Wind: A cost-benefit analysis

Narain Schroeder, Berkshire Eagle, June 25, 2005

[Reprinted with permission of the author who is director of Land Conservation for the Berkshire Natural Resources Council.]

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The Berkshire Eagle's editorial board recently equated those who oppose wind farms in the Berkshires with the thugs who club pro-democracy demonstrators in Azerbaijan. Such frivolous implications and questionable facts warrant a reply.

For all its appeal, and despite the role it may play someday in providing green power to the grid, wind power is something of a diversion. If the United States and the commonwealth of Massachusetts are serious about addressing climate change, we need to focus on the most cost-effective solutions first.

Reasonable opposition to wind power in the Berkshires is based on a cost benefit analysis. The cost of wind farms in the Berkshires, when considering our investment through tax incentives, habitat loss, and environmental degradation, may outweigh the benefits. The Hoosac Wind power plant, if built, will produce 13 one-hundredths of 1 percent of the state's annual consumption, or enough to power about 9,000 homes. Wind farms of this scale could easily destroy every ridgeline in the Berkshires just to keep pace with the commonwealth's projected growth in electricity demand.

The construction cost of the Hoosac Wind Plant is estimated to be $40 million. Yet for less than $250,000 a year existing power generators could remove the air pollutants that Enxco claims will be offset by Hoosac's turbines. The costs outweigh the benefits even before you take into account the $80 million dollars in taxpayer and consumer funded subsidies that Enxco could reap over the next 15 years.

This $80 million should be redirected towards a better public investment that will achieve substantial and long-term reductions in net global greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the first places to look in considering this investment is coal, which provides us with well over 50 percent of our energy needs. According to the Christian Science Monitor (Feb. 26, 2004), there are over 94 new coal-fired plants now planned across 36 states. That is enough capacity for 62 million homes. With the right combination of tax subsidies and emissions regulations all of these coal plants could, and should, be built as Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC, or simply "gasification") plants.

Coal gasification plants can all but eliminate greenhouse gases. They can also strip out 95 percent of the mercury before combustion, at about a tenth of the cost of trying to scrub it from exhaust gases. Coal gasification plants are already economically competitive when compared with the cost of new well-controlled pulverized coal units. When carbon dioxide capture is required, almost a certainty in the next few years, IGCC plants can be easily retrofitted to do this whereas retrofitting conventional plants is prohibitively expensive. Providing subsidies to build IGCC plants instead of traditional plants -- or instead of marginally productive wind farms -- is a great investment and should be the focus of our green energy tax dollars.

"The Climate of Man," a must-read three-part article by Elizabeth Kolbert published in the April 25-May 9 issues of The New Yorker, presents the theories of Robert Socolow, an engineering professor at Princeton who is one of the leading thinkers in how we can address global climate change. Socolow posits 15 scenarios, which he calls "stabilization wedges," each of which would prevent a billion metric tons of carbon per year from being emitted by 2054.

If we started today we would need to implement seven of those 15 wedges just to stabilize our carbon emissions. One wedge could be achieved by charging $100 per ton for carbon emissions, enough to make it worthwhile for energy producers to capture carbon. If that cost were passed onto the consumer it would add $15 a month to our electricity bill -- about the same price I was paying for Greener Watts New England before I realized I was lining Enxco's pockets for a feel-good diversion. If this subsidy were used to ensure that all new coal plants are Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plants it would be our first substantial and long-term step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Wedge No. 10 is wind electricity: At least a million wind turbines would be required globally; for the U.S. to achieve its share would require at least 200,000 turbines, or an average of 4,000 per state.

Wind farms will be part of a long-term strategy to provide clean energy but they are not our best investment today and they don't necessarily belong in the mountains of Florida and Monroe just because Enxco can make money building them there. Berkshire County residents who question spending huge sums of money to generate small amounts of power while risking important ecological, aesthetic, and economic resources are actually standing on very firm ground.

Everyone needs to wake up to the urgency of climate change, and in so doing, focus on our very best solutions first. Coal is our main source of power and our largest point source polluter. In a country that has not begun to take conservation seriously, a combination of coal gasification plants and more efficient cars would dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in the next 10 years. According to the Dutch state secretary for the environment, cited in the Kolbert article, if we don't reduce our emissions in the next 10 years it may be too late.