Several of the Mars Hill Mountain wind turbines in Maine.
Imagine my surprise today, after seeing nary a published word regarding anything Virginia has done for the environment lately, when I stumbled across something that has passed Virginia’s General Assembly and only awaits Governor Tim Kaine’s signature to make it law: easier permitting for renewable energy power generators.
Mainly, this means wind farms, though the law provides the same guarantees for a more lenient permitting process for sources that include “sunlight, wind, falling water, wave motion, tides, or geothermal power,” and, on a smaller scale, electricity generated by biomass or municipal solid waste.
Opponents, though, say the law is only designed to provide a tax shelter for big electrical interests, and worry besides that it will allow for mammoth (read: unsightly) turbine farms on the mountaintops of western Virginia — since the law is aimed at encouraging creation of wind farms with a capacity of up to 100 megawatts, considered by legislators to be “small-scale renewable.” Biomass power plants would be restricted to a 20-megawatt production capacity. The main voice of opposition to the bill, University of Virginia scientist Rick Webb, also cites concerns about the environmental impact on wildlife by the turbines themselves.
A Jan. 30, 2009 story in the Augusta Free Press quotes a number of researchers and cautionaries who say the legislation is poorly designed and will have a whole host of unintended consequences. They stress consideration of one item in particular: that a facility with a 100-megawatt capacity can in no way be defined as “small-scale.”
A newsletter article by UtiliPoint, Inc., an energy industry consulting and research firm, spends some time exploring what, exactly, a megawatt is, and uses a wind farm’s potential capacity as an example:
A megawatt (MW) is one million watts and a kilowatt (kW) is one thousand watts. Both terms are commonly used in the power business when describing generation or load consumption. For instance, a 100 MW rated wind farm is capable of producing 100 MW during peak winds, but will produce much less than its rated amount when winds are light. As a result of these varying wind speeds, over the course of a year a wind farm may only average 30 MW of power production.
Okay, that’s nice. But how much acreage does a 100-megawatt wind farm occupy?
In Bangor, Maine, the First Wind company just celebrated the opening of their second large-scale wind farm, a 57-megawatt, 38-turbine farm along the Stetson Mountain ridgeline. The first project, comprising 28 turbines with a production capacity of 42 megawatts, opened several years ago on Mars Hill Mountain, so the two projects total about 100 megawatts. While I couldn’t find even an estimate of the acreage required to build a 100-megawatt wind farm, an analysis of European wind farms by the World Resources Institute estimates that adequate spacing would demand anywhere from 270 to 810 hectares, or 650 to 2,000 acres.
(Another reason I love Google: to get an idea of a how big a 2,000 acre city is, I typed in “2,000 acres city” and came up with this story: “TradeWind Energy Leases 2,000 Acres for Wind Farm,” Kansas City Business Journal, Sept. 15, 2008.) You could fit 2.5 of New York’s Central Park into 2,000 acres, for instance.
In Maine, they’ve situated the farms along mountain ridges that were previously cleared by logging activity, and are in close proximity to existing powerline transmission systems.
This could also be accomplished in Virginia; maybe even West Virginia could get in on the game by siting wind farms on mountains and ridges have already been cleared by strip mining or logging. I doubt that wind farms will just start sprouting in everyone’s back yards in the mountains — besides, the Virginia bill provides for hefty fines (from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars) for violations of permitting as well as environmental impacts, and still mandates a a public comment period before any permit is issued for a turbine farm.
Full text of the Virginia renewables bill is here (S.B. 1347) , for you legal eagles and masochists out there.
