Wind Turbines as Art
by Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, St. Louis, MO on 06.16.06
It turns out that David Suzuki isn't the only one that thinks wind turbines are beautiful. This year's American Wind Energy Association's National Conference and Exhibition not only featured the usual array of speakers, meetings and poster presentations, but also hosted the National Wind Art Exhibit, a display of paintings all featuring wind turbines from a group of internationally-recognized artists. AWEA organized the show in partnership with REimaginations, an organization dedicated to promoting the aesthetic appeal of modern windmills:
It's clean. It's friendly. And it's often down right gorgeous. REimaginations is dedicated to providing you with images, artwork and gifts that convey the beauty of renewable energy production.There's no doubt that AWEA saw the exhibit as a way to challenge one of the prevailing arguments against locating wind farms near places like Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard: part- and full-time residents of these East Coast hot spots, and their supporters around the US, have claimed that wind turbines would wreck the natural beauty of these places. As you browse these artistic renderings, though, it's hard to deny that wind mills can work in harmony with their natural surroundings.REimaginations was started with the belief that wind turbines are beautiful. We wanted to share that belief through creating a venue for artists to show their interpretations of renewable energy.
We plan on building a collection of images and artwork that is an inspiration dedicated entirely to renewable energy. We are starting with a focus on wind energy. Wind energy is under attack across the country by those that see wind turbines as ugly. We find them to be beautiful expressions of the wind.
It will be interesting to see how much of a role such art works play in the conflicts surrounding the location of wind farms in the US and other countries. Essayist Bill McKibben noted last year that art could play a powerful role in the push for more eco-conscious development. Can it convince die-hard NIMBYs that wind turbines aren't a blight on the landscape, but an aesthetic contribution to it? :: REimagainations via Grist
Update: Painting by Marie Wise.
Tricky. Wind turbines can look great, they can look intrusive. In the most beautiful parts of our countries I feel they rarely enhance the landscape, unfortunately these are often the places that give the best wind conditions.
But who is the evil one here? The turbine manufacturer? Well they are offering a product that is less globally damaging than a coal plant.
The NIMBY? Well they just want to preserve their local environment.
What everyone should remember is that wind turbines + coal plants are both physical manifestations of our need for energy. For most of the time we have had small convenient power plants, located away from the majority of people. Now the power plants become larger and more numerous and more widespread.
Perhaps wind turbines are the solution to reducing energy use? If you don't want one in your backyard then.....just use less energy!
I think wind turbines are gorgeous - and not only because of their sleek styling and slightly sci fi grooviness. They are beautiful because they are not befouling the air and water, they do not require huge pits to be dug in the ground, or mountaintops to be removed and dumped into streams, and they do not create toxic waste which will last for millenia.
Windmills in the Netherlands have been used as a power source of sorts for hundreds of years, and are now part of the landscape. Tourists go out to the Dutch countryside just to see them in action. Maybe it'll be the same with these new-generation wind turbines, in time.
It's sort of like sports art: paintings of rushing linebackers or bikini babes sprawled on race cars. In this case, it's a rather pathetic attempt to portray industrial intrusion and sprawl as something else, i.e., not ugly.
How are wind turbines "sprawl"? Sprawl is hundreds of acres of McMansions plopped on a bulldozed landscape in the middle of perfectly green lawns. Which then require obscene amounts of energy to heat, cool, light, etc.
Wind turbines are slim, elegant, do not emit clouds of smoke, nor pour sludge into streams. While they may be "industrial", that is only in the loosest sense of the word. Their footprint on the land is miniscule compared to a factory or a Wal-Mart distribution center.
Sorry - I get incensed when people think that aesthetics should trump ecological sustainability. Even if wind turbines were hideous, hulking, bright purple monsters blocking my view, I'd rather have them there doing their part to slow global warming than to deal with the devastation that will come if we continue to rely on coal plants tucked away from our sightlines...
