Modeshift

The New York Times is catching up to the grassroots opposition to big energy projects, clean energy or dirty. Today the paper reported on the developing push back to big oil pipelines, big electrical transmission lines, and other energy transport projects of scale.

The dimensions of what needs to be done to push the country from high-carbon energy production to lower carbon production is as vast as anything the nation has attempted. That’s why it’s going much more slowly than most environmentalists and business executives anticipated. Not only are there technical gulfs to be crossed, there also are social oceans to navigate.

Among the most important is a basic American revulsion to size and scale in the clean energy sector that is expressing itself in every part of the country. Here in northern Michigan, for instance, Duke Energy late last year abandoned its plan to build 112 utility-scale wind turbines in Benzie and Manistee counties, principally because of revulsion by enough summer and full-time residents to their size.

As we’ve reported here for several years, there aren’t too many American clean energy sector projects of scale that haven’t come under pressure at the grassroots simply for being big. Big wind. Big solar. Big geothermal. Big transmission lines.

The clash over the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would extend from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast, also involves scale to some extent. It’s the first big individual infrastructure project of the new era of unconventional fossil fuel development that has attracted such public upheaval, though the water-intensive hydro-fracking production technology that led to the higher oil and gas production also is generating pointed criticism.

The oil and gas industry will have a much easier time moving their products to market, as the developments in North Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and the mid-Atlantic show. Americans are more comfortable with the fuels they know. And most of the pipeline infrastructure is already in place and simply needs to be extended to reach the new gas and oil fields. There’s almost $17 billion worth of pipeline construction, just completed or now occurring in the U.S. without the $7 billion Keystone XL and its earlier completed $5 billion Keystone project.

Completed and Proposed Oil and Natural Gas Pipelines in U.S.

Alberta Clipper — $3.3 billion

Southern Access Extension — $350 million

North Dakota System Expansion – $100 million

Enbridge Bakken Expansion – $560 million

Bakken Marketlink – $140 million

Bakken North -  $200 million

High Plains Expansion – $220 million

Northern Gateway Pipeline — $5.5 billion

Rocky Mountain Express gas pipeline — $4.5 billion

Proposed Cochin natural gas connector — $550 million

Quintana Capital Group oil pipeline: $250 million

Monarch pipeline —  $1 billion

Texas Longhorn — $275 million

Clean energy is encountering more difficult circumstances. The big solar and wind projects, for instance, that only a few years ago were viewed as low-carbon savior technologies by the American environmental community, are now seen as threats — to viewsheds, endangered species, public health, whatever. Transmission lines across wild lands are now viewed as dangerous and unsightly.

The public push-back points to a new stage of development, from centralized power generation in big plants, to decentralized clean energy production. That means installing solar arrays on individual business and residential rooftops, or building small wind generating stations that fit into neighborhoods and communities. While the concept may seem attractive, implementing such a scheme will take at least a generation even if it doesn’t run into any new civic opposition.

In the meantime, America is pushing as hard as it can to perpetuate the fossil fuel era, and losing momentum to China and Europe in clean energy production. The 750 kv transmission line in Gansu Province, China (above), which I photographed a year ago, transports power from new wind and solar installations in the northwestern deserts to the interior, and encountered no opposition.

In contrast, just last week in Michigan, Energy Conversion Devices, the parent of United Solar Ovonic, announced its plans to file for bankruptcy. United Solar Ovonic, the maker of thin-film photovoltaic panels, was for a short time one of the darlings of Midwest clean energy manufacturing sector.

– Keith Schneider

Converging trends  are roiling the clean energy manufacturing and production sectors here in Michigan and  nationally. President Obama knows it and is worried. The collapse of the Solyndra solar plant in California is  a prickly presidential campaign issue. Jobs and the country’s capacity to reduce its climate changing emissions, (as shown in the emissions counter above in NYC), also are big outcomes.

On Tuesday evening, the president told the story of an unemployed west Michigan furniture worker who landed one of 50 new jobs at Energetx Composites, a wind turbine blade manufacturer in Holland, Mich. that is the beneficiary of big state and federal clean energy grant support. Holland, by the way, also is the site of two big government-supported battery plants involved in supplying the state’s electric and hybrid car sector.

