Some history is unavoidable you
know! The original site development for what would become the LADWP's
Pine Tree Wind and Solar Farm was originated by a rather obscure firm
known as Wind Turbine Company. Wind Turbine Company later assigned all
of its rights to develop, install, and construct wind electric
generating facilities to Wind Turbine Prometheus, LP at the in Kern
County, California Project.
I cannot find a fragment of reliable
information on either one of these 2 firms.
All of this intrest
in renewable energy sources was in part due to Resolution No. 006 086 of
January 4, 2001. This allowed the Department of Water and Power of the
City of Los Angeles (LADWP), to initiate a competitive bid process,
seeking contracts for the long-term purchase of energy from renewable
energy sources, and later to acquire renewable resources facilities.
LADWP knew that it lacked the expertise, technology and experience
to develop and build the proposed Project by the Fall of 2007 and the
use of a new competitive bidding process made it impractical to meet the
Fall of 2007 time frame. Also LADWP was required to obtain a Kern County
Board of Supervisor's approval for a zoning change that would allow for
the construction of the Project, LADWP will be required to enter into a
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the County of Kern whereby LADWP
shall be responsible for meeting County of Kern's conditional use
permit.
So in 2007 under Agreement, DWP No. BP 05-011 purchased
the project for an amount not to exceed $239,317,005.
Appendix G:
Wind Farm Option Agreement (Hansen Family Limited Partnership), to be
acquired by WTP from the Hansen Family Limited Partnership that the
collective royalty payments to be paid to
GE Wind Energy, LLC and Hansen
Family Limited Partnership for the easements to be acquired by WTP shall
not exceed an annual cost of $1,000,000 for the initial twenty-year term
of each easement. How GE got involved at this point I do not understand.
All of this was signed in November, 8th of 2005 by Fay A. Chu, the
Deputy City Attorney back in 2005. What all this meant was that LADWP to
acquire 100 percent ownership of a 120 MW Wind Generation Facility
(Project) located in Kern County, California that is being designed,
developed and constructed by WTP. The Project is estimated to cost
$239,317,005, upon its completion, LADWP will own and operate the
Project.
Within a half mile of the guard shack we get our first look at some
of the wind turbines on a ridge in the near background. Also note that
the elevation has increased slightly as you can see pinion pine (Pinyon
pine) on the
hills. The paved road will only last for a few hundred feet.
Juniper Trees above, not Pinion Pines and they were full of berries
(actually the the nuts are in the berries!)
Interesting set of structures! But they have nothing to do with the
LADWP's Pine Tree Wind and Solar Farm but is most likely part of the
Hansen Family Limited Partnership's cattle operations. The stand of
cottonwood trees actually surrounds a water catchment basin and so these
trees are not natural to the landscape.
Where the feedlot is in relation to the guard shack.
The Hansen Family Limited Partnership has probably had cattle
grazing operations in this area for decades before the Wind Turbine
Prometheus, LP, WTP, GE Wind Energy and LADWP swept in to garner the
wind off the ridgelines so as to power Los Angelinos microwaves,
streetlights, neon signs, office equipment hospital equipment etc!
And finally the "pièce de résistance" of the entire complex! A
GE 1.5MW Wind Turbine. These are GE wind turbines with power units made
in Germany, blades made in Brazil and placed on towers built in South
Korea!
What model of GE wind turbine. The exact model is known
by GE and LADWP but that seems to not have been published. Considering
the date of the construction of Pine Tree and the years that GE produced
a specific model wind turbine I have roughly deduced that these are
probably:
1.5sl or 1.5sle
All of the 1.5 MW models from GE are now
considered obsolete and are no longer in production. Since the electric
generation capacity is known to be 1.5 MW we can exclude the 1.6sle
model. And the 1.5s & 1.5se used 70.5 diameter blades (Pine Tree
turbines are supposed to be 77 meter blades) so we can eliminate those 2
models.
1.5s (1500 kW, 70.5 m diameter) (old model) 1.5se
(1500 kW, 70.5 m diameter) (old model) 1.6sle (1500 kW, 77 m
diameter) (old model) 1.5sl (1500 kW, 77 m diameter) (old model)
1.5sle (1500 kW, 77 m diameter) (old model) 1.5xle (1500 kW, 82.5 m
diameter) (old model)
From a article about the difficulties in
engineering this site I learned that the general contractor on the
project, Kiewit Corporation had stated:
"It was quite difficult," says Gentner. "The towers are large, and
the blades, while not terribly heavy, are certainly very long."
