Blog Archive for June, 2011
Wind farms and the density question
If you were among that handful of people who spent seven hours Thursday watching our riveting live stream of the Goodhue County wind hearing at the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, you noticed a few recurring themes. There was concern that stray voltage would harm livestock. Or that residents would lose sleep because of low-frequency sound from the turbines. The usual points of contention in a wind farm debate.
But several speakers, including state Rep. Tim Kelly, raised an interesting question: Maybe places like Goodhue County are just too densely populated to be appropriate sites for large-scale wind projects.
It’s a reasonable question – after all, wind farms in sparsely-populated areas like South Dakota and even western Minnesota and Iowa are rarely controversial. It stands to reason that the more people there are in the area, the more opposition you’re going to run into.
But let’s consider the case of another seven-letter county starting with “G”: Gratiot County, Michigan, which we highlighted in a story back in March. Like Goodhue County, Gratiot County is mostly rural, with an economy that is heavily dependent on agriculture. Both counties were selected for wind farms in part because they have existing transmission infrastructure to handle the loads. And neither state has clear siting guidelines for large turbines.
In Michigan, however, residents are welcoming the wind farm with open arms. I made reporter M. Lisa Weatherford make a bunch of extra phone calls to try to scare up some organized opposition to the wind farm. There simply wasn’t any. That’s not to say there weren’t people opposed, but there was no equivalent to groups like Goodhue Wind Truth, which turned out in force for yesterday’s hearing in Minnesota.
And yet Gratiot County, according to the U.S. Census, has a population density of 74.5 people per square mile, which, according to my calculations, is higher than Goodhue County’s density of 60.9 people per square mile.
So clearly, population density, while undoubtedly a factor, is not the main determinant of whether a wind farm will run into organized public opposition.
As a rule, most of the people testifying against the project said they weren’t necessarily opposed to wind farms, or even wind farms in Goodhue County. These were not ranting tinfoilers. There’s no reason to suspect that people in rural Minnesota have any greater propensity toward ideological opposition to renewable energy than people in rural Michigan.
One factor could be the economy. According to Fed data, the unemployment rate in Goodhue County is just shy of 6 percent, while in Gratiot County, it’s closer to 10 percent (and was as high as 15 percent late last year). It makes sense that the economic boost of lease payments and tax revenue would be a little more tantalizing in financially strapped Michigan.
But while Goodhue County residents and local officials repeatedly complained that the wind developers were unresponsive to their concerns, Gratiot County’s process was more collaborative:
Throughout the process, [wind developer Richard Vander Veen] said developers spoke with and listened to a broad range of people from Future Farmers of America to educators, local, state and federal officials, MSU Cooperative Extension, and the Michigan Farm Bureau.
“In a county where 92.5 percent of the land is zoned agricultural and there are only 42,000 people, we wanted to appreciate the culture and the community values,” he said. “In the end we are helping move the county forward in a progressive way to keep family farms in families.”
“We know that you don’t just get consensus, you have to earn it,” he added.
One of the conditions of the site permit issued by the PUC requires AWA Goodhue, the developers of the Minnesota project, to make a “good faith effort” to get more non-participating landowners on board. Attorneys for the developers insist they’ve done all they can to gain consent from residents, but the experience in Michigan makes one wonder if a lot of this controversy could have been avoided if the Minnesota developers had gone a little further out of their way to be more, well, neighborly.
Live webcast of Goodhue Wind hearing
This morning, we’re hosing a live webcast of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission hearing on the Goodhue Wind project.
This is a bit of an experiment, the first of what we hope will be many collaborations with The UpTake, a Twin Cities-based citizen journalism operation.
The hearing itself marks a pivotal juncture for what has been a highly controversial wind siting debate. In a nutshell, the PUC will (hopefully) decide whether or not to apply a restrictive local siting ordinance, which would effectively kill the project.
While a decision is expected, it’s not necessarily guaranteed. And even if the regulators rule in favor of the project, opponents still have several additional avenues to fight it from. But regardless of the outcome, reporter Dan Haugen will be on site to sort it all out.