The president’s spotlight on the Holland worker and his vow in the State of the Union to “not walk away from the promise of clean energy” reflects, to some extent, his administration’s deep concerns about the swift evolution in overseas competition. He’s also worried about the fast-changing markets for energy, investment capital, and political and public support that are buffeting the American alternative energy sector.

Indeed, while a new wind energy production line opened in Holland last year, 140 miles away Evergreen Solar, a Massachusetts-based solar panel maker, declared bankruptcy in August and closed its new Midland, Michigan plant that employed about 40 people.

On the production side, solar and wind-generated power are holding their own. Solar energy developers added roughly 2,000 megawatts of new generating capacity last year, about double what was added in 2010. Wind energy propducers added nearly 7,000 megawatts of new generating capacity, 31 percent more than in 2010, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

But siting new plants is often a dogfight. Here in Benzie and Manistee counties where I live Duke Energy threw in the towel this month for a proposed 112-turbine wind farm. Opponents were essentially motivated by their revulsion to big towers interrupting a gentle wooded landscape. The issue was scale. Similar opposition is developing to the Obama administation’s proposal to open federal lands to big solar developments, as my Circle of Blue colleague, Brett Walton, discovered in Colorado’s San Luis Valley.

The popular pushback to big new clean energy projects is just one of the sources of turbulence in the U.S. clean energy manufacturing sector. On the one hand, big companies like GE announced plans in October to build a $300 million solar panel plant in Aurora, CO., that will employ 355 people when it opens this year. On the other hand Amonix, which in May completed a $18 million, 244,000-square foot plant in North Las Vegas to put over 300 people to work manufacturing equipment for big solar thermal plants in the desert Southwest, announced on January 25 that it was laying off 200 workers because of slow market conditions.

The picture in the wind energy manufacturing sector is a little clearer, though not by much. Gamesa, the big Spanish wind turbine maker, has two plants in Pennsylvania and employs 800 people. The company has opened over a dozen big wind farms nationally, including three in its adopted state. In 2009 it laid off several hundred workers but has rehired them. Meanwhile Vestas, the Danish wind energy manufacturers has built four wind manufacturing plants in Colorado that employ 1,500 workers.

Several market trends are smacking the wind energy. First is foreign competition, especially from South America, where new wind blade plants have been built specifically for the U.S. wind market, the world”s second largest behind China. The second is the federal wind energy production tax credit, which expires at the end of this year. Vestas, for instance, has threatened to close its Colorado plants if the tax credit is not renewed. While support for renewal is weak among Republican U.S. House and Senate members, it is strong among Republican governors in windy states — Ohio, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas — because of the role it is playing in encouraging job growth.

The third big trend affecting the wind industry is the boom in natural gas production, which is lowering prices and prompting more utilities to consider gas-powered generating units. Last week, the United States reduced its estimate for how much gas lies in the nation’s deep shale deposits by 40 percent. But those numbers are almost certain to be revised again, probably repeatedly, as production companies gain a better understanding of what is there. Even with the lower estimate there are still huge reserves of gas, and of oil, in those shales.

– Keith Schneider

Add preservationists to the list of American interest groups determined to kill clean energy projects. Preservation Magazine published a good piece on the troubling trend in its summer 2011 issue.

Along with all of the other concerns I’ve raised about the myriad and all-too-effective campaigns at the grassroots to curtail clean energy development, add this thought. At least in clean energy development the United States has the opportunity to replace scenic vistas with energy sources that don’t pollute and are sustainable. Which is a good thing considering that the conventional energy sources add to climate warming that is damaging the forests and grasslands that form those very same scenic vistas.

In my previous work on Smart Growth, the campaigns organized by the Michigan Land Use Institute and our partners were driven in part by one undeniable fact: In every case beautiful landscapes were being replaced by parking lots and big roads and other out-of-scale projects not fit for a new era of energy scarcity, climate change, and diminishing incomes. Moreover, those new projects — Walmarts, Meijers big box stores, fast food, chain motels — drove average wages down, not up. They drained community vitality.