Erected, each of the GE turbines stands 213 feet high to the top of
the hub, 339 feet including the height of the blades.
I like math so let's figure this out with simple math:
Height
to the top of a turbine blade (vertical) 339 ft. Height to the top
turbine hub= 213 ft.
339 -213 126 ft
Meaning each blade is about 126 feet in diameter or 38.4 meters. 2
Blades= 76.8 meters which is awfully close to the GE specification of a
blade diameter of 77 meters or 253 feet!
So the 1.5s & 1.5se
seems to fit well. I have removed the 82.5 (1.5xle) meter blade size
from the selection as the
information I garnered from the GE brochure (GE
A14954C15-MW-Brochure) on page 4 which indicates that the 82.5 meter
blade size was not being sold or shipped until 2008 when the Pine Tree
project was finished.
The GE wind turbine and tower shown above
can be seen in this satellite image as 1 of the 6 in the photo above.
The Pine Tree building plan was almost put on a permanent freeze when it
was found out that both USAF (from Edwards AFB) and the USN (from NOTS
China Lake) flew low over these mountains while testing new aircraft
concepts and equipment. Each tower is required to have a red flashing
light on it as a safety warning to pilots. Yes these towers are TALL!
In a way wind power and solar power are cousins! Wind power all
starts with the sun just like solar power. But wind power a few steps to
go through before we can harness it. So when the sun heats up a given
area of land, the air around that land area absorbs some of that heat.
Then at a certain temperature (depends on the temperature of the cooler
air mass), the hotter air will begin to rise upwards rapidly because a
given volume of hot air is lighter than an equal volume of cooler air.
The faster-moving hot air particles exert a greater pressure than
slower-moving particles, so it takes fewer hot air particles to maintain
the normal air pressure at a given elevation. When that lighter (weight
by volume) hot air rapidly and suddenly rises, the cooler air flows in
quickly to replace the gap the hot air left behind as it (hot air) rose
upwards. So what we call the wind is actually cooler air rushing in to
fill in the gap that hotter air has vacated.
Why the super high towers? Tower height is one of the major factors
in production capacity of a wind power turbine. The higher the turbine
blades are up from the ground, the more energy the blades can capture
because normally wind speeds will increase with an elevation increase.
Vertical-axis wind turbines have problems with ground friction
and with ground-level objects that interrupt the flow of the wind.
Scientists estimate that wind power companies can achieve a 12 percent increase
in wind speed with the doubling of the blade elevation. But
imagine all the issues with increased bird fatalities, more hazards to
air navigation and the unsightliness of a wind turbine stretching up to
500 or 700 feet in elevation!
Notice in the above photo the height of the wind turbine in the
background. The top of the blades on these turbines when the blades are
vertical would be about 340 from ground level. Now imagine a wind
turbine at 600 or 700 feet above ground level! Plainly that would be
puking gross!
Our society must come to grips with what we could
do the our landscapes if the wind power craze continues to go viral along with more
legislation requiring utilities to use even larger amounts of so called
"green energy".
Known fact! Many studies are available indicating that all 50 states
could save massive amounts of electricity by simply adopting true
conservation methods. We can give credit to the City of Los Angeles
which has just completed a 141,089 street light replacement program,
which covered a distance of 5,000 miles of streets across 4,000
intersections. Not only did this project reduce electric demand but
saved up to 40,500 tons of annual emissions. The only downside to this
program is that the "loan" of $57 million dollars came from the Federal
Government. Requiring a small town in Iowa to pony up it's money to pay
for Los Angeles street lighting can never be considered fair or correct
but rather undemocratic!
Could we design wind turbines to be more powerful
but not require an increase in footprint? Doubtful! Mankind has been
pushing the wind power envelope for the last 4 decades at a fast pace but in
almost all cases that I know of any increase in electrical power output
from a wind turbine comes from an increase in blade size and height
above ground.
Currently the Vestas V164 which has a rated
capacity of 8 MW, with a possible increase to 9 MW is the largest in
production wind turbine (2014 introduction into service). This massive
wind turbine has an overall height of 220 m (722 ft), and a blade
diameter of 164 m (538 ft) so therefore it is used only for offshore
platforms.
