An Honest Objection

Firstly, I’d like to draw your attention to the following blog on the Guardian’s site: Why there’s only one honest objection to wind farms.

I have been forming much the same opinion over the last few years. Sure, there are a few that sound like good objections until you give them any sort of thought:

• health impacts have never been proven at any sort of scale and what studies have been done are generally low statistics, self-reported or otherwise flawed. I’m not discounting the fact that psychosomatic effects are very powerful, but it’s simply not logical to hold a particular industry or technology to account for psychosomatic effects, however powerful.
• government subsidies go to all forms of power generation in one guise or another. Besides, you only get subsidised for power generated which gives a powerful incentive to take great care in your developments and particularly in your initial spend. You don’t get subsidies to build wind farms; that risk is the developers’ and the banks’ own. The big driver of rising fuel bills has been gas prices, not renewables.
• paying sums of money to the already rich land owners — well there you have an issue with capitalism, not with wind farms. I’m not disagreeing that it’s better to give money to the poor than the rich, who would? But that’s the system we’ve got and wind developers have no greater moral responsibility to tackle unfairness than anyone else.
• intermittant, unpredictable, small scale. Turns out wind farms, and the wind, are predictable enough; they are also highly responsive and can be quickly shut down or curtailed (run at reduced power) if necessary. They can’t provide more energy if the wind isn’t there, but they’re a powerful tool for the grid when it comes to balancing supply and demand.
• carbon cost of building and land space. There’s a carbon cost to all building projects but an airport, for instance, takes up a lot of land and then creates pollutants. Wind farms later reduce carbon output. And while they do take up a lot of land if you look at the boundary, in fact most of the land remains available for crops and livestock as normal.
• noise and shadow flicker. Shadow flicker is known to be a hazard to health in some cases, but only at high frequencies, far higher than large wind turbines get to even at high wind speeds. Because the sun follows a predictable path, it’s easy to demonstrate when it will happen and where and to be honest it’s pretty rare. It’s also easily reduced by closing curtains during the appropriate time of year, or facing a different direction. Since I live and work in the city I find it hard to take the noise complaints seriously as a mass issue (rather than on the level of individual nuisance): at high wind speeds the wind itself is louder if you’re outside or near a forest. Most of the time the noise of a working wind farm even actually inside its borders, isn’t much more than a medium-busy road, and we’ve learned to all but tune out road noise.

There are others, obviously, but none that I can think of which aren’t similarly easily rebutted.

I don’t think the author of the blog intends to suggest that people who object to wind farms and quote other reasons than looks are actively lying, just that they’re failing to acknowledge that they give disproportionate weight to minor issues because ultimately they don’t like 1) wind farms themselves or 2) their position in our landscapes.

Confirmation bias is a known phenomenon where we hear what we want to hear and discard evidence which contradicts our own preferences. I am aware of this, and I do make a conscious effort not to apply it to wind farms. The evidence I’ve seen for any of the objections up to now has generally been poor and even with a genuine effort to keep an open mind it hasn’t raised any real concerns.

I do worry about the number of people who are willing to argue “Wind farms are pointless: we should be investing in tidal farms!” or championing some other form of technology. We are investing money in researching tidal farms, and wave generation, and offshore wind farms, and even nuclear fusion, and these things are, indeed, very important to our future supply. But none of these technologies can generate the electricity we need now. They’re still in the pipeline. Wind farms can, and are. If, in ten, or twenty, or fifty years, wave or tidal becomes a significant contributer to our electricity networks, it will be built on lessons learned through onshore wind farms on how to cope with variable supply, and with supply that relies on weather conditions. Stopping the development of onshore wind farms would make it harder, not easier, for wave and tidal to reach deployment scale.

Turbinetastic’ is a wind industry professional who has kindly agreed to syndicate their posts to this blog. This post was originally published on turbinetastic’s  own blog on 24/06/2012.