The clean energy sector, if it develops any scale at all, will employ high-skill people earning better wages. It fits much more readily into a natural landscape. And it responds to climate change, which I fear could be the most important threat to the nation’s economy and security because of the fury of the storms we’re seeing now.

So what are preservationists preserving when they oppose clean energy projects? Vistas that are undergoing damage due to the culture’s unyielding reluctance to pursue a cleaner and safer energy path.

The history of renewable energy, at least the way many in the environmental community imagined it with the election of President Obama, is a straight story line. A courageous young leader, worried about economic and national security, takes on the big energy dogs and begins to shift the United States away from dirty, dangerous, and expensive fossil fuels.

Then there is history the way it actually unfolds. Markets and personal values and incomes and public attitudes and global competition and fate and chance are all shaken together like one of those hand-held snow storms in glass. Things eventually settle but the outcome can be so random.

That’s one way to explain the fierce resistance to a proposal by Duke Energy to build over 100 utility-scale wind generators in four townships in Benzie and Manistee counties. Public opinion polls show broad support for clean and renewable energy development. But individual projects, like Duke’s, are having a harder time getting built than the poll results suggest.

Difference of Wind Opinion
The push and pull is reflected almost weekly in the Benzie County Record Patriot. “We are being given an opportunity to help preserve what we have here and show the rest of the world we are willing to take a stand in the fight against pollution,” writes Emily Nugent, a recent college graduate raised in Benzie County who noted she was dismayed by the anti-wind signs and billboards (like the one pictured above in Frankfort). “I thought our community has been in support of taking care of our environment, not opposed to a greener way of life.”

“It is not sound green energy policy to substitute one form of pollution for another,” counters Michael Connolly, a resident of Arcadia, a Lake Michigan coastal village in Manistee County that is a hotbed of opposition to the Duke plan. “What is the gain to substitute reliance on fossil fuels for another form of aesthetic/visual and possible health risk pollution.”

Glenn Puitt of the Michigan Land Use Institute has been covering the issues and his latest piece on leasing is worth reading.

In the balancing of the actual risks of coal-fired generating stations and the perceived hazards of wind power it just seems so obvious which way the scale tilts. Coal mining kills, pollutes streams, wrecks mountaintops, tears apart prairies, and depletes water supplies. Coal combustion produces mercury-loaded emissions that contaminate lakes and enter the food chain. And carbon from coal-fired plants in the U.S., China, and other nations is the principal source of climate changing emissions.

Wind power, meanwhile, can be a threat to birds and bats, can produce an irritating flicker at some points on the ground during specific hours of the day in certain parts of the year, and is generated atop tall towers that some see as such a visual blight they worry that tourism revenue and property values could decline.

Risk Perception Impedes Clean Energy Development
Nevertheless, perceived risks of wind power and other renewables are proving to be powerful drivers of public sentiment here in northern Michigan and around the country. Developers are having a hard time getting new clean energy projects built.

Though a handful of new biomass plants came online in 2010, principally in the southeast states, a number of others – including one in Traverse City — also were cancelled due in part to financing problems and what Renewable Energy World, a trade news organization called “increased scrutiny by environmentalists and regulatory agencies.”

Last year just one company, Nevada based Ormat Technologies, brought a new geothermal power plant online, a 15MW plant in Jersey Valley, Nevada, according to the 2011 Annual U.S. Geothermal Power Production and Development Report. This in a generating sector that had developed over 3,000 megawatts of capacity in previous years.

Last year, 5,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity came online. That was half the new generating capacity built in 2009. This year, the U.S. wind energy industry appears to be doing better. In the first quarter of 2011, according to the American Wind Energy Association, 1,100 megawatts of new wind energy was installed in the first quarter and 5,600 megawatts is under construction.

But it also appears clear that wind energy development will not come close in 2010 and 2011 to matching the 18,400 megawatts of new generating capacity built in 2008 and 2009. To some extent this reflects uncertainty in financial markets and government support. But it also is the result of resistance at the grassroots to big projects. Realtors in Wisconsin, for instance, support Governor Scott Walker’s proposal to restrict wind development in that state.