Also, you can follow along on Twitter, using the hashtag #goodhuewind.
Video: Will wind farms blow the earth out of orbit?
The line between satire and reality gets a little thin sometimes…
(h/t Grist)
Air cleanup plan a tough sell in Iowa town
Muscatine resident Evelyn Reed listens as GPC's Mick Durham explains the company's plans to reduce air pollution in th town. (Photo by B. Adam Burke for Midwest Energy News)
Plans to reduce air pollution and strong odors from a coal-powered ethanol, alcohol and grain mill in Iowa’s most polluted city were met with skepticism by some area residents last night.
Mick Durham, Director of Environmental Services at Grain Processing Corporation, presented GPC’s schedule for a new dryer house and coal fired boiler environmental controls at its Muscatine plant.
The effort to clean up Muscatine’s air was the subject of a Midwest Energy News report earlier this year.
GPC abuts Muscatine’s Southend residential neighborhood and, with Monsanto Corporation and Muscatine Power and Water, is one of three major area polluters monitored by state regulators. The GPC plant has been the stage of an ongoing (since 2008) union lockout and a 2009 search warrant served by EPA agents.
The meeting between GPC and Clean Air Muscatine (CLAM), an activist group that formed this year, began with a short presentation by Janet Sichterman, VP of Human Resources and Communications at GPC’s parent company Muscatine Foods Corporation.
Sichterman gave her company’s history and then introduced Durham, who gave a detailed presentation on GPC’s plans to build a $75 million grain dryer. The new dryer house will eliminate 11 other dryers at the corn mill and is scheduled to be online in 2014. A $20 million upgrade to emissions controls for coal-burning is expected to be ready in early 2015.
The company has projected their total emissions in Muscatine will be reduced 72 percent by 2015 and 82 percent by 2020.
Durham tried to deflect some criticism by pointing to shifting pollution standards that he felt have forced polluters to guess at regulations and air quality standards.
The dryer house project has been through a three-year permitting process and the dryer unit can’t be purchased until permits are complete.
CLAM members have maintained a skeptical stance since GPC’s announcement about the cleanup project.
After some heated discussion, Sichterman told the group, “I’m hearing the enormous amount of frustration in the room.” She said she had come to listen to the group’s concerns and that the company was working on marketing its message about the upgrades.
CLAM president Sandy Stanley told the group, “Our anger should be directed at public officials,” including county and local representatives. She also reminded her group that GPC was only one of the polluters in the area.
Putting her company on record, Sichterman declared, “In 2015, the smell will be gone, the haze will be gone…We’re saying it clearly.”
When asked by Karl Reichert if GPC was a good corporate neighbor, without hesitation Sichterman said, “Absolutely. We are going to do our part,” but, she added, “I wish we could change the past.”
While admitting his own frustration with the pace of permits for the project, Durham said, “This is the fastest we can do it.” He also admitted that, “It’s impossible to eliminate it [air pollution] 100 percent.”
After listening to the data-heavy pitch, Lynda Smith, a life-long Muscatine resident who suffers from COPD, said, “Clean air isn’t numbers. You know it when you breathe it.”
The group plans to meet again next week.
‘Stifling’ cars in Europe
Yesterday morning, the New York Times looked at how some European cities are reinventing public spaces (actually, re-reinventing) by actively discouraging car traffic.
The story is a fascinating read that puts into stark relief the reality that our transportation systems don’t develop spontaneously and organically, but through deliberate choices that prioritize one mode over the other.
And the story has generated a bit of criticism over its tone – describing the efforts to discourage driving in draconian terms, with words like “stifling” (originally in the online headline, but since changed), “eroded,” “severely restrict,” and “torment.”
As someone who regularly tries to get places in an American city without using a car, I can certainly relate to being “tormented.” So I thought it would be fun to take the first couple of paragraphs of the story and recast them a bit.
Here’s the original:
While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.
