Swimming With Fiberglass: The Fallout from the Nantucket Turbine Accident

 

On the surface, wind-turbine-generated electric power has been one of the green-energy success stories of the twenty-first century.  In 2000, only about 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind power was installed in the U. S.  In 2022, that number had risen to 434 GW, fueled by a combination of government subsidies, advances in mechanical and power technologies, and generally favorable public opinion. 

 

But no large-scale technology is entirely without its problems, and one of the downsides of wind energy started showing up very prominently on Tuesday, July 18, when chunks of fiberglass-carbon composite material began to show up on a number of Nantucket beaches.  They turned out to be from a blade of a wind turbine that had failed the previous Saturday about 13 nautical miles south of the beaches, in an Atlantic-Ocean-based wind farm called Vineyard Wind.  The local environmental authorities shut down the beaches and called out Vineyard Wind for its failure to notify them promptly after the failure, according to reports in National Review.  The system off the New England Coast is the second-largest ocean-based one in the U. S., and began operations only in January after receiving over a billion dollars in indirect federal subsidies. 

 

Now, Vineyard Wind may be able to recover from this incident, in which no one was killed or even injured, as far as we know.  It's not exactly clear why the turbine blade broke, but there is a possibility that manufacturing problems in France may have been responsible, as an identical type of blade also ruptured recently in the U. K. 

 

Broken blades are not the only problem that wind turbines can cause.  Vineyard Wind is in a prime commercial fishing area, and fishing interests opposed the installation because snagging an underwater power cable with a dragnet can capsize a boat.  And there's also the bird problem.

 

Estimates vary, but one source says that up to a million birds are killed every year in the U. S. by wind turbines.  This is a little-known but depressing thought which is easy to ignore, as the turbines are installed either offshore where they are out of sight to everyone except a few boaters (and those fishing boats), or in remote areas such as, well, Texas and Oklahoma.

 

This isn't the first time that governments have put their heavy thumbs on the scale of energy development.  Many of the hydroelectric projects built in the 1930s, ranging from Hoover Dam to the multiple installations of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were paid for partly or completely with government dollars.  At the time, private utility interests protested about the unfair competition that such organizations as the TVA represented.  But in the depths of the Depression, anything that put people to work and made the perceived blessings of electricity available to more consumers was viewed favorably, and history has shown that viewpoint to be substantially correct.

 

Things are different now.  While demand for electricity is increasing, largely due to recent developments such as server farms for AI and cryptocurrency trading, we are not about to run out of electricity.  If environmental concerns militate against building more coal or natural-gas-fired plants, the nuclear option is one that makes a great deal of engineering sense, but is burdened with a lot of cultural baggage and regulatory barnacles.  In the headlong dash toward "net-zero" carbon emissions, the trendy thinkers and politicians have thrown billions at wind and solar power with more enthusiasm thsn discrimination, ignoring the fact that no hardware lasts forever, and it takes energy and physical stuff to build, and then when it wears out you have to put it somewhere.

 

I am told that after the carbon-fiberglass-composite wind turbine blades reach their end-of-lifetime date, which may be only a few years in some cases, the operators replace then and have to bury the old ones, intact, in the ground.  Recycling them would probably cost as much as making a new blade, and they're too big to take to a standard landfill.  And some of the chemicals in solar panels are nothing that you'd want to put on your morning cereal either, but acres and acres of them are going to have to be disposed of some day.

 

These are partly technical problems, and may have technical solutions.  But it's surprising how the same people who talk about how every technology must be sustainable, tend to turn a blind eye to the life-cycle issues of their favored technologies, simply because while in operation, they don't use fossil fuels. 

 

I'm sorry the beachgoers of Nantucket are having to stay out of the water temporarily while experts in haz-mat suits clean up the mess made by Vineyard Wind.  But some thought should have been given to the possibility of something like this happening, and maybe just a few miles away from some very popular beaches wasn't the best place to put the turbines. 

 

New England, unlike Texas, doesn't have a lot of good places on land to put wind turbines.  About thirty years ago, a mechanical engineer I knew at the University of Massachusetts managed to erect an experimental wind turbine on a prominent "mountain" (really a large hill) visible from I-95 in Massachusetts.  But every time I drove past it, I never saw it operating, and one day at a meeting, somebody finally asked him why they never saw it running.  His reply?  "It runs at night."  Sometimes it's hard being a pioneer.