Of all the renewable alternatives only solar photovoltaic energy appears to be holding its own, especially for photovoltaic systems installed on home and business rooftops. The residential market doubled last year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Utilities also opened three concentrated solar power plants, though green groups on the  West Coast are nervous about the big solar projects planned for deserts in California and the Southwest. They say the big plants, which cover hundreds of acres, can harm the land and wildlife.

Meanwhile Hydrocarbon Boom At Continent’s Center
What is clear today is that while Americans battle over clean energy projects. stunting green development, climbing gas prices serve as a daily reminder of just how strung out on oil this country is. The fossil energy industry is flexing its muscles in government and the finance community, winning permits and billions in cash to perpetuate the age of fossil fuels. The result is one of the grandest industrial expansions in recent decades, much of it at the center of the continent.

North American, Asian, and European companies are spending $15 billion annually to turn tar sands into oil in northern Canada; $7 billion annually to drill shale oil wells on the northern Great Plains; $30 billion to build a pipeline network for transporting tar sands oil, shale oil, and natural gas between Canada and the U.S. through the center of the continent, and to the Texas Gulf Coast; and $22.6 billion to expand and modernize refineries in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Gulf of Mexico. (See list of pipelines and refinery expansions below).

A Canadian tar sands developer  wants to open a new tar sands mines in Utah , and as of 2010, North Dakota is the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the nation-quickly heading to number two, behind Texas.

For the first time since the 1970s, the amount of oil being produced in the United States is on the rise. In 1977 US crude production was 8.1 million barrels per day. Production climbed in all but one of the next nine years to nearly 9 million barrels per day. From there production fell steadily each year until 2008, when it bottomed at 4.95 million barrels per year.

Production started up in 2009 and continues. Unfortunately, the sources of that fuel are more difficult and dangerous to extract and transport, and they carry greater risks of air pollution, groundwater contamination, water consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions than ever before.

– Keith Schneider

Sidebar

Completed and Proposed Oil and Natural Gas Pipelines in U.S.

Keystone and Keystone XL pipelines — $12 billion

Alberta Clipper — $3.3 billion

Southern Access Extension — $350 million

North Dakota System Expansion – $100 million

Enbridge Bakken Expansion – $560 million

Bakken Marketlink – $140 million

Bakken North -  $200 million

High Plains Expansion – $220 million

Northern Gateway Pipeline — $5.5 billion

Rocky Mountain Express gas pipeline — $4.5 billion

Proposed Cochin natural gas connector — $550 million

Quintana Capital Group oil pipeline: $250 million

Monarch pipeline —  $1 billion

Texas Longhorn — $275 million

US Refinery Expansions

Motiva (Shell) planned completion 2012 – $7.5 billion

BP Whiting Expansion, underway – $3.8 billion

Detroit Marathon expansion – $2.2 billion

Valero Port Arthur expansion – $1.4 billion

Total Port Arthur expansion – $2.2 billion

Wood River expansion – $1.8 billion

Marathon Garyville expansion – $3.7 billion

Roopali Phadke was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government from 2003 to 2005 when an intensifying civic struggle over a developer’s proposal to build the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Cape Cod caught her attention.

The battle line between supporters and opponents was readily apparent. But the soldiers filling out the ranks of the opposition leadership were especially confounding. They included Senator Ted Kennedy, one of the nation’s most influential liberal lawmakers, his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the country’s most prominent environmentalists, and Bill Koch, a billionaire fossil fuel energy developer, prominent funder of freemarket conservative causes and candidates, and twin brother to David Koch, a billionaire oilman from Kansas who was busy financing a radical anti-government, anti-environmental movement that came to be known as the Tea Party.

“I saw during the permitting process how support and opposition to Cape Wind splintered normal alliances,” said Phadke, (see pix right) who is now an associate professor of environmental studies at Macalester College in Minneapolis. “I dug in deep on that project and it opened up for me how pervasive opposition to wind energy is around the country.”

