When the wind stopped blowing today, power grid operators in Texas were forced to cut power to many interruptible customers in the state. The state of Texas is the largest producer of wind energy in the United States.
Although wind power is very clean and very cost competitive with other sources of electrical power, the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of the wind is its biggest drawback and prevents it from being more widely used.
Given that, I bet most people would be surprised to find out that environmentalists are the biggest enemies of wind farms. And you can’t really blame them either – according to a recently published report, at the Altamont Pass wind farm in California, the number of actual dead birds found among the four targeted species (burrowing owl, American kestrel, red-tailed hawk and golden eagle) increased nearly 90 percent from 2005-06 to 2006-07, which is between 1,839 and 2,906 bird deaths per year.
Below, an unidentified dead bird of prey found below the Altamont Pass wind turbines in the San Francisco Bay Area:
There is a good, balanced followup story on the Texas utility system event in today’s (3/1/08) Houston Chronicle.
When the wind stops blowing and wind farm electricity generation drops, the process usually takes hours. By contrast, other power plants may go out of service instantaneously when a problem occurs. Wind forecasting, which could have helped address the ERCOT situation, can be and is being used by utility system operators to manage wind on their systems, and will become standard practice as the use of this clean, renewable energy source continues to grow.
For a thoughtful look at the bird issue by an environmentalist, see Confessions of a Bird Lover by Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Regards,
Tom Gray
American Wind Energy Association
http://www.awea.org
http://www.ifnotwind.org