#10 Tilting at Windmills
Which would you pick for your kid’s energy future?
In Miguel de Cervantes’ novel from the early 1600s, the addled knight Don Quixote convinces himself that windmills are evil giants and challenges them to a joust. Six hundred years later, many people are again tilting at windmills!
Windmills were an evolutionary development of one of mankind’s earliest renewable energy technologies — ship’s sails. By 200 BC they were being used to pump water in China and grind grain in the Middle East, and in the Middle Ages, windmills were used for many applications in England and the Netherlands. In 1930 there were over 600,000 windmills in the US, used primarily on farms for pumping water. Then came fossil fuels, and wind energy was soon largely forgotten — except by recreational sailors, of course!
The energy crisis of the 1970s gave birth to modern wind turbines. OPEC quickly learned that the last thing they wanted was for Americans to learn to conserve. Later, the fracking boom would have put wind power back in the icebox again were it not for the growing realization of the “inconvenient” costs of fossil fuels.
In 2021 we got 9.2 % of our electricity from wind in the US, surpassing hydropower for the first time. In the next few years, wind will generate more electricity than coal, and more than all other renewables combined. Texas leads the country in wind generation, producing almost 25% of all the wind power in the country. The winds that blew grit in the faces of dust bowl refugees now hold the greatest land based wind power potential in the US.
But if you study the weather app on your smartphone, it will show that the greatest source of wind is just offshore, a reservoir that has barely been tapped in the US. Offshore wind poses technological challenges, but these pale in comparison to opposition from a broad coalition of petroleum interests, climate deniers and not-in-my-back-yard shorefront property owners. However, offshore wind will have to come if we are to slow the climate change juggernaut.
I have many friends who object to wind turbines. They hate to see them, whether they are on ridge tops or offshore. This attitude leaves me puzzled — to me their design is elegant, their stately rotation calming in a world that is otherwise constantly rushing about. Like a clipper ship with her canvas stretched to the trades, they remind you that, with ingenuity, work can be done without noise, fire and smoke.
Things you can do:
Bone up on wind turbine basics with the US Energy Information Agency — Ten things you didn’t know about wind power
Learn some of the subtle tactics of wind power opponents on the coast of Maine — Boothbay Register
If you oppose wind power, please think about the alternatives!
Thank you for reading,
Doug Hylan, Brooklin, Maine
“We must face up to an inescapable reality: the challenges of sustainability simply overwhelm the adequacy of our responses. With some honorable exceptions, our responses are too few, too little, and too late.” — Kofi A. Annan