Carefully Selected Quotes,
by Ye Editor
"Background
Wind energy development has exploded in southeastern Wyoming. In just two counties we have now in operation, or permitted to begin construction, some ten wind projects involving 613,000 acres (958 square miles) and offering nameplate rating of 6,300MW.
Why has this development accelerated so much lately? ...
First, the region undoubtedly has impressive wind energy resources and these installations should, like oil and gas production, follow the resource.
However, while average wind speeds in parts of southeast Wyoming are high, the wind displays a great deal of variability on a variety of time scales – exactly the characteristic which makes wind energy problematic.
Second, except for one project which is sited in a region of private residences and businesses there is little local opposition to these projects.
Everyone seems aware that these projects will pass the permitting stage easily. There is little statutory guidance. There are no regulations regarding impacts to view shed, for instance, like there is in cities (i.e. limitations on structure height, for instance).
Third, the wind farms are being sited where there are few land owners which is a great aid in organizing leases. In this part of Wyoming property is often owned in very large holdings. Much of it is state or Federal land, especially BLM. One project includes a 50/50 mix of private and BLM. The private land involved here has one private owner of around 250 square miles.
Fourth, there is the perception of coming prosperity. Local engineers expect increasing demand for surveying and civil engineering services as do some construction services such as for porta-potties. There is new tax revenue. What is sold to the county is revenue for facilities upgrades, better wages, and equipment for schools.
Fifth, the most difficult factor to put in a proper perspective is the current popular belief that these so-called renewable energy sources are high-tech and will enhance the environment, in fact possibly save the planet. In one case County Commissioners stated explicitly that their decision to approve was predicated partially on reducing greenhouse gasses.
... The Permitting Process
The permit applications are enormous documents, 1,700 pages isn’t out of the realm of possibility. One should expect that these put forth the applicant’s best case and so they should be read with an appropriate deal of skepticism because they are, by nature, biased.
Public hearings are scheduled to consider the application. My overall sense is that if one has doubts about renewable energy invading your neighborhood or region, public hearings are not a productive place to voice concerns. By this stage the effort has gained too much momentum for approval. Few people in opposition show up generally and many people who do show up in opposition to these permits present emotional, extreme and poorly substantiated claims.[1] People with more persuasive objections get caught up in the resulting emotion and discounted altogether. Send written comments instead and send them early.
The usual path to approval is to first seek approval from the county commissioners who will rely on the opinion of a planning commission. The planning commission typically has knowledge about construction, but not necessarily industry. The minutes of their meetings makes this clear. However, even with obvious shortcomings, the application is sent to the commissioners with a recommendation to approve.
Local approval now leads to a request for a conditional permit from a state agency such as our Industrial Siting Council (ISC). This council in turn will depend on a recommendation from the Industrial Siting Division of the State Department of Environmental Quality, which in turn gathers opinion from many various state agencies.
... No one in these agencies is a party to the hearing and so they won’t testify in person.[2] Worse still, their advice lacks independence as the agencies are not immune to politics. One person told me some time ago that there is pressure from above, perhaps only perceived but effective nonetheless, to not push back too hard on wind energy.
After having passed public hearings, the client may have other conditions to meet such as from the FAA concerning lighting or perhaps some level of rigor of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because Federal property is involved and so forth, but hearings are a major hurdle to clear.
The scientific engineering ethos is about evidence and making logical arguments based on what researchers have concluded often after a great deal of independent review. Its knowledge is constantly under revision. Someone who has self-reported experience without data or other evidence is arguing “ex cathedra”– argument from authority. Science and engineering are not about authority, and in our culture we view such claims suspiciously.
The culture of public hearings, on the other hand, often is about authority. An argument made from published studies by a person not directly involved in the research is actually providing hearsay. The legal/procedural ethos places great emphasis on eye witnesses, and cross-examination. If the earlier researchers whose work I drew upon for my testimony can’t be cross-examined, well, as the hearing examiner stated in response to objections, the council would consider my testimony “for what it’s worth.”
In summary there is little opportunity to criticize work the applicant does despite its obvious biases or mistakes. Work done by agency advisors is well insulated from criticism. ...
We all know that the steel towers, concrete foundations, plastic and glass blades, copper wound generators/alternators, uses of rare earth elements, and on and on, contain an enormous amount of embodied energy, almost all of which comes from coal, petroleum or natural gas, and carries a very large burden on the environment as well during operations and decommissioning.
... Wind turbines dominate the scene and produce a major visual focus from as far away as 18 miles depending on lighting. If a person hates red blinking light then they’ll find the night-time view worse.
... Testimony about environmental harms and nuisances carry little weight with hearing officers because they defer to in-house advisors and even the applicant. They limit testimony severely and often for good reason.