… and here’s my version:
While European cities are discouraging car use to promote walking, biking and mass transit, many American cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to everything but cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make walking and biking inconvenient and just plain miserable enough to tilt citizens toward less environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
Cities including Las Vegas to Chicago and Phoenix have closed vast swaths of streets to foot traffic. New York and San Francisco have had bike lanes eroded by popular car-driving programs. Bicyclists in Provo, Utah are required to have a permit to ride in the city. And nearly all American cities have joined a national network of “freeways” where only cars may enter.
OK, I’m being snarky. Still, the point remains – the car-dependent infrastructure we have today is the result of an intentional choice to push everyone into a singular mode of transportation (picking winners and losers, as some might put it).
Sometimes we need to take a trip to opposite-land in order to see that.
Photo by sonofabike via Creative Commons
What does a 21st century electricity grid look like?
What does a 21st century electricity grid look like? A couple of different visions recently crossed our radar, one from the White House and the other from the Minneapolis-based New Rules Project.
The White House report, “A Policy Framework for the 21st Century Grid: Enabling Our Secure Energy Future,” was released last week and emphasizes four key pillars: smart grid investments, innovation in the electricity sector, empowering consumers and securing the grid.
“In a 21st century grid, smart grid technologies will help integrate more variable renewable sources of electricity, including both utility scale generation systems such as large wind turbines and distributed generation systems such as rooftop solar panels, in addition to facilitating the greater use of electric vehicles and energy storage. Moreover, such technologies will help enable utilities to manage stresses on the grid, such as peak demand, and pass savings on to consumers as a result,” the report says.
GreenTechGrid writes that the plan calls for a federal Smart Grid Innovation Hub, which would be used to consolidate and share research and best practices. The White House plan also calls for rethinking regulations so that utilities have greater incentive to conserve energy, and it says consumers should be empowered with more tools and information to manage their energy use.
The New Rules report, “Democratizing the Electricity System: A Vision for the 21st Century Grid,” released on Wednesday, focuses on distributed generation as an alternative to large, centralized power plants. It points to examples in Hawaii and Las Vegas where smaller-scale solar and wind is being successfully integrated into the power grid.
“The 20th century of electricity generation was characterized by ever larger and more distant central power plants. But a 21st century technological dynamic offers the possibility of a dramatically different electricity future: millions of widely dispersed renewable energy plants and storage systems tied into a smart grid,” the report says.
The report likens the transition to the way the Internet and Wikipedia have displaced the library encyclopedia. Under this vision, homes and business become electricity producers as well as consumers. This creates economic benefits for local communities, but it also reduces efficiency losses from long-distance transmission and minimizes the need for backup and peaking generation plants.
John Farrell, author of the New Rules report, said in an email that the White House report “has the right elements of the 21st century grid (renewable energy, efficiency and demand response, and smart grids), but it maintains the unnecessary, top-down utility ‘grid-lock.’” Citizens remain consumers rather than producers under the White House vision, Farrell said, “selling short the opportunity to democratize the electricity grid alongside the inevitable transition to 100 percent renewable energy.”
Meanwhile, GreenBiz.com reports that GE and Best Buy announced a partnership on Thursday to fast-track two smart-grid home energy products. The technologies won a crowdsourced innovation contest. VPhase allows people to reduce the incoming voltage to their home. The other, Suntulit, is a smart air-conditioner technology that considers room temperature and occupancy.
Start-up aims to streamline biomass transactions
Kevin Triemstra, CEO, Minneapolis Biomass Exchange (Photo by Dan Haugen)
In the early days of the U.S. biomass industry, it’s sometimes taken considerable energy just for buyers and sellers to find one another. There’s a sense that the market will need to become better organized before it can grow to maturity.
I paid a visit earlier this week to the Minneapolis Biomass Exchange, a web-based Minnesota start-up that hopes to play a role in streamlining biomass transactions.
The company was founded by software engineer Kevin Triemstra in July 2009. The idea is to become the eBay.com for energy crops, a place where biomass sellers can advertise materials and buyers can place bids or purchase them.