Now
GE Renewable Energy (the same company that
produced the wind turbines at Pine Tree) is in the the construction
phase of what GE states will be the world's largest and most powerful
offshore wind turbine called the Haliade-X. The scale of the turbine is
immense. It will stand 260 meters tall and have a capacity of 12
megawatts (MW) as well as 107-meter-long blades.
260 meters= 853
feet 107 meters= 351 feet
When it comes to modern wind turbines, we are going to see
that their are 2
primary designs: horizontal-axis and vertical-axis. Vertical-axis wind
turbines (VAWTs) are pretty rare. I have seen a few
at the at the Tehachapi Wind Farm and when I did have a moving view
I could see that of most of the Vertical-axis wind turbines were not spinning!
All commercially
produced, utility-scale wind turbines are horizontal-axis wind turbines
(HAWTs). The HAWT has a shaft is mounted horizontally, parallel to the
ground in the nacelle. For a HAWT to work it needs to facing into the
wind and so must constantly align themselves using a yaw-adjustment
mechanism. The yaw system typically consists of electric motors and
gearboxes that move the entire rotor left or right in small increments.
From www.energy.gov/maps/how-does-wind-turbine-work
In many of these photos it might seem as if the wind turbines are
not functioning. Not True! I only spied 1 wind turbine at Pine Tree that
was not working. The wind turbines blades do not need to spin at a high
rate of speed to produce useable amounts of electricity. Why?
These wind turbines are massive and have huge blades that only need to
spin at an average of about 18 RPM. Each blade set has enough torque
behind it to turn the shaft that is connected to a gear box that will
increase the speed to about 1,000 RPM. That is enough shaft speed to
turn a generator and produce the electricity.
So my camera had a
fairly high shutter speed due to the bright sunny day and therefore you
will not see any motion trails on the photos.
All 3 of these wind turbines were happily spinning when I took this
photo. The prevailing wind direction up at Pine Ridge was West to East and the
wind velocity was on average about 20 to 25 mph. The wind velocity at the top of the
turbine was undoubtedly at a higher velocity.
At least 40 wind turbines can be seen in this photo. The area of
land leased by LADWP is some 8,000 acres in size or 12 1/2 square miles!
Some of the hills seen here and in other photos of the Pine Tree Wind
Farm may seem to be signifgantly more barren than those of other hills and one might try to
attribute that to the construction of the wind turbines but this is not
technically true.
The Hansen Family has had a cattle grazing operation here in this
area of the Eastern Tehachapi mountains for many decades now and
what you see above is simply overgrazing by cattle and not due to wind turbine
construction.
As we saw earlier in this page, the Hansen Family has a
feedlot on the facility. Which is obvious as you
can guess that the available grass and shrubs in these high desert
mountains would normally not be enough to keep these bovines from going
on strike for better nourishment!
Also in the above photo notice
that in the distance
you can see another collection of wind turbines that have a different
type of tower structure. These use the older type of lattice structure
normally found on smaller wind turbine of a kilowatt type power rating
compared to the heavy round mast type pole structure found on these GE
1.5 MW wind turbines.
Looking at the satellite map above you will see as
Blue arrow to the right which indicates
the direction of the photo while the Maroon
circle indicates the wind turbine pole that can be seen to the right of
the munching cattle. To the left is a polygonal zone in Red that
indicates the approximate area of the Jawbone Wind Energy, LLC. site.
Vancouver, British Columbia-based Alterra Power Corp. has acquired the
40 MW Jawbone wind development in Kern County, California
in 2017.
This project was started
after the Pine Tree project and according to the Kern County Notice of
Preparation and Initial Study with a file date of November 24, 2010. But
the original concept could have started earlier.
Actually this
area to the East of Pine River has 2 projects nearing completion and
they were developed during the same time frame using the same
Environmental Impact Report (EIR).
The North Sky River
Project is proposed by North Sky River Energy, LLC and the Jawbone Wind
Energy Project is proposed by Jawbone Wind Energy, LLC. The proposed
project requires approval of zone change requests and a conditional use
permit (CUP) and if approved would allow for the commercial production
of 339 Megawatts (MW) of electricity from wind turbine generators (WTGs)
on an 13,535-acre site in unincorporated Kern County. This information
comes from the Kern County North Sky River Wind Energy Project and
Jawbone Wind Energy Project (Draft Environmental Impact Report) dated
May 2011.
The electrcity generated at this newer wind farm will
be used by either Edison or Pacific Gas & Electric.