Behind The Opposition Trend
A year ago, while serving as a communications consultant to a small northern Michigan utility, I smacked into the same trend, and it encompasses opposition to more than wind energy development. Traverse City Light and Power proposed to generate 30 percent of its power with renewable sources by 2020, and the utility’s board viewed a 10-megawatt, combined heat and power, state-of-the-art, clean-burning wood biomass gasification plant as a good start. It would employ 20 to 30 people, and cycle $4 million a year through the community that otherwise was being sent to Wyoming and Lansing for dirty, climate-changing, mercury-producing coal-fired power.

The proposal was a no-brainer to me. But my views certainly weren’t as widely shared as I anticipated. Last June, after a fierce grassroots pushback, the utility abandoned the project.

The experience, though, prompted me to report intensively on the civic fate of other clean and renewable energy projects around the country. I’ve collected my articles in a ModeShift special report that documents community battles impeding renewable and clean energy projects — wind, solar, geothermal, smart grid — in more than 30 states.

I’m convinced that the opposition movement, which is national, growing, connected online, and sharing data and organizing techniques, represents a significant barrier to the clean energy industry’s development in the U.S. But I’ve felt more isolated on this point in the journalism and academic community than I expected. That’s likely because national polls, including one reported last week by Dave Roberts of Grist, consistently show that Americans support the clean energy alternatives.

I’ve concluded, though, that when the theoretical becomes the actual, Americans are changing their minds about clean energy. Here in northwest Michigan’s Benzie and Manistee counties, where I’ve lived for almost 20 years, a Duke Energy proposal to build 112 utility-scale wind turbines has encountered serious turbulence from many people who I know personally and previously expressed strong support for clean alternatives.

A Social Scientist’s Findings
Last week, in a conversation with Roopali Phadke, a political scientist trained at Wellesley, Cornell, and U.C. Santa Cruz, I learned more about the causes of the resistance. Phadke has attracted National Science Foundation grants for a project that “seeks to better understand how communities can navigate controversy and engage in the process of wind energy development.”

In a new paper that’s going to press in Antipode, a journal of geography, Phadke documents 130 wind opposition groups in 30 states. The numbers, she says, are increasing. “It’s a significant movement,” Phadke told me.”The wind developers didn’t see this coming — the number of groups, how networked they are, and what a challenge it is to their industry.” In her paper, which draws its narrative from opposition to a Duke Energy windfarm proposed for federal land in Nevada, Phadke concludes that the movement reflects “the emerging social resistance to re-sculpting of energy geographies.”

“Local opposition to wind development in the New American West is representative of broader shifts in the economic and aesthetic value of once historically “productive” rural landscapes,” she writes.

Phadke added: “As a conspicuous technology capable of both sustaining and thwarting the realization of an imagined rural ideal, utility-scale wind energy development across American landscapes calls forth similar social reconciliation as was faced with the expansion of railroads, steamships, and factories in early modern America.”

The American wind energy industry, which has attacked Republican opposition to state and federal incentives, is not yet acknowledging the influence of its grassroots opponents. In October I called the American Wind Energy Association,  and reached Denise Bode, the Washington-based trade group’s chief executive officer. I asked Bode what AWEA was doing to respond to the civic efforts to block wind projects. “What are you talking about?” she said before hustling off the phone.

No doubt, in her private conversations with AWEA’s board and staff, there is considerable concern. The American Wind Energy Association reported earlier this year that wind energy generating capacity increased by just 5.1 gigawatts in 2010 in the U.S. That’s half of the generating capacity increase in 2009, and less than a third of the 16.5-GW increase in wind generating capacity built last year in China. (see pix above from northern Gansu Province).

The Washington-based trade association faulted political uncertainty about federal and state incentives, roiled financial markets, and diminished interest by the nation’s utilities to commit to wind. The association didn’t mention the increasing grassroots resistance to wind power in rural areas.

“The focus of the industry, the government, and national environmental organizations has been on technology, jobs, and making the economics right,”  said Professor Phadke. “But they’ve glossed over the civic work that needs to be done. This is a revolution in energy production. There is an assumption that everyone has been on board. They aren’t.”