 

It's a matter of judgment as to whether our era has gone overboard in its fiscal and political enthusiasm for wind, solar, and other renewables,as opposed to the tried-and-true fossil fuels and the controversial option of nuclear energy.  There are real hazards ahead if we displace too many old-style "dispatchable" sources (controllable on demand) with systems that depend on the wind blowing and the sun being out.  We still can't store large amounts of electricity economically, and there are technical reasons that too much wind and solar energy on a grid can make it hard to control, although these may be worked out in time.  And grid reliability is a vital feature that will affect the entire economy adversely if we lose it. 

 

I hope people in Nantucket get their beaches cleaned up before the summer swimming season is over, but even if they do, I'm not planning a trip up there.  This Texas wimp can't swim in water that cold.

 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nantucket-beaches-closed-after-wind-turbine-breaks-apart-sending-fiberglass-shards-into-ocean/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/the-biden-harris-green-crown-jewel-just-shattered-literally/.  The statistic on birds killed annually by wind turbines is from https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-deaths, and the growth in wind energy in the U. S. is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/189412/us-electricity-generation-from-wind-energy-since-2005/.

 

Are There Batteries In the Grid's Future?

 

Texas has the largest installed capacity of wind generation of any U. S. state as of 2019.  But all those windmills did no good a year ago when historically low temperatures knocked out natural-gas production and generators, leading to the Big Freeze and the deaths of over 200 people.  The reason?  There was almost no wind associated with the cold snap, and no wind means no wind generation. 

 

In the debate about the Texas power grid that followed, some charged that our increasing reliance on wind power (and to a lesser extent, solar power) was destabilizing the grid.  Up to now, at least, power has to be generated on demand, so electric-utility operators have come up with a combination of base-load and peak-load generators to deal with the fluctuations in demand, which can go very low at 2 A. M. on a mild spring day, but soar to many times the minimum on a blazing August afternoon.

 

Base-load generators are most efficient when they run all the time.  Nuclear power is in this category, as are fossil-fuel plants that use steam turbines and large boilers fired by natural gas (or, decreasingly, coal).  These types of plants are used for base loads because starting and stopping them is a big deal and can take hours or even days. 

 

Peak-load plants, on the other hand, are designed to come on line in just minutes.  One example is the gas-turbine plant, basically a bunch of jet engines hooked to generators.  Peak-load plants are typically less efficient than base-load plants, but they can be started up quickly to meet soaring demand in emergencies. 

 

Solar and wind don't fit either of these categories, as they depend on whether the sun's out or the wind's blowing, respectively.  Fitting the fairly unpredictable output of these renewable types of energy into an existing grid can be challenging, because it adds fluctuations that weren't there before.  If the wind's blowing hard and Texas is getting up to 10% or more of its total electricity demand met by wind energy, and all of a sudden the wind stops, you have to be ready to jump in with peak-load plants and supply what's missing, and that isn't always easy.  So as more fluctuating renewables are added, the problem of managing the grid to meet fluctuating demand gets even harder.

 

Although experts determined that this issue was not a primary cause of the February 2021 Texas blackout, it's an ongoing concern, and one way of dealing with it is a very old one:  batteries.

 

Using batteries as electric-utility energy storage is not a new idea.  I have a 1910-era book on my shelves that describes how electric-streetcar power plants were supplemented by banks of lead-acid batteries attached across the lines at strategic places along the streetcar routes.  In periods of light demand with low traffic, the batteries were charged by the central power plant.  And during rush hour when there were more trolleys on the line than usual, the batteries would discharge into the overhead wires and supplement the base-load power generated at the central plant.

 

The problem with lead-acid batteries is that it takes a huge number of them to store enough energy to make a difference with a large-scale power grid.  Depending on the technology, a lithium battery of the same volume as a lead-acid battery can store up to ten times the energy, and the weight advantages are even better.  That's why electric cars had to wait until lithium batteries were fairly practical to compete with internal-combustion cars. 

 

In December of 2020, Vistra Energy connected what was then the largest battery-storage energy facility in the world to the California grid at Moss Landing in Monterey County.  The system can provide up to 300 MW of power and can store 1.2 gigawatt-hours, implying that it could provide its peak energy output for three or four hours before pooping out.  But that is plenty of time to tide a grid over an emergency until other more conventional sources can be put online.

