Birds, Bats, Slow Wind Power Generation in Maryland

Turbines would be slowed to kill fewer endangered bats

Maryland's first industrial-scale wind energy project would be required under a federal plan issued Monday to slow down its turbines at certain times of the year to reduce the number of endangered bats that might be killed by the long, spinning blades.

Exelon Power, which owns and operates the 28-turbine Criterion wind project in Garrett County, also would have to protect one or more bat caves in other states to make up for any federally protected Indiana bats its turbines might harm.

The tiny, insect-eating Indiana bats, which are found across the eastern United States, have been officially listed since 1967 as in danger of disappearing. Biologists say their number has become even more depleted in the past half-century as a result of human disturbance of their caves, pesticide poisoning and a recent disease, white-nose syndrome.

It's kind of ironic that wind power, long touted as one of the great sources of renewable energy, is being cut back due to environmental concerns.  It almost makes you think somebody just doesn't want more energy produced.

Wind Power Fades Off Chesapeake

Gamesa Suspends U.S. Offshore Wind Test

Gamesa Corp. Tecnologica SA (GAM), Spain’s largest maker of wind-power equipment, suspended plans to install what may have become the first U.S. offshore turbine.

Gamesa postponed the deployment of a 5-megawatt prototype in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay because of doubts about permitting and sales prospects, the company said today in a statement. It will move forward with a similar project in Spain.

There are no offshore wind projects in operation in North America and it’s not clear when there will be demand for Gamesa’s sea-based turbines in the region, said David Rosenberg, a spokesman for the Zamudio, Spain-based company.

If it's so environmentally friendly, why would they have trouble with permitting?

“A viable commercial market in the United States is still farther out, as much as three or four years away, at the earliest,” the company said in the statement. The lack of a mature market makes it “extremely difficult to justify the enormous expenditure of capital” needed to build and install the prototype, it said.

Gamesa said it’s “approaching completion” of a critical design review for the Virginia turbine and will suspend the project once that’s finished.

When wind power companies aren't willing to bet on their product despite enormous subsidies relative to other forms of energy, maybe, just maybe the technology is premature.

Wind Power Adds to Global Warming

Wind Farms Warming Texas

Researchers used satellite data from 2003 to 2011 to examine surface temperatures across as wide swath of west Texas, which has built four of the world's largest wind farms. The data showed a direct correlation between night-time temperatures increases of 0.72 degrees C (1.3 degrees F) and the placement of the farms.

"Given the present installed capacity and the projected growth in installation of wind farms across the world, I feel that wind farms, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional meteorology," Liming Zhou, associate professor at the State University of New York, Albany and author of the paper published April 29 in Nature Climate Change said in an e-mail to Discovery News.

The effect seems to be largely due to mixing; at night, the wind turbines mix the cool layer of air close to the ground with warmer air above, resulting in warmer average temperatures at the surface.

Wind turbines also heat the air for another reason; friction and the 2nd law of Thermodynamics.  Wind is the sun's thermal energy converted (however inefficiently) to kinetic energy.  To capture that energy back from the wind using the wind turbines involves friction along the blades, and the conversion of that energy to electricity, all of which, by the 2nd Law, involve to loss of some of that energy as heat.

There have been a number of "gotcha" type articles on this in the skeptical media. Wind Power adds to Global Warming!  Oh Nooes!

I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint because the AGW side takes every bit of weather news, and turns it into a screed against Global Warming.  It gets extremely tiring to hear about the death of mountains because a few herbs have shifted their range vertically a fraction of a meter a year, or that home runs have become easier due to thinner air caused by global warming. The list of thing that have been blamed on global warming is just astonishing (and funny as hell).

So, while I tend to discount the importance of the warming of Texas due to Picken's Propellers, a little turnabout is fair play.

Your Daily Dose of Stupid

Sen Tom Carper (D-Del) proposes to "Save the Post Office" using wind mills to generate electricity for battery powered delivery vehicles...