Somebody Stop The Cancer And Save The Birds
Something Trump Doesn’t Know: Wind. But He Has Studied Windmills ‘Better Than Anybody.’The president means wind turbines. And he doesn’t realize that the power remains on even when the wind stops. “Here’s what Trump revealed about his knowledge of windmills at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday: “I know it is very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly. Very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured. Tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes, gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amounts of fumes and everything.” Trump described the windmills as noisy and claimed they killed birds, including many bald eagles.“Why is it OK for these windmills to destroy the bird population?” he asked.In the past, Trump has also claimed that the power from wind turbines cuts out when there’s no wind.“All of a sudden, it stops; the wind and the televisions go off,” Trump said in a speech in August. “And your wives and husbands say, ‘Darling, I want to watch Donald Trump on television tonight. But the wind stopped blowing and I can’t watch. There’s no electricity in the house, darling.’” According to the AWEA’s “U.S. Wind Industry Third Quarter 2019 Market Report”, 1,927 megawatts – a little under 2 GW – of wind power capacity was commissioned in the third quarter of 2019, the highest third quarter on record for installations. These installations pushed overall capacity above the landmark figure of 100 GW, the AWEA’s report said.
On a state level, Texas leads the way with more than 27 GW of cumulative capacity, according to the AWEA’s report. Capacity refers to the maximum amount that installations can produce, not what they are currently generating.
“Wind now supplies clean and efficient power to the equivalent of 32 million American homes, sustains 500 U.S. factories, and delivers more than one billion dollars a year in new revenue to rural communities and states,” AWEA CEO Tom Kiernan said in a statement. As a non-carbon-emitting technology, wind power has a big environmental advantage over its leading fossil fuel competitors. Onshore and offshore wind has a life cycle carbon footprint of 20 grams or less of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour. The “cleanest” natural gas power plants – those that use combined cycle technology – produce more than 400 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour. Supercritical coal plants – the least polluting in the industry – generate close to 800 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour.
Offshore wind – the next frontier
Though well advanced in several European nations, U.S. offshore wind got off to an unfortunate start with New England’s hotly contested Cape Wind project. Proposed for shallow waters near upscale vacation communities on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, Cape Wind met with vigorous opposition. Substantially funded by fossil fuel interests, opponents objected to the project’s high cost to ratepayers, but the anticipated visual impact of turbines on Nantucket Sound drew particular hostility. Backers abandoned Cape Wind in 2018.
There’s new and increasing hope for U.S. offshore wind, with numerous federal leases opening up large expanses of ocean acreage from New England down through the mid-Atlantic. Technology advances, including floating turbines, make it possible to place wind farms in deeper waters, farther from populated coastal areas. Equally important, much lower project costs now make offshore wind a realistic competitor with other sources of power generation. Public concern and official analyses now focus on balancing wind development with fisheries and marine mammal protection and with navigational safety.
The way forward
As U.S. reliance on wind power grows, there is an increased need to build enough energy storage and demand response capability to absorb surplus power when it’s generated and adjust to shortfalls when they occur. Modernized and expanded transmission also will be required, to manage the flow of electricity from diverse energy resources across broad geographical areas. Prioritizing these investments will be essential if wind is to meet its potential as a bulwark against runaway U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.