Currently, the site has listings for 1.5 million tons of biomass for sale, from 100,000 tons of fruit pits in Boston, Mass., to 1,000 bales of prairie grass in Owatonna, Minn. Buyers have also placed want ads for another 300,000 tons of material.
Earlier this month, The Exchange started beta testing for a new patent-pending quality control test. It’s partnered with a laboratory to offer sample testing of listed materials, for a fee, at the request of either buyers or sellers. The tests will measure attributes such as ash, BTUs and moisture.
“Buyers’ needs are highly variable,” Triemstra said. Higher ash content could be fine for some industrial customers, but it might clog up smaller burners, he said. And the energy value in wood chips can vary significantly depending on how much bark and moisture they contain, for example.
The quality control test data will be posted directly to the material’s listing page, eliminating the risk of sellers altering or hiding the data. The plan is to eventually incorporate the quality data into a seller rating to boost trust in the market.
The site still functions more like a classifieds site than an auction or exchange — buyers and sellers need to connect offline to complete the transaction. Eventually, though, the site plans to build in features that will let buyers bid on and pay for supplies directly through the site.
“The goal is to make biomass exchange more efficient,” said Triemstra.
Reporter: no “news blackout” at Nebraska plant
Is the White House covering up one of the worst nuclear accidents in U.S. history?
That’s the allegation made in a long-winded report by Pakistani newspaper The Nation, which claims the Obama administration has ordered a “news blackout” on any information related to Nebraska’s flood-surrounded Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant.
The false story cites a “shocking report” from Russia’s atomic energy agency that allegedly describes a “catastrophic loss of cooling” at the plant, as well as a politically motivated “cover-up” by federal officials in order to preserve Obama’s energy policy.
In reality, the power plant has been in a safe, cold shutdown for months. Plant operators powered it down April 9 for a refueling and never restarted it because of the severe flood forecast. The plant sits along the Missouri River about 20 miles north of Omaha.
Still, the false cover-up rumors have spread. A Google search for “Fort Calhoun nuclear” and “news blackout” turns up around 13,000 results, many of them for right-wing political blogs and message boards.
I decided to call Omaha World-Herald staff writer Nancy Gaarder to ask her what it’s been like covering the nuclear plant story during the midst of a “news blackout”:
“The nuclear power plant on Friday held an hour press conference with the local media. I imagine anyone who wanted to could have come,” said Gaarder. “I haven’t taken the time to preoccupy myself with anything at the presidential level, so I don’t know where that thing came from, but there is not a news blackout. The utility is responding to questions. They had a briefing on Friday and, you know, I don’t know what else to say.”
Gaarder wrote about the plant on June 17 (“NRC: No flood danger at reactor“). Officials said the reactor was safely shutdown, and that flood barriers would protect it against the rising waters. She also interviewed a nuclear watchdog from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which, in this case, didn’t sound overly concerned about the flood risk.
So where did this “news blackout” rumor come from? Gaarder has some theories.
“There was a very interesting and well researched post on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists lamenting the loss of news coverage; that the [news] industry is dwindling away so that it’s harder for this type of good coverage to occur,” Gaarder said, “and that has validity to it.
“I wonder if somehow the idea that we don’t have as many reporters anymore so we don’t have as much news morphed into an intentional news blackout. I don’t know where that came from, or whether this is the kind of thing that happens in an age of the Internet. I have no clue. All I can tell you is there is not a news blackout,” she said.
The World-Herald hasn’t published a story about the Fort Calhoun plant since Saturday. (Gaarder was working on a follow-up story for Thursday’s paper.) There’s a perception among some in the newsroom that they’ve already covered it. “We’ve already said the plant is safe, so what new is there to say?” Gaarder said rhetorically. “People will disagree. What’s news is subjective.”
But the biggest reason there hasn’t been more coverage of the plant is that there’s just a lot going on, and only so many column inches and reporters to get to it all. The airport, bridges and other infrastructure are also threatened by the flooding. A major gasoline terminal was forced to close because of standing water. Other reporters have been covering evacuation plans in the event of a levy break. Tornadoes ripped through the state on Monday. And the city hosted the College World Series over the weekend.