These newer type of wind powered turbine generators do have a few
built in advantages that can actually help reduce the number of bird
kills especially to the raptor bird type (eagles, falcons, hawks and
owls). Environmentilists have been screaming for years that the wind
turbine farms have been slaughter farms to the bird population!
So as you can see from the video that replacing the smaller kilowatt
type wind turbine with megawatt type wind turbines will reduce the
number of turbines. Also with the higher frame (usually a pole type) the
turbines can be located in somewhat safer bird zones. Also the solid
pole type tower mast will prevent birds from roosting or nest building
as can happen with smaller lattice frames.
The "re-powering" of
wind turbine farms will help reduce the bird kill rate but it is not a
panacea for the industry. And unless the companies owning the wind farms
see a monetary advantage in re-powering their older wind farms the
change to newer turbines and less turbines will be painfully slow.
So
why
was the Pine Tree area chosen? Look at the above photo of the tall tree in the
center of the photo. (What type of tree is it? It has needles like a
pine but no bark!). Open the photo to 100% and see how the wind
up here in the mountains blows hard and for a large number of hours per
day. Absolutely perfect for a wind farm.
Here we have a hillside covered with Juniper and a few Pinion pines.
This area of the Western Tehachapi mountains is
California Juniper Alliance
A wind power farm
is not just a collection of wind turbines on steel poles! A Wind Farm
will consist of a collection wind turbines, transformers, transmission
lines, electric sub-stations, access roads, metrological towers, storage
sheds and usually a O&M facility.
This is another reason why we
should NOT consider a Wind Farm as necessarily a true "Green Power
Source" that has NO effect on the environment! Yes, a wind farm by
design will not create any direct air
pollution. But in-directly, yes.
The land disturbance is immense and spread over a wide zone. But in
comparison to a natural gas fed turbines that California utilities seem
to favor, a Wind Farms carbon footprint is miniscule.
Dirt roads at Pine Tree used by LADWP for maintenance of the Wind
Turbine infrastructure. A total of 34 miles of these roads in total.
Roads have to be maintained not only for the safety of the DWP
workers and security guards at the site but also to mitigate the
drainage issues as these roads disturb the natural flow of what
little rain and snow this area receives.
To the left is fencing surrounding the Solar farm at Pine Tree. A
smaller 8.5 MW facility that will normally have a more consistent
power flow during the day when the may die down. To the right is a
transformer found at each one of the Wind Turbines. These
transformers are pack full of toxic transformer oil and could be a
mini environmental disaster if one would fail and spill it's
contents.
I did not see a single oil stain around any
transformer pad. The site as a matter of fact was very clean of
human debris! Notice the fence in the left photo, no plastic bags,
Styrofoam plates, plastic cups! Excellent job LADWP :)
Transformer sub-station at Pine Tree needed to change the voltage
and current for the electrcity to get down the hill and into the
power grid. Operations and maintenance building at Pine tree.
Here is photo showing you the LADWP's O&M building with 1 of
the DWP maintenance truck set to scale next to 1 of the turbine blade
shipping containers.
Also note that here you will see one of the
very few electrical power lines above ground. Almost all of the
electricity generated by the wind farm generators goes to the
Sub-station via underground conduits. Another well thought out idea by
DWP and the companies that started the Pine Tree Project.
Maintenance must be carried out on a daily basis on all the
equipment. Left we can see what is probably gear oil leaking from the
bottom of a nacelle. Yes the oil needs to be cleaned up before any might
drop down and contaminate the soil, but this is no easy task. A
maintenance worker cannot just pop out a step ladder from the back of
his truck, climb up to the top and wipe down the oil. The height up to
the bottom of the nacelle is about 200 feet!
The left photo
indicates that rust is still a issue even in this dry humidity zone. One
wonders also if the quality of the steel was sub-standard. Again
Mr./Mrs./Ms. Painter fellow from LADWP can't use a step ladder to get at
this area to clean and repaint.
That about wraps up the visit
to the LADWP's Pine Tree Wind and Solar Farm. Next we should take a
final look at the Flora & Fauna of the Pine Tree area viewed as a
habitat.
I am a Zero Emissions 4 legged hopping machine! I am 100%
biodegradable and so are my droppings. I require no roads, no
electricity, no catalytic converters nor do I need and or want you in my
backyard! I just want to eat and re-produce!
Click me to move to
the last page.
