NYT misrepresents wind energy
An article in Friday's New York Times by Matthew Wald bears the provocative title, "Wind Farms May Not Lower Air Pollution, Study Suggests." This is, of course, completely ridiculous.
The article is about a report by the National Academy of Sciences on the subject, but doesn't provide a link to the report itself (the report's summary is located here, the press release is here, and the body of the report is here). Instead, the author mis-characterizes the report by opening the article with this absurd clause:
Building thousands of wind turbines would probably not reduce the pollutants that cause smog and acid rain ...
If Wald had bothered to read the actual report, he would have found this on page 1:
Generation of electricity by wind energy has the potential to reduce environmental impacts caused by use of fossil fuels to generate electricity because, unlike fossil fuels, wind energy does not generate atmospheric contaminants or thermal pollution.
Wald does admit later in the article:
Wind machines can displace power from coal and make electricity without sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and without nitrogen oxides, which add to smog. But the study said they would not reduce the total output of those pollutants because there was already a cap on sulfur emissions and one on nitrogen oxides was likely to follow.
At least that first sentence is correct. The second one is a non sequitur, since even a single wind turbine reduces the demand for coal by at least a small amount. Whether there's a cap on emissions or not is irrelevant; the more wind turbines we build, the fewer coal plants we have to build. On the subject of caps, which Weld misrepresents, the actual report says this:
The degree to which emissions would be further reduced through special provisions to encourage wind-energy use -- such as set-asides, in which a percentage of emissions allowed under the cap are retired to the extent they can be offset by wind energy -- is uncertain, the committee added.
A reliance on wind power "may not reduce pollution" only if we don't deploy it. That's the only way to make sense of the article's mis-characterizations.
Wald finishes his hit piece with another non sequitur:
And the amount of wind energy that can be integrated into the electricity grid is limited, the researchers said. The maximum that could be accommodated, Dr. Policansky said, is probably 20 percent of the nation’s electricity use.
Twenty percent is a huge fraction. If we were to eliminate one fifth of our coal plants by relying on non-polluting sources, we'd go a long way toward mitigating both pollution and global warming. Twenty percent is not a trivial amount.
Wald needs to go back to school.
(There's a Knoxville connection to the National Academy of Sciences report: one of the authors is with UT's Energy, Environment, and Resources Center here in Knoxville.)