Lake County Illinois is considering a good strategy to help them move forward with wind power projects. The idea may help other areas that want to embrace wind projects but have been struggling with wind energy regulations.

Wrestling for two years with wind project regulations, Lake County Board members are now looking to separate regulations for large wind farm proposals from smaller turbine requests from homeowners, schools and businesses. Separating the two would allow the County Board to vote separately on these widely different aspects of the country’s proposed regulations.  

By separating the types of projects being considered, regulations for smaller turbines would have a better chance of being approved. This would allow schools and unincorporated land owners the opportunity to move forward with requests while larger wind farm regulations continue to be developed.

Since several board members disfavor larger turbine farms in Lake County, and local residents have come out in droves against a proposed 10 turbine wind farm project in the area, focusing first on small wind project regulations could support the development of wind power but on a scale that satisfies everyone involved. It’s a kind of Win-Win for all.

To read more click here. To find out more about Lake County Illinois click here.

Currently undergoing a $550 million renovation to transform the building into a more energy efficient and eco-friendly structure, the Empire State Building has just become the largest commercial purchaser of 100% renewable energy. This month it signed a contract with Green Mountain Energy Company to purchase nearly 55 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of renewable energy annually.

This is more than double the amount of renewable power purchased by any other commercial customer in New York City! Once again the Empire State “Lady” stands head and shoulders above her peers.

The renewable energy to supply the Empire State Building will be purchased as wind Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) from Green Mountain’s parent company, NRG Energy. Purchasing RECs supports renewable energy directly when it cannot be purchased directly from a producer.

By purchasing RECs in the same quantity of electricity consumed by the Empire State Building the amount of energy used by the building is added to the U.S. power grid directly from renewable sources. This ensures support for the further development of renewable energy projects. Purchasing RECs is a great way to “go green” when green energy supplies can’t come directly to you.

Named by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, the Empire State Building is well on the way to becoming a Big Green Beacon on the renewables scene.
To read more, click here. To take a tour of the Empire State Building, click here.

The Somers claim that’s much too close – “at 500 feet from the turbine (at a location they visited) we couldn’t hear each other talk” they claim. The couple says BNE ignored their location’s historic status when it proposed erecting wind turbines half a mile away.

Under state law, the nine-member Connecticut Siting Council will review BNE’s petition. It has sole jurisdiction over construction of any type of electric-generating facilities. The council’s executive director notes that concerns of local residents are taken into account as are a project’s impact on the environment and public safety.

The Somers have petitioned the council to participate in the hearings claiming BNE ignored their historic location when siting its wind farm a half a mile away.

In turn, BNE Energy counter filed a petition to deny the Somers’ request saying that the couple’s claims are irrelevant under the Siting Council’s guidelines. “BNE need only establish that the proposed project complies with air and water quality standards of the Department of Environmental Protection.”

To add to the conflict, the Somers’ property was not added to the National Register of Historic Places until last July. It was too late for BNE’s consultants to include that fact in the company’s proposal.

This will be the first time the council reviews a commercial wind farm proposal and its decision will affect the future of commercial wind development in the state. To read more, click here.

The 3.4 kW Falcon turbine was installed on an 18′ pole on Williams’ property by Joe Moore Construction, an authorized WePOWER dealer. To read more and see more photos, click here.

From all I’ve seen on the Internet so far, The Age of Stupid is an incredibly powerful film. It was funded through a viral, grassroots effort and not supported by the usual film studio, media attention, and marketing dollars to make it widely known to potential movie goers. But here again, through the power of the Internet, YouTube, bloggers and you, the word is getting out. This is a MUST SEE movie!

It had its world premiere in London on March 15th 2009. It was released in UK cinemas on March 20th 2009, and will be released in other countries (Click here to find out Where? When?).

If you do nothing else this week, take a look at The Age of Stupid trailers on YouTube and at the The Age of Stupid webiste.

Here’s the best of its trailers off YouTube-click here.