What if they're not in fact "doing their part to slow global warming"? By insisting that opposition is only aesthetic the industry avoids that central question. Denmark's patterns of fuel use have apparently not changed at all despite wind turbines sprawled across their whole country.
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editor note: could you cite your sources about Denmark, please?
Electricity generation by fuel 1971-2003
Electricity and district heating
Through the 1970s, Denmark replaced oil with coal for electricity generation. In the 1990s, natural gas replaced some of the coal, but oil use also rose slightly.
The late 1990s saw the rise of wind power. In the graph, however, it appears to be an add-on above the trend rather than affecting the other fuels.
Denmark's use of wind is complicated in that they already have a "must-use" nondispatchable energy source in their extensive and efficient combined heat and power plants. So surges of wind power typically have to be shunted to Norway and Sweden. See Danish Wind: Too Good to be True?
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editor note: I fail to see the problem. If they didn't have these winds turbines, they would have had to get something else to meet increased demand, something else more polluting.
The upshot of the information is that wind power does not in fact "meet increased demand." If they didn't have wind turbines, nothing would be different.
But Rosa, it was YOUR post that used the aesthetics argument, not mine!
What? You said they are gorgeous and useful. But they are neither.
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editor note: Rucio, is that you?
Last known IP address of anti-wind activist "Rucio": 66.6.176.23
IP address of "Rosa": 66.6.176.23
Hmm...
Fate! We're both in Vermont, both using the same ISP I believe. If he's on dial-up, too, then like me he gets a new IP address each time he connects. Looks like we've both been given, at different times obviously, the one you picked out.
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editor note: And of the billions of websites on the net, you are both writing comments on the same blog, using the same kind of arguments against wind power. Sure. Now go buy a lottery ticket.
btw, there are 4,294,967,296 unique IP address possibilities with IPv4 (which is 32 bits).
First, I wanted folks to know that the image that acompanyied this article was done by Marie Wise and is titled "Copper Mtn. Wind Turbine"(Copyrighted 2006) and is of a turbine in Quebec.
As for Rosa's comments, the interesting thing to me is that this wind art was created by artists, not industry flacks trying to get folks like Rosa to change their mind. If you talk to the artists that created these works you'd find they did it for the same reasons they paint other scenes - they were inspired to do so. Only one of the paintings (out of 15 at the exhibit) was a commissioned piece. The others were created by the artists for art, not for PR.
As for Denmark, without the wind it is clear that they would be using more fossil fuels than they are today. And the excess power they generate is sold to Norway and Sweden, not just "shunted" there. Also, the number of jobs and amount of revenue that the wind industry has generated for the country needs to be part of the equation.
The claim that "wind energy makes no difference" may seem surreal, but oddly, it has become the central point of attack for NIMBYs over the past year. I say "surreal" because to accept it, one would have to believe that the wind energy industry, electric utilities, government (U.S. and others), and many major environmental groups are all engaged in a vast conspiracy.
We have taken a stab at dealing with it with a fact sheet The Difference Wind Makes.
Those who would like to dig further into the technical background on what happens when a wind farm is connected to the utility system should consult Utility Wind Integration State of the Art, a brief report issued recently by the Utility Wind Integration Group (UWIG), in cooperation with the three major U.S. utility trade associations--the Edison Electric Institute, the American Public Power Association, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.
Regards,
Tom Gray
American Wind Energy Association
www.awea.org
www.ifnotwind.org
A whois on 66.6.176.23 brings up a dial-up service provider in Connecticut using the range 66.6.176.0 - 66.6.191.255. The range for the Vermont ISP is probably a narrow part of that.
Now to the comments of fellow Vermonters Andrew Perchlik and Thomas Gray.
Artists aren't that different from the rest of us and are quite capable of bad judgment.
Yes, Denmark sells the unneeded wind power -- at a loss. And it displaces hydro.
AWEA's fact sheet is typical. It does not point out any actual effect on the use of other fuels. It ignores the huge subsidies it receives. It argues in theory about environmental benefits (ignoring its own environmental impacts) without any effort to actually show any.
