2 Wind Energy Myths Debunked
Filed Under: Environmental News, Green Technology on July 25, 2009
There are two needling urban legends or myths about wind energy that are commonly used to say that wind turbines will not be able to replace much of our power usage and aren’t really ecological or “green.” Both of them are myths, not fact, and are bunk.
Myth 1: Wind Turbines Kill Birds
The most common one is that birds are constantly killed by the rotating blades of wind turbines and that California or other states are considering banning them (or being hypocritical in environmental policy and allowing them). Often, these birds are named as “Spotted Owls” (the infamous catch-all endangered species bird) or other endangered birds.
The reality is very different. Wind turbines turn way too slow to hit nearly all species of birds. I’d wager that even the Dodo bird would be able to get out of the way fast enough. They also don’t have enough force behind them, in most winds, to do anything but shove the bird for a second, before the shape of the blade and the bird’s soft feathers slid it out and away from the turbine again.
This wasn’t always true, of course, and some of the older models from the 1970s and 1980s–some of which are still in existence in Altamont, California–turned very quickly. Remember, that was the day of the muscle car and James Bond on a speedboat, so it was all about the speed. Generators at that time, it was believed, had to turn at high RPMs to generate any worthwhile amount of power. So turbines spun at quite high rates.
They soon found that not only did they kill birds quite regularly, but these turbines were also not scalable past a certain size and thus would never be useful in lower winds or higher outputs. The Europeans, who were not nearly as obsessed with speed, can be credited with slowing things down and coming up with the larger, slower design that we see today.
Myth 2: Wind Won’t Work Because We Need To Store the Power
Another pervasive myth is actually grounded in a misconception of how current grid systems work as well as how a total operation for power generation would work with a significant amount of wind generation included. Most would be surprised to find out that there is little to now mass storage of power used in our system now.
Unless you count unburnt coal, water in a reservoir that hasn’t been sent through a dam, or natural gas that hasn’t been fired, that is.
Current systems on the grid have scalable ouput that can be changed nearly instantly to match demand. Natural gas and hydro are most commonly used this way. Their production can ramp up or slow down almost on demand to meet the needs of the current grid users. This occurs daily, without most of us even realizing, it, actually.
Coal can also be cycled this way, but isn’t often done (except on schedules: more in daytime, less at night) because it takes much longer to adjust.
Current estimates from the American Wind Energy Association says that even when wind energy production makes up 20% of our current power usage, other systems in the grid can make up for any losses or over-abundance when wind is plentiful or not.
Hopefully, I’ve given you a way to stave off the doubters when either of these issues come up.