If something is amiss in this article you can
always e-mail the Desertsunrise Webmaster fellow!
Diameter: 77.0 m
Swept area: 4,657.0 m² Number of blades: 3 Rotor speed, max: 20.4
U/min Tipspeed: 82 m/s Type: LM 37 Material: GFK
Manufacturer: LM Glasfieber Power density 1: 322.1 W/m² Power
density 2: 3.1 m²/kW
Explaining how a wind turbine works with graphic illustrations:
An anemometer is used to measure wind velocity and
direction and then send that information to the wind turbines
controller.
The turbine blades are where wind energy is transferred to
mechanical energy.
The Hub is used to mount all the blades together and also
provides the blade pitch mechanism.
The wind turbine needs 2 brakes, 1 for the rotor and 1 for
the yaw (360° turning) plus the all important rotor lock so the
maintenance crews can work safely on the turbine!
The gearbox is where the slower rotational speed of 30 to 50
RPM is changed to a speed of 1800 RPM as this is the normal speed
required for a generator to produce electricity.
The nacelle is a housing that covers the gearbox, shaft,
generator and controller unit.
This is where Wind Energy actually become Electric Energy and is
usually the heaviest unit in the nacelle.
The massive steel tower is what is used to get these large wind
turbine blades up into faster moving wind.
Image via www.kleinfelder.com
Wind Turbine tower types.
Wind Power while seemingly clean and "green" with a low
environmental footprint is not as green nor environmentally wonderful as
the popular press would have you believe.
Without a doubt Wind
Power has no where near the horrible environmental issues that all
fossil fuel type have. We still need to examine some of the negative
effects that Wind Power has to deal with.
The tree form of California Juniper (Juniperus
californica) as a dominant conifer occurs sparsely in this area in the
Kern Plateau Subsection and somewhat more frequently in the Eastern
Slopes and Tehachapi – Piute Mountains Subsections. It establishes on
harsh sites such as those having shallow or coarse-textured soils,
having been mapped generally at low to moderate elevations (2800 – 5000
ft or 854 to 1524 m). It is usually associated with Singleleaf Pinyon
Pine (Pinusmonophylla), Blue Oak (Quercus douglasii), ShrubOaks (Quercus
spp.), Buckwheat (Eriogonum spp.), annual grasses, and shrubs in the
Great Basin – Mixed Desert Scrub type such as Blackbrush (Coleogyne
ramosissima) and Big Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata)
SOUTH
SIERRAN ECOLOGICAL PROVINCE CALVEG ZONE 4
If the state of
California is one of the key leading states in the fight against both
"global warming" and air pollution and California really desires to
paint itself as the Green Revolution state, then what is the major
problem with getting some European style offshore wind farms in place?
California loves all that Euro socialism and since the state is
chock full of Hollywood entertainment fellows who constantly bash any
and all fossil fuel companies while they drive their foreign made Euro
gas/diesel polluting machines back and forth between the film & TV
studios to their multi-million dollar mansions.
So HEY! Why not
some Euro style offshore wind farms. Europe has been on a spree off
building these large wind turbine farms in many of the coastal waters
around Europe.
Well it turns out that California's desire to be
"green" only goes as far as shoving their "greenness" onto some other
poor unlucky less fortunate 3rd world people. No not in Asia, but some
other area of California, just not in the City of Los Angeles nor on the
coast of California!
As of 2018 California does not have any
offshore wind farms that I know of. Another reason offshore why wind
farming has not taken off in this state is due to the severe slope of
the continental shelf as it drops of rather quickly and goes deeper than
much of the Eastern US coast and Europe.
This means that for all
intent purposes the towers used to house the turbines and blades will
have to be floating towers not anchored to the seabed.
The last
and most recent excuse given for the lack of offshore wind farms in
California is the US Navy has created their own map of where the Navy
will not allow wind turbines to be built! Well Mr. Squid you do not sir,
have the final say in this matter and as a matter of fact have NO say in
the matter at all!
The state of California is about to become
the biggest hypocrite state in the union if it does not stop
appropriating land from the poor, the political less powerful and using
the perceived bigoted idea of rural hillbillies not using the land
properly.
On the East coast of the USA a major wind farm project has been
underway for some 16 years! Many of the same politicians and powerful
political families that were heavy proponents of "green energy" flipped
sides and joined with a fossil fuel company and were thus able to stop
the project.