The 20% capacity credit assigned to wind by PacifiCorp is also a hopeful projection. NYSERDA assigned 10% in a recent study. Studies in Germany and Ireland found it to approach zero as more wind is added (as it pushes against the system capacity to deal with the extra variability).
And that UWIG study is incoherent. It says at one point that wind provides energy not capacity and at another that wind has a 40% capacity value. It claims that the variability of wind power to the system is reduced when mixed with demand variability, while also noting that they are uncorrelated (meaning you would add high-wind/low-demand and low-wind/high-demand extremes).
These are not NIMBY or aesthetic arguments, which is why these men try so hard to characterize the opposition as NIMBY or aesthetically challenged. (Even as they push these developments in other people's back yards, not their own.)
Thank you Andrew of Vermont Renewable Energy for requesting that I be given credit for the use of my painting on this website.
I am the artist, (Marie Wise, an oil painter in Washington State) and I created this painting because 1) It was a visually exciting subject for me, 2) I support the development of wind energy, and 3) I wanted to participate in a visual expression of the growing wind energy industry and saw the art exhibit as a unique opportunity.
The painting itself was inspired by a photograph taken by a colleague who worked for the manufacturer (at that time) of this turbine, located in Murdochville, Quebec. We both felt that it represented the vast and uncharted potential for wind energy, symbolized by the mountains behind it. It was an unusual creative endeavor for me as an artist, as I haven't painted this type of industrial subject before. However, I do plan to continue with several more paintings in the future.
I would like to thank Andrew for organizing and supporting the art exhibit at the recent Windpower conference in Pittsburgh. It provided artists an opportunity to make a statement about wind energy, and the people who viewed the exhibit to experience the artistic representations of a powerful component of our energy industry. Very well done!
We do have a new fact sheet that specifically addresses the subsidy question, but it apparently is not quite finished yet, as I don't see it on our Web site. However, interested readers will find a brief overview of this and related NIMBY mythology about wind's cost here.
The NYSERDA [New York State Energy Research and Development Authority] study did indeed find that wind's "capacity value" (ability to replace fossil-fired or other fueled capacity) was only 10% (that is, adding 100 megawatts of wind to the NY power system would only add as much reliability as adding 10 MW of fueled capacity). Other studies in the U.S. have found higher values--a major study of the Xcel North system, for example, gave wind a capacity value of 27% (the number varies from utility to utility based on the ebb and flow of the daily electricity demand pattern and how well it matches up with wind speed patterns). However, since Rosa chooses to rely on it, the NYSERDA report also says:
"Energy produced by wind generators will displace energy that would have been provided by other generators. Considering wind and load profiles for years 2001 and 2002, 65% of the energy displaced by wind generation would come from natural gas, 15% from coal, 10% from oil, and 10% from imports. As with the economic impacts discussed above, the unit commitment process affects the relative proportions of energy displaced, but the general trend is the same regardless of how wind generation is treated in the unit commitment process. By displacing energy from fossil-fired generators, wind generation causes reductions in emissions from those generators. Based on wind and load profiles for years 2001 and 2002, annual NOx emissions would be reduced by 6,400 tons and SOx emissions would be reduced by 12,000 tons." See The Effects of Integrating Wind Power on Transmission System Planning, Reliability, and Operations: Report on Phase 2: System Performance Evaluation: Executive Summary.
Rosa claims that the UWIG report is incoherent. Hey, it was written by engineers, what can I say? The point is, it's not me, the industry flack, saying that wind can be integrated into the power system without major problems, it's the U.S. power engineering society and the major utility trade associations. Like it or not, their credibility in this area is very high.
Finally, in my opinion, Rosa's arguments are NIMBY arguments. NIMBYs operate on the "spaghetti principle"--throw enough stuff at the wall and maybe some of it will stick. Aesthetics are a legitimate issue. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether they agree that wind turbines are ugly, and whether that is reason enough to shelve one of the more promising responses we have available today to the issue of global warming.