– Keith Schneider

About a year ago, while consulting with Traverse City Light and Power on the utility’s plan to generate 30 percent of its energy from renewable resources, I recognized the surprising and damaging trend developing within grassroots environmental groups to sow fear and block clean and renewable energy projects.

That trend is growing bigger. Opponents to a big Duke Energy proposal to build the 112-turbine Gail Windpower installation in Benzie and Manistee counties here, many of whom view themselves as grassroots environmentalists, deployed a polemical film and junk science to scare people.

Late last month, my friend and former colleague at the New York Times, Felicity Barringer, reported that opponents to wireless smart meters, used to improve energy efficiency, are fighting a plan to install the devices, accusing them of causing cancer. Electromagnetic radiation from the meters, say critics, can injure living tissue, though multiple studies have failed to conclusively link such radiation to human disease. Sitting in front of the television years on end, for example, can certainly produce pyschic and bodily harm. But it won’t be from the electromagnetic radiation produced by the appliance.

That won’t mollify opponents, of course, who advance the “be safe rather than sorry” view of risk management, regardless of what the science says, especially if they ideologically oppose new technology. I’ve interviewed activists charged up about the purported risks of electromagnetic radiation. A few talked to me from their cellphones.

You recall, if you read this blog, that fraud science was also used in the struggle over a wood biomass gasification plant in Traverse City. Instead of embracing a utility proposal to build a state-of-the-art energy plant, a clean renewable proposal that would provide 10 mw of electricity and replace an equal measure of dirty coal-fired power, the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council fought the plan. The Traverse City-based group, using a couple of hectoring regional residents and some out-of-state activists touting rubbish science, built a fear-based campaign that accused the utility of proposing an industrial monster. The high-tech plant, about as big as a bakery, was said by opponents to be a grave risk to public health, would slaughter the forests, and disturb the peace. The region’s two major news publications and broadcast media embraced the activist message and the plan died in June.

At the time I noted that the bitter language and hyperbolic authoritarian tone of the Traverse City greens, some of whom I’d worked with for years, sounded a lot to me like the language of the local Tea Party. Felicity reports the same phenomenon is occurring in northern California, where greens are trumping up charges of health consequences over the use of smart devices that Tea Party activists view as a threat to privacy.

You wonder how the United States can progress when so many people share the same nervous view of the future?

– Keith Schneider

Duke Energy, which last month merged with Progress Energy to become the nation’s largest electric utility, proposes to build a 112-turbine, $360 million wind farm in four rural townships in Benzie and Manistee counties. The company, in its public statements, says it hopes to begin construction in the spring of 2012. Duke also says it has reached binding leasing agreements with landowners who own 10,000 to 11,000 acres of the 16,000 acres in Duke’s wind development zone.

The proposal has stirred strong emotions here, prompting two townships to issue wind construction moratoriums, and leading two citizen opposition groups to form. Support or opposition to the Duke proposal transcends politics, income levels, residency, age, or any other conventional means to measure public opinion.

My own view is that the project, carefully and intelligently sited, is a good thing for the region. That’s an easy call for me to make given that I just spent three years as communications director for the Apollo Alliance, a proponent of “clean energy, good jobs,” and the U.S. Climate Action Network, which is convinced about the science of climate change. It’s clear to me that wind, solar, nuclear and other non-fossil fueled  energy sources represent a sound response to the warming earth. I also am convinced that the new public and private revenue that the project generates is a plus for families, job growth, and local governments.

But my experience seeking to site new renewable energy projects in this region, and the entirely unscientific poll I’ve conducted with friends and neighbors in Benzie and Manistee counties, indicates to me that Duke will be lucky to build one new turbine.

Resistance is High
With the exception of landowners who seek to gain $20,000 or more a year in lease payments for every wind turbine sited on their ground, the resistance to the towers is powerful. They are seen as too big, too loud, too intrusive, and too much of a threat to property values and this region’s small town way of life. Moreover the people I know, including myself, who view the wind power project as an important step to leverage the new energy markets of the 21st century, harvesting new public and private income and cleaner energy, are not likely to jump into the policy and advocacy ring.