 

Actually, because batteries can start supplying massive amounts of power in less than one cycle of the 60-Hz power frequency, they are very useful for damping out short-term instabilities in power grids that can otherwise trip relays and cause blackouts.  This type of operation can't be done with mechanical generation systems.  So a battery storage facility like this is one more tool in the power-dispatcher's toolbox to use in meeting fluctuating demand.

 

The Moss Landing facility was in the news recently because of a fire that destroyed ten of the nearly 100,000 battery packs at the facility, the second such fire in five months.  The first fire was caused by leaking water from cooling pipes, and so the second one may be due to similar causes.  The fire was contained and out before the fire department had a chance to do anything. 

 

The nice thing about battery systems is that failures can be isolated fairly easily, as the Moss Landing mishaps show.  Although the plant was shut down during the fire for safety reasons, repairs are fairly straightforward and the system was back online in short order.  This feature of gradual degradation is a big asset in the utility business, where shutdowns can cause big headaches.

 

It remains to be seen how significant a role battery storage will play in the future of the so-called smart grid.  Electric-car makers such as Tesla have dreams of distributed battery storage, in which thousands or millions of electric cars plugged in overnight could serve as a virtual storage facility controlled by the electric utility they're plugged into.  That would require massive changes in both hardware and regulatory structures that I'm not sure we're ready for.  But it's a nice dual-use idea that might evolve into a much more reliable, robust, and efficient grid than the fairly brittle things we have now. 

 

When I worked at an electronics repair shop one summer in college, I'd be amused when a customer would say, "This radio isn't electric, it runs on batteries."  In the future we may all be running on batteries more than we realize, and the grid will be more stable as a result.

 

Sources:  The website www.vice.com carried a story about the Moss Landing fires at https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypw5x/largest-lithium-ion-battery-in-the-world-meltdown-moss-landing.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on "Wind generation in the United States" and "Battery storage power station."

 

A Test Case For How To Lower Carbon Emissions: Texas

No, I haven't gone off my nut with blind patriotism toward my native state.  Yes, I know that ex-governor Rick Perry said in 2014, "Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice [to] the country, and I believe a disservice to the world."  But the fact of the matter is that Texas has the most installed wind-generation capacity of any state, more even than California, and shows no signs of turning back.  How we got here is a lesson in the effects of government regulation, and shows that sometimes less is more.

In an Associated Press article, reporter Michael Biesecker points out the irony that three of the leading wind-generation states—Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas—are also home to state and federal lawmakers who have been the most critical of climate-change ideas and most supportive of fossil fuel businesses such as oil and coal.  He shows that in both 2014 and 2015, U. S. utilities spent more money installing renewable-energy sources such as wind and solar than they did building fossil-fueled power plants.  And the fossil-fuel plants they did build mostly burn natural gas, which contributes less to the carbon-dioxide burden of the atmosphere than coal does.  The fact that natural gas is so popular is largely because it's cheaper these days, and that's because the largely Texas-based oil-and-gas-extraction industry figured out how to do fracking, which has made more natural gas available now than we've had for a long time. 

A few years ago we were hearing calls for carbon taxes, heavy regulation of fossil-fuel industries, and draconian mandates for Federal- and state-funded renewable energy projects imposed from Washington and other centers of governmental power.  Largely because Washington has been gridlocked for the last five or six years, no significant Federal laws were passed, although the Obama administration has done what it could through executive actions in those directions. 

Meanwhile, in Texas we enjoy some peculiar advantages when it comes to doing new things with electric power.  Because years ago, Texas refused to interconnect in a major way with the electric grids in the rest of the country, most of the state gets power from an entity called ERCOT—the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.  Both physically and legally, ERCOT is independent from both the rest of the U. S. power grid and from the tangle of regulatory requirements that the rest of the country has to deal with whenever a power utility wants to do something different.  

As Kyle Downey points out in an article at lawstreetmedia.com, this freedom from outside utility regulations has allowed Texas to pass innovative laws such as the Renewable Portfolio Standard in 1999, which created mandates and funded incentives for utilities to develop renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.  Modified over the years and threatened with repeal but never revoked, the Standard has succeeded beyond most people's expectations.  From barely 1,000 MW of installed wind-generation capacity in 2002, wind power has grown to the extent that about ten percent of all power produced in the state is generated by wind farms—some 17,000 MW as of 2015.   Many Texas utility customers can choose to "buy" only wind power through a trading system that gives choices of sources and pricing plans, and this has also allowed private individuals to vote for wind power with their wallets, rather than much more indirectly at the ballot box. 