Click here for The Age of Stupid website

So what you might say. I won’t be alive in 45 years. What can you do? It’s just Nature’s way. What’s happening will not just suddenly hit the world 45 years from now…. it’s happening all around us on an every day basis. It’s already affecting your life and even your immediate future. It’s happening NOW. Will your children and their children look back to THIS time and THIS place and say “Why didn’t they stop climate change when they had the chance?

Special thanks toVicky Portwain at Wind Energy Planning for her post on The Age of Stupid and bringing it to our attention.

Back in the 1970s a small Jacobs windcharger was installed on a tenement roof in Bronx, New York. The Bronx project succeeded. It proved that rooftop generated electricity could be fed back into a utility’s network without destroying the network, the building, or the city. And then the project was dismantled. What is the status of urban wind development today?

On the “can’t do it” side are wind experts like Paul Gipe. He has long claimed that rooftop mounting of wind turbines to capture urban wind is just not feasible for several very good reasons.

Turbines vibrate, and even strong commercial built-to-withstand-anything buildings will ‘feel’ those nasty ‘vibes’. If, like Jay Leno, we are mounting a turbine on a building that will only house our rare automobile collection, the vibrations are probably not a problem. But for homes, offices and other people-populated spaces, those building vibrations could jangle the nerves worse than a 4th cup of morning coffee. Has the vibration issue been resolved in today’s rooftop turbine designs?

Wind turbulence is another rooftop wind power problem. Ask any sailor about wind shadows and turbulence and they will tell you about the river of wind that flows unseen (but rarely unfelt) around and about every structure (natural or human-made) on the planet. Every building interferes with the natural flow of the wind, much like stones and rocks affect the flow of water in a stream. The building itself, the rooftop itself will affect the turbine’s operation by interfering with the natural flow of wind about the blades.

If a wind turbine is raised high above the roof line, the problem can be mitigated. But can the roof of the building and the building itself support the extra loads created by the wind turbine, the tower and the pull of the wind turbulence affecting both? Are tall turbines mounted on tall rooftops the only solution to rooftop turbine design?

Those are serious issues and unless today’s turbine designers have addressed these problems, the outlook for rooftop wind power projects looks rather bleak. Yet, several turbine manufacturers claim that they have at least part of the solution to the problem of capturing wind at the rooftop level without the past problems of vibration and noise. We’ll look into several of these in upcoming posts.

Is VAWT design an obvious answer? In several previous posts on my Wind Power Handbook blog site I take a look at small versus tall turbines and vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) versus horizontal axis designs (HAWT). We’ll look into the current state of both in upcoming posts.

There are two bright beacons on the US urban wind energy horizon – converting urban brown fields into urban wind farms and New York City’s ambitious wind power agenda to populate the city’s rooftops, bridges, and skyscrapers with wind turbines to generate electricity.

“When it comes to producing clean power, we’re determined to make New York the No. 1 city in the nation,” claims Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“If rooftop wind can make it anywhere, this is a great city,” claims New York City’s director of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. “We have a lot of tall buildings.”

So is rooftop mounting of wind turbines feasible today or not? Has turbine design changed enough recently such that rooftop wind power is a real urban energy possibility today? What is the real viability of New York City’s urban rooftop wind agenda and the very interesting idea of converting urban brown fields into urban wind farms? Stay tuned as we do some deeper-digging homework and please do not hesitate to weigh in with a comment, a pointer to an interesting project or your general feedback on any of these issues.

With so much excellent wind power available in cities across the US,  can we really afford to drag our feet developing audacious means to tap and harness it?

As outspoken “green activist” Ted Turner said on Sunday’s Meet the Press interview, “…The days of fossil fuel are over.”

The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture claims that The Windy City nickname for Chicago does not have a thing to do with wind power. It came from an editorial written by Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun. He wrote his piece to belittle Chicago as it vied against New York (Washington, D.C., and St. Louis) to become the host city for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. He referred to the “windy” (as in full of hot air) bragging of the Chicago promoters making the case to choose their city.

Other sources claim that the nickname goes back even further to rivalry between Chicago and Cincinnati for bragging rights in the meat packing industry which then spilled over into baseball. Cincinnati newspapers covering the baseball rivalry used the term “windy city” to imply that Chicago was just full of bluster.