Regards,
Tom Gray
American Wind Energy Association
www.awea.org
www.ifnotwind.org
For an interesting, thoughtful perspective on this issue, see Why I Hate Wind Farms and Think There Should Be More of Them.
[I sent this in the morning, but it doesn't appear to have gone through.]
NIMBY NIMBY NIMBY! Did you say it enough?
Note that I did not "rely on" the NYSERDA report. I pointed out the different capacity value it assumed. "Assumed" is the key word. It is fantasy. There were news stories yesterday about Germany's expansion of coal-fired generation. Denmark has not reduced its use of other fuels because of wind. It appears that as wind installation approaches the system's excess capacity's ability to balance the extra fluctuation, the true capacity value of zero can no longer be fudged. We will never get to that point in the U.S., since even 5% wind would require over 80,000 MW of wind capacity. And that would not mean 5% less of anything else, because the rest of the system would be working less efficiently to accommodate it. And should that number be erected over a number of years, its percentage would be reduced by a greater growth in demand.
The spaghetti principle is more evident in the AWEA's defense against the many criticisms of big wind. Anything and more to avoid the central charge that wind power on the grid does not save other fuels to any significant degree to justify its own negative impacts and costs.
Obviously, if actual benefits could be shown for large-scale wind power, the argument would be easy. The writer from Wales would be quite right. There would be a benefit to weigh against the cost. But the promoters have yet to describe such a benefit except in theory. So they resort to inaccurate name calling.
For them, demanding real figures from the world's actual experience makes one a NIMBY. But NIMBYs support a project or technology, just not where they have to live with it. Thomas Gray and Andrew Perchlik are NIMBYs. The people are standing up to them.
Rosa describes the NYSERDA report as fantasy. I invite readers to simply examine it for themselves. The title is "The Effects of Integrating Wind Power on Transmission System Planning, Reliability, and Operations," and the various portions of it are all available on the Web. Probably the best and simplest way to access them (along with many other authoritative studies of the impact of wind energy on utility operations) is through the Utility Wind Integration Group site. It is called the "NYISO/NYSERDA Wind Study" there, because the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the company that operates New York state's electricity transmission system, also funded it.
It's easy to make claims about Germany and Denmark. Let's see some sources and citations, and I will check them out.
Regards,
Tom Gray
American Wind Energ, by Association
www.awea.org
www.ifnotwind.org
Rosa describes the NYSERDA report as "fantasy." I invite readers to simply examine it for themselves. The title is "The Effects of Integrating Wind Power on Transmission System Planning, Reliability, and Operations," and the various portions of it are all available on the Web. Probably the best and simplest way to access them (along with many other authoritative studies of the impact of wind energy on utility operations) is through the Utility Wind Integration Group site. The report is called the "NYISO/NYSERDA Wind Study" there, because the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the company that operates New York state's electricity transmission system, also funded it. More recently, Ontario has just commissioned the same company, GE, to do a similar study of wind integration in that province.
It's easy to make unsubstantiated claims about Germany and Denmark. Let's see some sources and citations, and I will check them out.
Tom Gray
American Wind Energy Association
www.awea.org
www.ifnotwind.org
I'm no expert, but the reason that it is still not easy to make the case for wind is that the economics are only just starting to make it a financial winner. It is already an environmental winner. We should be investing in it now for when it is clearly cheaper than oil and coal. (Although it may be a while before it is cheaper than coal in a purely financial sense.)
A comment about the hydro replacement theory. To quote Monthy Python: 'this is getting to silly'.
When Norway buys Danish windpower they can shut down some of their hydroplants.
This does not mean the water of the feeding rivers flows unutilised past the turbines. In reality, the unused riverwater is stored in the resevoirs of the hydroplant. At a later moment they can use this water to generate electricty. For their own use, or to sell to Denmark, Germany, and in the near future to the Netherlands.