Economics
... In Wyoming, which has the reputation of a non-diverse economy, these developers offer their projects as an opportunity to escape from the boom-and-bust cycles of the commodities businesses. In fact, wind energy development doesn’t look much different in this regard.
... What supports the applicant’s economic analysis is ... An input/output model predicts how spending in one industry affects others, and the SAM portion of the modeling accounts for personal spending.
I will instead depend on some experience gained
from wind energy projects in Colorado.
... The developers stress new tax revenue heavily. It is easier to estimate as there are only three sources to examine; sales/use taxes, ad valorem tax, and wind energy excise tax. Developers will often stress that impact assistance funds are available too.
However, these are not a separate revenue source, but rather sales/use taxes that would have gone into the State general fund, but are redirected to the county. It’s just moving money from one pocket to another. ... That this is simply redirected money lies at the heart of current controversies over these funds being too generous and not well supervised.
... Let’s look at the short term construction phase of a project–a hypothetical project of about 600MW nameplate capacity–and then the long term O&M phase.
A project of this size will first require materials. At least one-half are manufactured outside the area and represent no local earnings.
A substantial fraction of the materials will be cement, aggregates, and water which might be locally sourced.
This project will add about $30 million of sales/use taxes to the county over a two year span during which the counties would have collected $204 million anyway.
So, there is a temporary 15% jump in local government revenues. In addition, during a two-year construction phase there is a need for perhaps 400 construction (direct) jobs, of which 90% are from out of state.
These will go away leaving perhaps 30 permanent jobs.
The construction period induces local jobs which occur in retail, insurance, recreation, restaurants and lodging.
Modeling estimates of induced jobs are too optimistic for our local area. Experience suggests perhaps one-third as many, but the point is 90% of them go away as the project transitions to an O&M phase. ...
The long term benefits of this project to government agencies will be ad valorem (property) tax, some sales/use tax on supplies and equipment, a minor amount of annual leases on government property, and a wind energy excise tax.
To the commercial economy it will be wages paid to personnel, materials and services, sales taxes on consumable or maintenance materials, and leases paid to landowners.
Land lease revenues are almost 100% leakage. These are not made to a great many landowners who are likely to spend money locally, but rather are extremely granular payments to people living beyond the local area.
One project has only two landowners – the Federal government and someone who lives in a neighboring state. Another project lists five different landowners of which only one lives in the area. Lease payments are not likely to enter the local circulation of money.
... Conclusions and suggestions
... local governments are so enthusiastic about these projects. A large proportion of local “earnings” pass to government agencies first and then to the public through government services. It looks like how foreign aid works, but we hope it works better.
... these projects offer a boom-and-bust character just like the industrial projects people currently blame for boom-and-bust cycles. People should brace themselves for a boom in years 2023-2025 as numerous projects are constructed, followed by a bust in years 2025-2028 as the induced economy shifts downward to a new equilibrium and before wind energy excise taxes fully arrive.
Third, despite talk of wind energy being an energy source of the future, what it more nearly resembles is ranching of beef cattle which epitomizes an energy source of the past. ... wind energy gathers a low density recurring wind resource over enormous tracts of land as electrical energy.
Wind Turbines Out West Part II, by Kevin Kilty
Completeness
The purpose of an applications process at the county level followed by a similar one at the State level is to ensure that a project not present hazards to the health, safety, or welfare of citizens or wildlife. ...
... To achieve this the zoning regulations demands an application should address these selected items
“…general nuisances, specifically such as noise, vibration, that may affect off-site property owners. And show that the WECS Project or the solar energy facility will not be a significantly negative impact on wildlife species in the area…”
... Impacts to wildlife
The widely known problem with wind turbines is they kill birds, and particularly soaring birds with small populations often at risk. Altamont Pass in California is an especially egregious example that is a black-eye for the wind energy industry. A recent essay here addressed some of these concerns.
...The scientific literature on big game and wind energy is thin, but there do exist a couple of studies done at Wyoming field sites that focus on pronghorn alone. What seems to be the most robust finding of this research is first, that wind turbines are placed in the same ground pronghorn prefer for winter grazing; and second, that pronghorn tend to avoid wind turbines long after the construction is over and operations begin.[5] This indicates a behavioral change for unknown reasons, but behavioral changes can lead eventually to demographic changes. All research suggests a need for longer term monitoring.
There is a population of about 4,600 pronghorn that are permanent residents of a lune-shaped region of land bound by I-80 on the south and the Union Pacific mainline and US 30/287 on the north. The Rock Creek wind farm will cut across the center of this territory, and itself contains about 15,000 acres of what the Wyoming Game and Fish calls “critical winter range.” The applicant in this case has produced a draft Monitoring Plan for wildlife. Yet the plan is so carefully worded and vaguely aspirational that I do not know if any longer term monitoring plan will actually occur.
