Tomorrow is the first day of March.
That means, if the old saying holds, that it will come in like a lion. Being March, of course, your results may vary.
The arrival of what is historically the windiest month of the year (give or take a derecho or hurricane here or there) seems a good time to think about wind energy.
Especially now that some wind projects are back in the news and apparently on the table — a new one in Botetourt County, an old one revived in Pulaski County.
If either of them comes to pass — and we’ve seen a lot of wind projects proposed that didn’t — it would become the first commercial wind farm in Virginia.
James Blythe would wonder what took so long.
Blythe, a Scottish science professor, was the first person to use a windmill to generate electricity. He built one at his holiday cottage in 1887, making his the first house in the world to be powered by wind. Scotland being a windy place, Blythe soon found he was generating more electricity than he needed, so he offered the surplus to the nearby town of Marykirk.
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The people there turned him down, insisting that electricity was “the work of the devil.”
Today, we have no such compuction against electricity. Indeed, one of the great public policy questions of our time is how we can go about generating more of Lucifer’s spark.
Actually, the how is not in question. We know how. It’s more a matter of what we’ll use to do it, and where that will be done. It seems we all want the lights to come on when we flick the switch, but we’d like to keep the means of producing that light hidden well out of sight. Or at least over in the next county.
There is not a single means of producing power that doesn’t have some controversy attached to it.
Coal fills the air with carbon dioxide that heats up the planet.
So does oil, and sometimes oil trains jump the tracks and burn, like one did in Lynchburg last spring.
Natural gas burns off half the carbon dioxide that coal does, so it can claim to be at least halfway clean, but folks don’t seem too keen to have a natural gas pipeline running through their back yard, as we’ve seen from the three lines that are now proposed to go through Western Virginia. And then there’s the question of whether pumping the ground full of exotic chemicals to “frack” the gas out of the rocks is really a good idea.
Nuclear doesn’t foul the air or the water, but when something goes wrong, it can really go wrong. People can move back into Chernobyl in, oh, about 20,000 years.
Hydro-electric power floods the land, displaces people and sometimes endangers rare wildlife. Remember the snail darter?
The so-called “renewables” of wind and solar may be free, but even they aren’t free of complaints. Wind turbines can be noisy, unsightly and are basically big blenders for bats and birds, and so split environmentalists into two camps.
As for solar, well, no trains of solar energy are derailing in the middle of downtowns and burning with the heat of the sun, but vast tracts of concentrated solar panels in the Mojave Desert have been known to put off so much heat they ignite birds in mid-air. “Streamers,” they’re called, for the trail of smoke they leave as they plummet earthward — sometimes one every two minutes, according to federal wildlife officials who investigated last summer.
So, until scientists unlock the riddle of cold fusion (or is it the myth of cold fusion?), these are pretty much our choices for making the lights come on.
Each one has risks.
Each one has costs (we all know how much the price of oil fluctuates).
Each one has varying levels of reliability (the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, though some of the energy they produce can be stored).
And each one has politics attached to it (coal is concentrated in certain counties and certain states, which means there’s a guaranteed “coal vote” in a way that there’s not yet a “wind” vote or a “solar” vote.)
Plus, there are certain legacy factors: We already have a lot of coal-fired plants, so it’s easy to keep shoveling coal into them as long as the price is right (and, to be sure, the cost of complying with federal regulations on carbon emissions is making coal plants more expensive to operate).
Appalachian Power is particularly dependent on coal; 70 percent of its energy comes from there. Converting those plants to natural gas, or building something else entirely, requires spending money, which ultimately consumers are going to pay for one way or another.
The point of stating the obvious is to raise this question: Right now, Western Virginia is faced with several different energy proposals. Some object to the proposed natural gas pipelines because they would come through their back yard; some object to natural gas on principle. The wind proposal in Botetourt hasn’t generated any real opposition (yet), but the one in Pulaski did first time around, as well as proposed turbines in Roanoke County and Highland County that have yet to be built.
All these objections are valid, to some degree, and yet . . . we still need energy.
So we’d pose this question for folks to consider: If you object to the pipeline, or the turbines, or coal, or insert your least favorite form of energy here, what form of energy would you support? And would it generate just as much electricity? And, perhaps the kicker, are you willing to pay the price for it?
If you don’t want to hear the turbines near Eagle Rock, are you willing to risk more oil trains rolling through? The one that derailed in Lynchburg last year went on that very route and the one that recently derailed in West Virginia was headed that way.
If you don’t want gas pipelines snaking under the Roanoke or New River valleys, would you support those wind turbines instead? And a whole lot more of them?
If you don’t want more energy produced domestically, are you willing to ship your money to regimes overseas that repress their own people and don’t like us very much, either? Or . . . or . . . well, you get the idea.
Because the answer to proposed energy projects can’t always be “no.” Unless you think electricity is truly the work of the devil.