My involvement, for instance, is likely to solely focus on reporting new developments. The narrative of Duke’s proposal, whether they succeed or not, is a story about this region and this country.

Last week, following my “Afraid of the Wind” post, I received several messages from two smart friends who have differing views of the Gail Windpower Project.

Two Lawyers, Two Views
Jim Olson, a friend who was raised in Traverse City, now lives up the road in Honor, and is routinely recognized by his peers as one of the country’s best environmental lawyers, supports wind energy, but is reserving judgment on the Gail wind project.

“I support wind energy in our region, including the places where the wind is, the coastal areas,” he writes. “This does not mean I support Duke Energy’s project as proposed.  To date, I do not and will not until I see more of whether and how Duke Energy will work with local landowners, communities, and those from whom they are leasing the location to exploit the wind.  In addition, I see wind as a commons, in which all should share in some way. So I’m still thinking through what this looks like with the large, centralized corporate, big wind turbine model.

“As I said in my emails and elsewhere, I prefer a lower more appropriate wind turbine/ or wind generation in our region, including community wind projects and I believe Congress and our state legislature must provide an equivalent or even playing field through tax incentives for all of us, not just Duke or big energy.

“The dilemma for some about this project is the lack of subsidies and legal structure for alternative wind energy projects, such as community, lower scale, and residential,” Jim wrote. ” To be sure there are some tax breaks for residential and others businesses, but little structure for community smaller call electrical utility wind energy operations.”

“Under current tax, financial, and legal conditions it is next to impossible for these alternatives to make much headway,” Jim continued.  “Hence, the country, and communities like Arcadia/Frankfort are faced with either “yes” or “no” in participating in the nation’s commitment, an absolutely necessary one, to renewable wind energy – energy independence, non-fossil fuels, mitigation of climate change effects that undoubtedly will occur and worsen if nothing is done.

“So we need to support wind turbines,” Jim added. ” This is because of climate change and because there are significant tax subsidies that make them real; but the local area accepting the effects from large scale operations, like Duke’s, must receive open-minded measures that minimize impacts, address land use, and level the playing field, sort of speak, in the social justice sense, due to lack of options and alternatives.

“The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the cross-effects of competing subsidies for wind turbine versus unconventional fossil fuel development in the west.  Clearly, these subsidies, along with any for so-called “clean coal” have to go or be reduced, which is a political impossibility it seems, for now anyway. Otherwise, Duke simply takes subsidies for all, including wind, and uses those major economic cash inflows to keep burning coal and other fossil fuels.”

Arcadia’s Friend
Tom Carr, a friend who owns a lovely home in Arcadia Township, and a lawyer whose family has summered along the northern coast of Lake Michigan here for generations, sent a thoughtful essay encompassing his opposition. “The likelihood is that the vast majority of Arcadia residents and visitors would support harnessing wind energy if it could be done economically and without significant “collateral damage” to the local environment.”

Tom wrote: “I am a 3rd generation property owner in Northwestern Lower Michigan, my grandfather having begun coming to the area in 1920 or so.  My views are those of my own family, my brother, my sister, our 9 adult children and their families.  Of that group, 6 own property on the lakefront or overlooking Arcadia.  I believe my thoughts mirror those of the vast majority of property owners in and visitors to Arcadia Township.

“The reality is that “large scale operations” of any kind don’t belong in these areas, whether wind farms or hog farms.

“While our nation may need to have a commitment to renewable energy, that doesn’t necessarily mean that as a nation we have to have an “absolutely necessary” commitment to renewable wind energy (or, necessarily, any commitment to wind energy), versus to solar energy, nuclear energy, or other alternatives to carbon based energy sources, or that any such commitment is so important as to diminish to the status of petty irritants the collateral damage than may occur to areas in which renewable energy projects are located.

“It may be possible to identify relatively remote areas of Arcadia, Blaine, Pleasanton and Joyfield Townships where placement of 112, 495-foot-high industrial wind turbines is feasible.  However, there is no place for such installations in the “valley” of Arcadia or on the surrounding ridge lines.