Whatever the source of The Windy City nickname, anyone who lives there, anyone who visits would certainly agree that it is quite windy almost all time in Chicago. How does Chicago’s wind power compare to other US cities?

Based on the National Climatic Data Center’s data on annual average wind speeds, the top windiest cities in the US in average wind speed in mph are:

1. Dodge City, Kansas 13.9
2. Amarillo, Texas 13.5
3. Rochester, Minnesota 13.1
4. Casper, Wyoming 12.9
5. Cheyenne, Wyoming 12.9
6. Great Falls, Montana 12.7
7. Goodland, Kansas 12.6
8. Boston, Massachusetts 12.5
9. Lubbock, Texas 12.4
10. New York City 12.2
11. Oklahoma City 12.2

Chicago ranks about twenty-first out of 68 windy cities, with an average wind speed of 10.3 miles per hour. So the right to being called The Windy City based on wind power alone can continue to remain controversial. That is not really the issue.

The real question is with so many US cities having excellent average annual wind speeds, why is it that we don’t hear much more in the press about urban wind energy development? Why don’t we have numerous urban rooftop wind development test projects being covered in the news?

We will dig into the current state of urban wind development and see what’s available today in roof top turbine design over the next few blog posts here at the Wind Power Handbook.

In the meantime, if you’d like to read more on the history of The Windy City and how it got its name, here are a few good sources for your background reading.

Donald Miller’s City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America

Norman Bolotin’s The World’s Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893

And, my all time favorite – a very well written super read – Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

In an earlier post – Wind Power and Property Values - on this site, I provided an executive brief on the 2003 study, the Renewable Energy Policy Project (REEP). In essence, researchers assembled a database covering every US wind development project between 1998 and 2002 and more than 25,000 property transactions before and after the projects came on line.

The 81 page REPP Analytical Report was published In May 2003. The Report concluded that for the ten major wind project locations analyzed, property values increased faster in the view shed in eight of the ten projects. And, in nine of the ten cases property values increased faster after the project came on line than they did before. Finally, after projects came on-line, property values increased faster in the view shed than they did in the comparable community. Voila! Positive impact!

In her blog post on property values – What is the impact of wind turbines on house values? –  Vicky Portwain, director in a wind farm development company in the UK, points us to a 2007 project in the UK that claims just the opposite. In this study, property values appeared to be negatively affected by the development of a wind farm nearby.

Which study is correct? First, to compare two very different time frames raises caution. And, to try to compare the results of two very different studies would also be a mistake. But, more importantly, are we sure that the relationship between the presence/absence of a wind farm nearby is the only, or even most important variable affecting land values? This is a point that Vicky raises nicely in her blog post.

Every student of research design knows that outside of an extremely well controlled laboratory experiment, statistical results are always at risk from unknown or unsuspected other variables not included in the study – some other elements that could actually be having a great impact on your study results. Further, every student of statistical analysis knows that just because two variables appear to impact each other (correlation), does not in any way prove that one variable really does change the other (causation).

So back to the conflicting results of the two property value studies here.

The REPP project researchers acknowledge that their report was not an attempt to explain all the influences on property values. Their analysis “is an empirical review of the changes in property values over time…done solely to determine whether the existing data could be interpreted as supporting the claim that wind development harms property values.”

As for the UK study, Vicky points out that when researchers interviewed local real estate agents in the research area, they found that they may have missed some other very important variables also affecting those lower property values.

I don’t believe there is a definitive answer on property values being impacted by wind farm or wind turbine development. Wind project supporters and resistors need to back away from this issue. Taking a stand on property value effect is too fraught with unknown variables to use it as an argument either for or against developing wind power in an area.

If you are trying to develop a community wind project, make sure you do your homework on this issue. Read these two reports.

You do not need to be a statistician to understand the findings of the REPP Report, nor the Cornwall study cited on the Wind Energy Planning site. And, both of these studies provide useful background if you are working on a wind project. Both studies will help you answer opponents who use the “plummeting property values” argument against your project.