The other factor Downey mentions that has made Texas a wind-power leader is that we have a lot of land in the Panhandle where the wind blows steadily almost all the time, and even conveniently gets stronger at night when other renewables such as solar conk out.  That everlasting wind on the prairie that early settlers often found so annoying is finally turning out to be a money-making asset.  The state has also provided a fund to connect the remote wind-generation farms to the demand centers in populated areas of the eastern and central part of the state with transmission lines, an essential ingredient of the process that legislatures often overlook when planning renewable-energy futures for their constituents.  Overall, the wind-power picture has never looked brighter in Texas, and there are more wind farms yet to be built.  One study has shown that even without government incentives, building a wind farm is now the cheapest way to install new generating capacity—even cheaper than fossil-fuel plants.

What are the implications of this story for the current debate over carbon emissions and global climate change?  For one thing, it tells me that predicting what people are going to do is hard, unless you restrict them with so many regulations that they don't have much choice.  Few forecasters a decade ago would have foreseen the U. S. getting to a point where it is nearly independent of oil imports, as we are now.  And even I thought that when certain wind-power subsidies came to an end, that the bottom would fall out of wind-generation growth in Texas.  I was wrong, obviously, and not for the first time. 

On a personal level, much of what an individual worries about does not in fact come to pass.  Something like this may be the case with carbon emissions.  In researching this article, I came across a chart showing that in 2013, China built more wind-generating power plant capacity than nuclear-powered plants.  China is still one of the world's largest offenders when it comes to carbon emission because of its huge number of coal-fired power plants, but it is an encouraging sign that even a highly autocratic government such as China's recognizes the good sense in encouraging renewable energy sources. 

All that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere isn't going to go away overnight, and we will be dealing with the consequences of burning fossil fuels, whatever they turn out to be, for many decades.  But those who would like to empower a world government with the means of forcing people to quit burning fossil fuels should take a look at Texas, where climate-change deniers are happily building wind farms, making money, and thumbing their noses at regulators who are everywhere else but in Texas.  It's paradoxical, but it seems to work.

Sources:  The AP article by Michael Biesecker on how conservative states are leading the renewable-energy drive was carried by numerous outlets and is available on the U. S. News & World Report website at http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2016-05-06/gop-states-benefiting-from-shift-to-wind-and-solar-energy.  Kyle Downey's article "The Mystery of Wind Energy in Texas" is at http://lawstreetmedia.com/issues/energy-and-environment/mystery-wind-energy-texas/.  Rick Perry's quotation is from http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/31/top-10-misguided-climate-deniers-quotes-2014 and the article about wind energy in China is at https://www.statista.com/chart/1233/wind-outpaces-nuclear-in-china/.

Being Green Takes Green: Europe Rethinks Renewable Energy Standards

For the past decade or more, as Al Gore and the majority of climate-change scientists have insisted that the world is speeding headlong toward an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions, European countries have adhered to stringent emission controls in order to lessen their dependence on fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.  And the strictures have been in place long enough to have a significant effect;  Germany, for example, now routinely gets a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources.  But as economist Stephen Moore points out in a recent article in National Review, treading so lightly on one's carbon footprint has a price:  higher energy costs.  A kilowatt-hour in Europe currently costs up to twice as much as it does in the U. S., and European manufacturers who use lots of electricity are starting to take notice.  Companies such as the chemical giant BASF are planning new operations in the U. S. rather than Europe.  As a result, the European Union recently announced that it was dropping its mandatory emissions standards for its member nations, letting them burn more coal and oil, if they can find it.  And one of the places they are most likely to start looking is—you guessed it—the U. S.  New exploration technologies, primarily fracking (hydraulic fracturing), have put the U. S. on track to be a net exporter of energy in the near future, and it looks like Europe will now be a prime customer, their disdain for old-fashioned carbon-based fuels notwithstanding.