The how and why of this failure is very interesting
when you look at the issue from a standpoint of "Not in my Backyard"
hypocrites!
Everyone must come to
grips with reality here. Wind Power from turbines and Solar Power from
massive solar farms in the desert and scrublands is NOT a completely "Green" and
environmentally safe alternative to fossil fuels.
True a wind
power farm will not generate any air pollution compared to what a
natural gas power plant will. But their is a very ugly downside in the
construction phase of a wind turbine farm and the eyesore issue is never ending.
Read
the story below and examine the photos carefully. If this happened in
YOUR backyard how would you feel?
Usually in a standard wind turbine
farm, 3 different Meteorological Towers (aka Met Mast) will be
installed.
These towers are needed to provide couple of years
worth (minumum of at least 2) of wind data. The Met (mast) tower is used
to collect wind data, temperature, humidity, rain and so on but also for
other information.
Normally the Met Mast towers are lower that
the WTGs (Wind Turbine Generator) that will be installed at the site,
with an average height of 40 meters (although today many
industrial-scale wind energy projects have several 60-meter
meteorological towers). The hub height is where the wind speed will be
measured (if possible) and this data will be interpolated at the correct
elevation using one of the available formulas.
These towers
measure the actual wind speed in the positions where a WTG's would be
erected, at the hub height (60 meters or more). The Met Mast towers are
then used to calibrate the projected power curve. Then if the projected
produced energy is in line with the expected values then funding for the
project can proceed. Banks, governments, financial lending firms do not
want to invest in a wind farm project if the primary source of energy if
not consistent.
In normal practice after a couple of weeks
(usually 2 to 3 months) this tower is removed and a test turbine is
installed close to where the Met Mast was.
Below is a 3D close up of the F15 met mast at Pine Tree. I was never
able to locate the other 2 Met Mast's in the Pine Tree facility but I am
told by personal working at the facility that all 3 towers still exist.
Going to the West of Tower F15 we can find the Pine Tree Solar Farm.
I am very curious as to why LADWP decide to put in a Solar Farm at
this site.
This is a 85 MW solar facility on a small plateau within the 8,000
acre site. Just a few miles south of here in the desert floor are a
couple of humongous solar farms that are either owned by LADWP or
privately owned but contracted to supply electricity to LADWP.
Did LADWP construct this solar farm in hopes that it would help
smooth out or mitigate wind power electricity production when the wind
fluctuates during the day?
Or did the LADWP just get a wad of
Federal government cash to use on renewable energy sources?
Wind is not finite source as it has been blowing
around this globe for many a millennia but it is fickle. Some area of
the planet have more and faster movement of the wind. One area in
southern California in the Tehachapi Mountains has had wind energy farms
since the early 1980's.
The Wind Resource Area Tehachapi is one
of the 3 largest wind farms in California and one of the largest in area
with a massive number of wind turbines. Take a look at the map below and
then imagine if your local suburb was filled with this many wind
turbines!
Another wind energy farm is going up just to the southwest of the
LADWP's Pine Tree wind farm. This newer development is designed to take
advantage of 2 items that will make this project viable.
1. Tax
Credits (Fed and State)
“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the
only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax
credit.”
Warren Buffett, WSJ 5/4/14
2. Existing LADWP
Infrastructure
Point of Interconnection:
LADWP Barren Ridge Sub. Transmission
Availability: New LADWP 230kV line
under construction to Los Angeles
Map showing the area for Barren Ridge Wind
Image from celticenergyinc.com
Met Mast being erected at Barren
Ridge. These usually go up before the wind turbines are installed.
Image from celticenergyinc.com
The absolutely most frightening quote I have heard in some
time!
The Warren Buffet quote that is!
“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the
only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax
credit.”
Warren Buffett, WSJ 5/4/14
So in other words the viability
and commercially feasibility would NOT be as high if these tax credits
were not available?
Here is another quote this time from
savingmaine.org where in the state of Maine a fight is ongoing to either
change or reduce the environmental impact of the wind energy craze in
that state.
IS WIND AFFORDABLE? – The truth is Mainers pay for wind energy
several times over. Wind is a heavily subsidized industry. Wind
developers use government loan guarantees, energy tax credits,
production tax credits, carbon cap and trade credits, and a 30%
investment tax credit taken when the project is completed.
