Into the Wind - the AWEA Blog

As the previous cross-posted article by Simon Mahan suggests, the fact that no power plant runs 100 percent of the time and that other energy sources besides wind have their issues is beginning to catch the attention of commenters in the blogosphere.

Of course, that's not too surprising, since those issues have been revealed by a series of recent in-your-face events.  The latest?  Last week's

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The Washington Post carried a bad news/good news story on birds and wind power yesterday.  That's always the order of things--as the old newspaper saw puts it succinctly, "If it bleeds, it leads."

The headline was a downer, and so were the first six or seven paragraphs.  On the plus side, the story was accompanied by a very well-done graphic showing just how small wind power is in the overall picture of human-related avian mortality.

Studies show something like half the people who read the newspaper only see the headline on any given article, and there's a further sharp drop in readership after the first paragraph.  With that in mind, here are a few items from lower down in the story that deserve more emphasis:

- " ... [F]ederal officials, other ...

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Since Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) entered the Presidential race, his record has become a subject of controversy, on many fronts.  On energy, at least one major environmental group contends he has done "nothing significant" for wind power, despite the fact that the Lone Star State is the nation's leader in installed wind, by a country mile.

We beg to differ.

Wind power has become big business in Texas, where over 10,000 megawatts (MW) of wind generation (enough to power the equivalent of 3 million average American homes) has been installed while Perry has been governor.
 
The boom in Texas was aided by expansion of the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (originally passed under former Governor and President George W. Bush), the concept of designated ...

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This article by Simon Mahan was cross-posted from Footprints on the Path to Clean Energy, the blog of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

You’ve likely heard this argument before: “The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, so we can’t rely on renewable energy.” However, a series of recent events undermine the false dichotomy that renewable energies are unreliable and that coal, nuclear and natural gas are reliable.

There are too many reasons to list in a single blogpost why depending on fossil and nuclear energies is dangerous, ...

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A (wind power) friend suggested dining at Birch & Barley restaurant in Washington, D.C., last evening.  Much to our surprise and delight, it turned out to be their first night for serving New Belgium beer, previously only available in the western U.S.

A number of breweries and wineries now buy wind power or generate clean power (wind or solar) on site, but New Belgium is special, having been the first brewery to take the plunge, in 1998.  At the time, its employee-owners voted overwhelmingly to buy wind power from Xcel Energy's (then Public Service of Colorado's) Windsource program, and to finance the purchase by reducing their own bonus pool.  See the

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FoxNews.Com carried a story on bird collisions a few days ago with a number of misleading statements.  We covered much of the same ground with a response to the Los Angeles Times in early June (see "News story draws questionable conclusions from eagle collisions with old turbines," June 6, 2011), and won't repeat that material at length.

Corrections of some specific items in the Fox piece:

1) The problem of golden eagle collisions with older, smaller, high-RPM wind turbines in Altamont Pass is nothing new, and has been known (and been in the media periodically) since the early 1990s.

...

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Robert Bradley, of the misleadingly named and petro-funded Institute for Energy Research, has a new opinion article on Forbes.com attacking federal incentives for wind power. As always, Mr. Bradley is selective with his facts--here is a comment I posted with a few that he missed (and some added resource links).

Mr. Bradley has been attacking renewable energy sources for more than a decade.  This time, he uses as ammunition [a recent] EIA [Energy Information Administration] report that was ...

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As in many parts of the eastern U.S., the wind power debate has been contentious in Vermont, most likely because there are few areas of flat land and the best wind speeds are found on highly visible mountain ridgelines. Still, despite the noisy objections of some (including the state's former Governor--a bitter opponent--and Vermonters for a Clean Environment, a nonprofit), it's been evident for a while that most Vermonters favor this clean energy source.

A recent vote in northern Vermont underscored that preference. Wind opponents framed the contest over a transmission line as a "referendum on wind," and lost by a margin of more than 3 to 1. Here's a recent letter I received from the Clean Energy Program of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG), a pro-wind ...

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