Engineers made it possible for Germany to achieve the impressive feat of running a quarter of a modern economy on renewable energy alone.  Engineers also have made it possible for the U. S. to increase its oil and gas production in recent years beyond the wildest dreams of everyone but a few farsighted oil-exploration entrepreneurs.  In the absence of government controls or restrictions, customers for energy will buy the cheapest convenient fuel available.  Everyone agrees that except for a few isolated localities, there are no strictly economic reasons to build lots of renewable-energy sources into a large-scale power grid.  A fossil-fuel power plant is much cheaper to build, its output is more reliable, and the continuing cost of the fuel is often more than offset by the construction, maintenance, and other costs associated with the relative unreliability of wind and solar energy. 

But such a strictly economic analysis ignores a cultural and political factor:  the perceived virtue of using renewable energy as opposed to the use of fossil fuels.  In the moral universe in which many government and science leaders live, burning fossil fuels is as close as you can get to a mortal sin against future generations, and against those living now who may be harmed by the consequences of anthropogenic global warming.  The desire to avoid this sin is so great that, at least in Europe, it led to the European Union's mandatory emissions standards which effectively imposed renewable-energy quotas on its member nations.  But even the bureaucrats of the EU can recognize impending economic disaster when they see it, and as the costs of living with a renewable-energy grid began to pile up, they and their constituents saw the consequences of idealism in their power bills.  And it got to be too much.

This is not the place to debate the truth, falsity, or somewhere-in-betweenness of the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.  What is of more immediate concern is the public's perception of the issue, and how that perception (or rather, spectrum of perceptions) influences governmental policies and laws.  For whatever reason, the EU, with its relatively opaque governing structure and increasingly centralized power over its member nations, responded promptly and vigorously to the perceived threat of global warming with practical measures that had significant negative economic effects.  The fact that the same leaders are now backing off on these measures in the face of rising energy costs says volumes about their real priorities, which turn out to be similar to those of politicians in other parts of the globe.  The slogan "The economy, stupid" was part of Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign that brought down George H. W. Bush's presidency, and while Brussels bureaucrats do not face the same sorts of political pressures that U. S. presidential contenders do, they appear to have more sense than they sometimes get credit for. 

In a free society, individual members can try to live off the grid entirely, or buy three Hummers and take cross-continental trips in them, or anything in between.  But things like national power grids are, by necessity, creatures of politics, policies, and law.  And any society which wants to pay the price for eschewing fossil fuels may do so. 

The problems come when an elite leadership that is persuaded of the evils of fossil fuels tries to implement its expensive energy tastes, however virtuous, on the backs of a populace that has to pay for it.  That experiment has been tried in Europe, and we are witnessing its failure, to a great extent, although Europe will probably continue to rely on renewables to a greater degree than the U. S. does for some time to come. 

It may come as a surprise to some of my readers that in good old "ahl-bidness" Texas, where much of the technology of hydraulic fracturing was developed, and where petroleum is regarded roughly in the same light as mother's milk, we lead the nation in wind-power generation.  In fact, on a particularly windy day in 2013, for a short time Texas surpassed Germany in renewables use,  because for a short time more than a fourth of the total electricity being consumed was supplied by wind power.  As in other parts of the world, the growth of renewables didn't happen without a substantial government incentive, namely a guaranteed purchase price for wind-generated electricity that encouraged the construction of huge wind farms in West Texas.  But this shift to wind was achieved without the penalty-laden restrictions on the construction of conventional fossil-fuel plants that the EU emissions standards imposed.

Decades, if not centuries, will elapse before the whole story of fossil fuels, global warming, and all that can be written.  In the meantime, billions of people on this planet want and need, the advantages that cheap, reliable electric power can provide.  Other things being equal, most of them would probably want to save the planet rather than cook it for breakfast, but things are not equal—not economically, not politically, and not culturally.  And in this inequality lies the complexity of the ethics of energy policy today.

Sources:  Stephen Moore's article "Europe's Green Collapse" appeared in the Feb. 24, 2014 issue of National Review.  The record 28% of electric power generated by wind in Texas occurred at 7:08 PM, Feb. 9, 2013, and was reported in the Abilene Reporter News at http://www.reporternews.com/news/2013/mar/01/texas-wind-energy-sets-record-grid-expansion-in/.  The report that Texas leads the nation in installed wind-power generation capacity is taken from the website of the American Council on Renewable Energy at http://www.acore.org/files/pdfs/states/Texas.pdf.