismissing the fact that low wind days would produce even less, all figures seem to point to poor return on investment.

    Some have suggested the building of cheaper wind farms, but ultimately higher maintenance costs and spare gas turbines to replace broken ones would cancel out any perceived benefits, as gas for the turbines would only add to carbon dioxide emissions.

    At this point, the outlook for wind to be a major source of UK electricity seems grim. Much like the wind itself, the problem just might be uncontrollable.