Government programs such as tax increment financing are also used to
subsidize projects. Projects can also be written off with 5 year
depreciation plans offering further tax reductions to developers. So
in addition to paying higher electrical energy rates, tax payers
subsidize projects with their tax dollars.
Another point that is NEVER made when a wind energy farm is being
proposed is that in many cases the destruction of forest, woodlands,
brush and grasslands has a negative offset against carbon reduction!
Another quote from savingmaine.org:
ARE WE HELPING TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE USING WIND TURBINES? – Maine
is already a leader in fighting climate change! We are not the
polluters. Only 14% of our carbon emissions come from electrical
generation. Maine no longer uses coal or oil to produce electricity.
And every tree that is cut down for a wind
turbine increases Maine’s carbon footprint. Nearly 50% of
Maine’s electricity comes from renewable sources – hydropower and
biomass, and we are the first state in the nation to have tidal
hydro projects. Because of poor performance after 6 years only 1.5%
of electrical energy comes from wind. The wind energy industry
exaggerates its carbon offset data and wind production.
Below is a image from savingmaine.org showing the amount of trees
that were destroyed to clear an area for a wind turbine tower base in
the Oakfield Project.
All this negative print about the actual cost of wind energy must be
seen in the American Environmental landscape. We must use less energy
altogether and the absolutely largest is that humungous vehicle fleet
that was estimated at 263.6 million registered vehicles in the United
States in 2015! This does NOT include off-road vehicles, snowmobiles,
watercraft, agriculture vehicles and the unreported number of unlicensed
vehicles! A vast amount of fossil fuel guzzling engines! Here is where
the USA needs to concentrate on massively reducing the carbon footprint.
Honest Mass Transportation
Not only can the USA reduce our carbon footprint by reducing the number
of vehicles but we can also reduce our ridiculous importing of foreign
oil and natural gas and freeing this nation from the hegemony of the
foreign oil cartels.
Do we really want to see a million of these scattered about the USA?
Another issue that many of the residents in Maine are fed up with is
that a large portion of the wind energy electricity generated by wind
farms in Maine are used outside of the state of Maine.
Same issue
in California where the population that benefits from the capturing of
wind energy is not the same population that has to suffer with it's
health being reduced, way of life being changed, loss of habitat and
stuck with thousands of permanent eyesores!
This imbalance is
downright criminal!
Photo and quote from: dailybail.com
"The photo demonstrates turbine wake turbulence in large wind farm
arrays and why the potential for wind energy is substantially
overestimated by most sources. The first turbine to catch the wind will
produce appreciable energy, while turbines in its wake, down wind of
that unit, produce exponentially less energy due to air turbulence. The
low level fog, known as sea smoke, clearly shows this and is one of the
best photographs ever taken that demonstrates this effect."
The
Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco,
was roaring at nearly full bore one day last month, its four gas and
steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to the
California grid.
On the horizon, across an industrial shipping
channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, scores of wind
turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades —
or many others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33
megawatts of power statewide in the midafternoon, less than 1% of the
potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of
electricity.
As is true on many days in California when
multibillion-dollar investments in wind and solar energy plants are
thwarted by the weather, the void was filled by gas-fired plants like
the Delta Energy Center.
Quoted from the LA Times article:
December 09, 2012 | By
Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times
"One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power — and a problem the
state is not yet prepared to meet — is that wind and solar energy
must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired generators.
As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a
legal mandate to produce one-third of California's electricity by
2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from fossil fuel
plants."
Ok the point here is the imbalance between the "Haves" and the
"Have-nots" or the "Rich & Powerful" and the "Poor & Disenfranchized".
All bad news for a nation that hails itself as a democracy!
The
urban elites have cast themselves into the lot of pure hypocrats when it
comes to environmentalism. The liberal left cabal of the news media,
Democratic politicians, Hollywood entertainment types need to pay the
same price as those that they crush under their bootheels!
This
all will change when we see thousands of gigantic wind turbines off the
coast of Santa Monica beach, Zuma Beach, Venice Beach, Dana Point, Los
Angeles harbor along with the foothills of the Verdugo Hills covered in
Solar panels, the Hollywood sign replaced with a Solar panel farm!
So
why
was the Pine Tree area chosen? Look at the above photo of the tall tree in the
center of the photo. (What type of tree is it? It has needles like a
pine but no bark!). Open the photo to 100% and see how the wind
up here in the mountains blows hard and for a large number of hours per
day. Absolutely perfect for a wind farm.
