by turbinetastic
I’m starting to get really worried about the wind industry. I think it’s an important industry, for several reasons:
- It brings jobs to Scotland, even in a time of recession,
- It allows for our dependence on imports for electricity supply to be reduced,
- It reduces the carbon intensity of our energy,
- It serves as a point of learning on the road to making real use of our renewable resources: solar, wave and tidal, and whatever new technology comes after.
What worries me is that the debate on wind energy, from the pro-wind side, is totally dominated by three voices: the economists/business leaders, the politicians and the green activists.
The way I see the world, politicians are there to tell us if something should be done; economists tell us if people will pay for it; and activists are there to lobby for a pre-existing set of ideas. When it comes to “can something be achieved”, that’s where you need the geeks: specifically the scientists and the engineers. And the scientists and engineers are very, very quiet on the issue of wind power.
Part of the reason for this is that wind energy for large-scale electricity is still very much in its infancy. Ten years ago, the procedure for installing a wind farm was completely unrecognisable compared to what happens today: masts were smaller, turbines were smaller and closer together, and the softer requirements like bird surveys and protection for peat lands weren’t as well established. Ten years in a career is a long time; but it’s hardly any time at all when you look at how quickly the onshore wind industry has grown. (Offshore wind has barely begun its journey yet, so I’m not talking about that.)
Within that huge rate of growth, large companies have grown from small groups of tinkering engineers, and somehow the managers, the politicians and the economists have become the dominant voices. And they say: protect our IP, don’t say anything which will bring the industry into disrepute, keep to the party line. It’s scientists who say, share data, do best practice and let people see it’s being done. But somehow the scientists and the engineers aren’t making the decisions in this industry. And where they’ve risen to the top, they seem to do so by falling in line with the industry position. Don’t question, don’t talk about any issues, don’t ever suggest there’s anything wrong. And so they become the business leaders, the economists, the politicians.
One result of this is that an industry which employs hundreds, perhaps thousands of highly-qualified engineers, and a fair few scientists too, doesn’t seem to have the geeks on their side.
I’m talking about this blog. The author of the blog is Colin R McInnes, a professor of engineering at the University of Strathclyde. As a citizen, he’s been writing to newspapers fairly often lately. His letters tend to be good engineering, as you’d expect, but they tend to come down on the anti-wind side.
He’s not correct. But, and this is important: IT IS NOT HIS FAULT THAT HE’S WRONG.
He’s an engineer. More than that, this guy researches into solar sails for a living. If you asked him about whether solar sails were worth investing public money in, presumably he’d say yes. This is frontier research: it can’t fund itself without huge subsidies. Yet this same man is essentially arguing that if offshore wind farms, a very new attempt at large-scale deployment of technology to an extremely challenging environment, can’t fund themselves commercially then they should be scrapped. So what’s the difference?
He doesn’t know that we’re here. The scientists and engineers who are tasked with building wind farms and actually making them work. He’s not in the industry, doesn’t go to conferences or meetings. He’s only engaging with the public discourse. Which is, as I stated earlier, dominated by politics, activists and the party line. He is operating in a complete vacuum of technically-literate information on wind farms.
We need to start talking in a language that the technical people can understand. That means demonstrating good practice and actually letting the numbers out there. How much are wind farms generating? Why are they being installed where they are? What are the measured capacity factors? How do we determine the layouts? What actions do we take to mitigate public concerns? How do we re-power or decommission a wind farm at the end of its life? Are we held to account if we breach our planning?
I don’t know if I can make this happen. This blog is a start, I suppose. Perhaps you can. The time for secrecy is ending; if anything I’m very concerned that we’re already too late. What might have been good for an individual company is threatening to doom an entire industry. And that industry matters.
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 31/05/2012.