The Clear Air of the West
... Applications contain a section on view impact. In one case the photographs provided were terrible. The views were overwhelmed by smoke and haze from forest fires in Colorado.
... photographs do not present a scene in the same way that a human sees it, so photographs cannot inform a commission about visual impact. ...
Second, people simply have no idea how visually arresting 600+ foot tall turbines with turning blades are going to be under morning or evening light with a dark sky behind.
One person at a county hearing explained that no one would even notice these turbines at a distance; this person had no idea.
... 383 foot tall turbines were likely to become a visual focus at a distance of 12 miles, and scaling up to 600+ feet puts that out to 18-20 miles.
... once the current permitted plants are built wind turbines will be a focus of visual attention along a continuous stretch of 180 miles of I-80 for 18 miles either side of the highway – 6,480 square miles of territory. ... travelers, vacationers and hunters would all probably prefer to see natural scenery. ...
Aircraft warning lighting presents another problem to address. Even people who are quite favorably disposed toward wind energy tell me they dislike the red blinking lights all over the countryside at night in the clear air of the West.
In response to this the wind energy applicant usually promises to seek permission from the FAA to install an aircraft detection lighting system (ADLS) that operates only when an aircraft flies within an envelope 3 nautical around the perimeter of the wind farm and from 200 feet above ground surface to 1,000 feet above the tallest obstruction.
... The Roundhouse wind farm along I-80 west of Cheyenne has an ADLS running, but there is so much air traffic that the lights are on often anyway. If the FAA does not grant the request for ADLS then the applicant will ask for a variance to fall back and install the usual aircraft warning lights. This will probably be granted.
Acoustics
... The problem as I see it is three fold:
1) expected noise levels are calculated using a standard that does not pertain everywhere,
2) local noise ordinances are often poorly written, and
3) rarely does anyone check actual noise levels against these projections to learn about their deficiencies.
The ISO 9613-2 standard is not specific to wind turbines and is rather a general means of noise calculation “applicable, directly or indirectly, to most situations concerning road or rail traffic, industrial noise sources, construction activities, and many other ground based noise sources.” .
... The following violations of these assumptions make its use at many Western locales problematic and are backed up by wording in the standard or by published research.
... As turbines become more powerful they emit mechanical noise of lower frequency (6MW turbines likely shift their noise spectrum by ½ octave). Thus more of the noise lies below the A weighting scale of the ISO9613-2 standard.
One puzzling thing is that despite estimates of uncertainty stated within the standard itself, and additional ones known from turbine manufacturers – no one seems to use this to make reasonable design margins in a way that engineers should. ...
... While noise is not a direct cause of health problems, it is a contributor to sleep disturbance which can become an indirect cause.
About 5% of turbine installations account for a majority of noise complaints according to a 2012 study. ...
... in the two counties of southeastern Wyoming I have referred to, one has no ordinance at all except to say the noise should not present a nuisance.
The other county has a noise limit of 55 dBA but with no metric stipulated.
Washington County, Colorado has noise limits at the property line of a non-participating property not to exceed 45 dBA for more than 6 minutes of any hour or not to exceed 50 dBA (Leq,60).[13] These are not as stringent as most European standards, but are better than what we have in Wyoming.
NOTE:
The A-Weighting sound pressure level (SPL) scale on a sound pressure meter is intended as a proxy for hearing damage, NOT to measure how annoying the noise is, or whether it interferes with sleep. It is believed that lower frequencies do less hearing damage. Therefore, the A-Weighting rolls off the SPL by about 50dB at 20Hz. ( a lot) and even more for infrasonic frequencies below 20Hz. Unless one uses flat Z-weighting, the bass and infrasonic (aka subsonic) noise problem is significantly obscured. In addition, infrasonic sound waves can travel many miles, cause windows to rattle, and can be louder inside a bedroom than when measured outside the same home. That is caused by bass resonances between room surfaces at specific frequencies related to the distance between those surfaces. Bass frequency and infrasonic energy can also vibrate various objects inside the home, and even the whole house has it's own resonant frequency. The pulsing noise from windmills is also more disturbing than a steady tone. The A-weighting SPL measured outdoors misses most of the windmill noise problems that interfere with sleep and health.
Ye Editor, audiophile since 1965, and builder of enormous DIY subwoofers that can reproduce infrasonic frequencies, since the 1980s. One is on the right (six cubic foot box) and the other is on the left (six cubic foot vertical tube):