“So we have a lot going on, and a lot of flood-related issues to write about,” Gaarder said. “We have pieces of critical infrastructure that are important, that we’ve had to make sure we understood how they’re protected, and that takes time.”
Another study: Great Lakes offshore wind is still OK
A new study by Grand Valley State University may remind you of an old study by Grand Valley State University. The new one is on the impacts of offshore wind. The conclusion: Not as bad as people might think. The old study: Same bottom line. But will it change minds? Probably not, and that’s a (cough) shame.
The cough is from the coal that powers much of Michigan, and the Midwest. The deal with coal is that it’s been in use a long time, and some people just don’t see the harm it does.
A big wind turbine in a lake? People can see that. The noise from a turbine? People can hear that. But how does either compare to the impact of a coal plant that billows out emissions around the clock? What about those coal-plant stacks along the waterfront? Ah, people don’t even notice them anymore. It’s like living by a highway. After a while, you don’t hear the rumble anymore.
Photo Credit: EPA
The latest Grand Valley study examined the visibility of a proposed wind farm located in Lake Michigan, six miles from shore. The report from the West Michigan Wind Assessment found that such a wind farm would be visible 64 percent of the time based on average weather conditions. This is the third issue brief (pdf) released by the assessment project, which is funded by Michigan Sea Grant (a program that’s balanced enough to combine bitter rivals Michigan State and the University of Michigan under one roof.)
Another highlight: Besides being able to see tiny turbines on the horizon 64 percent of the time, the study found it “unlikely that any sound would reach the shore six miles away.”
Erik Nordman, principal investigator for the project, sums up the dilemma quite nicely: “We found there are different expectations and uses of the shoreline, from power plants to recreation to relaxation. This information can help open up a discussion to understand the different values of the Great Lakes and whether offshore wind energy is appropriate.”
Maybe a good followup question is what’s more appropriate on the Great Lakes? Wind or coal? Spinning turbines or deposits of mercury and dead fish?
A Norwegian company called Scandia proposed a $4 billion offshore wind project in Lake Michigan last year. Commissioners in Mason and Oceana counties voted “no.”
To refresh your memory, the headline from last year was on a Grand Valley study that discounted many common fears about offshore turbines. In other words, they pose little health risk and aren’t as loud as many people believe.
Oil/gas industry influence on regulators, and school kids
This morning’s headlines include stories about the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to influence safety regulators, and school kids.
A San Francisco Chronicle investigation finds that two-thirds of the 174 pipeline safety studies started in the last decade have been largely funded by pipeline operators or organizations they control. It turns out that federal regulators require outside funding cover at least half the cost of most pipeline safety studies, a policy the White House now says it wants to change.
The Chronicle concludes that studies have largely ignored risks related to aging infrastructure, which was a factor in two deadly pipeline explosions in California in the past four years. The newspaper also found examples in which industry officials were allowed to edit the wording of final reports. A former commissioner for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, John Ahearne, tells the paper it appears the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has been “providing some sort of cover” for the industry.
“Just the fact that they are going through the motions of doing studies is not adequate, unless the studies have been developed by a critical process. And that doesn’t sound like that exists in that tiny agency,” said Ahearne.
Read the San Francisco Chronicle’s complete investigation here.
Meanwhile, Erich Schwartzel of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette comes across a new coloring book staring “Talisman Terry, the Friendly Fracosaurus.” The coloring book was created by Calgary-based Talisman Energy and teaches children all about the benefits of hydraulic fracturing. For example, after drilling, new trees, bald eagles, even rainbows appear.
See:
The company’s U.S. spokesperson, Natalie Cox, defended the coloring book as “fairly innocuous” and appropriate for the intended age. “Let’s keep in mind our audience. If you’re talking age 9 or younger, you can’t get into the questions like, ‘What is in fracking fluid?’”
By the way, the industry has started to answer that question for adults. The Wall Street Journal reports that the natural gas industry has begun to disclose more information about the chemicals it uses during fracking.
(h/t to the Society of Environmental Journalists)