After sharing the studies’ details with your project opponents, the strongest argument you can make is that there may be many other variables that have greater impact on property values than the presence or absence of wind turbines.

Click here to see the full REPP report.

Click here to read about the UK research on the Wind Energy Planning website.

In an early September post on my website – Wind Power Greed - I painted an ugly picture of wind energy lust. Some wind farm developers in upstate New York were bribing local officials to get permission to build wind towers, colluding among developers to avoid competitive wind option leases, and shutting down discussion in local town meetings looking for the quickest way possible to acquire enough land to make their wind farms a reality.

Thanks to the concerted efforts of a number of good folks and solid investigation by the NY Attorney General, New York State now has a Wind Power Code of Ethics that spells out quite clearly what must, and must not occur as developers and towns bring wind energy to the state.

Although subscription to the code is not mandatory, the code itself and the Task Force created to monitor wind development in the state, will ensure that towns and wind developers both keep an eye on how they do business.

In brief, the Code covers conflicts of interest by banning wind companies from:

• offering municipal officers bribes, gifts, compensation for services, contingent compensation, honoraria, or payment of legal fees and
• soliciting from municipal officers restrictions on easements/leases, or confidential information.

 The Code further spells out specific public disclosure publication requirements covering any and all financial interests of municipal officers in the project/company and all easements and leases.

The wind development company must provide specific education and training to its own employees and local municipal officers on how they need to conduct business within the Code of Ethics.

Click here to download a copy of the NY Wind Power Code of Ethics.

Or read it on line at the Wind Power Law Blog

Click here to go directly to the Code on their site.

Infrasound is sound with a frequency too low to be heard by the human ear – in general it is bass waves with a frequency below 20 Hz to 22 kHz.

We are surrounded by and have evolved within an environment of naturally occurring infrasound — ocean waves, wind, earthquakes, pounding surf, waterfalls, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and anything that produces a naturally occurring slow oscillation of the air.

And of course, there is a whole lot of human generated infrasound – from slow speed fans to engines, cars, buses, trains, motorcycles, airplanes, explosions, and machinery.

Yet the fuzzy connection between wind turbine infrasound and risk to human health continues. It hinges on the idea that high levels of low frequency noise excite the body to vibrate, most notably in the chest, and that profoundly deaf humans perceive noise through vibrations in their bodies. But the thinking is circular to claim that wind turbines generate inaudible infrasound that “can be felt but not heard” and that this infrasound vibrates the chest with dire health risks.

To begin with, the noise frequency levels that produce body vibrations are well above the hearing threshold. You would hear the explosion, crash, or band speakers cranked to their maximum loudness as well as feel them, unless you were profoundly deaf. So the idea that unperceived wind turbine infrasound is pounding your body and making you sick – is another one of those “we don’t want wind turbines” myths.

On the other hand the “problem noise” that does come from wind turbines is the fluctuating swish sound of the blades passing the tower, which does irritate some people who are highly sensitive to fluctuating sound.

The problem is that wind project objectors use acoustic terms like infrasound incorrectly. They indicate that ‘infrasound’ is a generalized health problem for all people living near a wind turbine. It is something they cannot hear, but they can all feel it and that their health is at risk.

What we do need to note is that the turbine swish noise might be problematic for some people and when those affected by fluctuating sounds appear, we do need to pay attention. But if scores of people in an area start claiming that the blade swish sound is affecting them negatively – be skeptical. Intermittent sound fluctuation really only affects some very sensitive people – not everyone. It is a real problem – just not a really pervasive one.

For more on the infrasound and turbine issue, click here:
Infrasound from Wind Turbines – Fact, Fiction or Deception by Geoff Leventhall.

And click here for:
Do wind turbines produce significant low frequency sound levels?  by G.P. van den Berg

Click here for information on tubine noise assessments in other posts on my site:
A sound by any other name…

Special thanks to Appalachian State University for publishing the Leventhall and van den Berg papers in the Reports section of its very informative website.