“Perhaps the turbines can be located in remote areas of the Townships, so as to significantly alleviate or eliminate altogether the aesthetic, health, tourism and support services and blade flicker issues.  Even if that is the case, though, as conditions precedent to commencing construction, Duke should be required to compensate adjoining property owners for diminution in their property values and provide surety for the cost of removal and restoration.

“I am part of an extended family that has enjoyed the area for more than 90 years, has major emotional and financial commitments to it, wants to see the beauty, serenity, and way of life continue unabated. I feel no more obligation to put any of what I  –  and, for example, my siblings and the 9 families in the next generation of the Carr clan  –  value in Arcadia at risk to support “our nation’s commitment . . . to renewable wind energy” than I believe that residents of the Grand Traverse region would if the project were to be sited on Old Mission Peninsula or any of us would were it to be sited on the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

“To the contrary, I will work others to see that the project does not impinge upon our valley or the surrounding ridge lines, and will happily support like-minded people in the other affected townships.”

– Keith Schneider

The Michigan Land Use Institute this week posted a strong report, and a rich archive of supporting material, that raises important questions about the credibility of assertions that “infrasound” generated by utility-scale wind turbines produces dangerous health consequences. The article, by MLUI managing editor Jim Dulzo, a former colleague and a journalist who knows his way around complex issues, notes that opponents of big wind farms, including the 112-turbine, $360 million project proposed for Benzie and Manistee counties here in northwest Michigan, have embraced the unproven thesis to stop wind development in their regions.

Dulzo writes, “Two local groups opposed to the project, Citizens for Responsible Wind Development and the Arcadia Wind Study Group, base their push for mile-plus setbacks on a self-published book by New York pediatrician Nina Pierpont. She claims her “natural experiment” shows that wind turbine infrasound causes serious health problems, and that mile-plus setbacks are necessary. Wind opponents nationwide now routinely use her claim to push for big, project-killing setbacks.

“Dr. Pierpont’s theory, however, has little research other than her own to back it up, even though she has been promoting it aggressively since at least 2005. In the past 13 months, her infrasound-based “wind turbine syndrome” theory has drawn strong criticism from two panels of acoustic scientists and medical doctors who formally investigated it. And a 40-year infrasound research veteran is urging policy makers to ignore unfounded worries about low-frequency sound and, instead, concentrate on protecting people from sounds they can actually hear.”

The annals of environmental dispute in America, of course, are rich in the narrative of hyperbole, fear, and irony. Years ago one of the most prominent environmental leaders in the United States urged me to curtail my reporting on new evidence showing that dioxin, a byproduct of chemical combustion, was much less dangerous to people than previously thought. He argued that trace levels of the compound could cause high levels of human cancers and other maladies, and that such reporting would stir government to loosen regulatory standards. He made his case while lighting a tobacco pipe and inhaling deeply.

Mixing fear with scientific bombast, though, has now become the toxic tactical brew of choice for opponents of renewable and clean energy development here in northern Michigan. Early last year, during my three-month stint as a communications consultant, Traverse City Light and Power’s proposal to build a clean, high-tech, 10mw wood biomass gasification plant was defeated by an opposition campaign based on fear and ginned up science. Essentially, said opponents, the plant would use so much wood as to “slaughter” the forests.  And its particulate emissions, though controlled by state-of-the-art equipment, would generate innumerable respiratory illnesses, said critics.

Neither assertion was true. The Grand Traverse region, mind you, is so rich in wood fuel that a good number of those same opponents burn wood to heat their homes in stoves and furnaces with no pollution or particulate control at all. Nevertheless, the TCLP biomass plant was seen by opponents as tantamount to constructing a nerve gas factory in the center of town.

Jeff Smith, the respected editor of Traverse Magazine, wrote a careful evaluation of the disappointing episode in the November 2010 issue that describes his own dismay with the tactics and the outcome. “Maybe you are thinking the business community did this because they feared higher power rates from a naively ambitious but costly green energy plan,” Smith writes. “Not so. The people driving the ballot initiatives and the people whose opposition killed the 30 by 20 goal view themselves as environmentalists, and what raised their ire was that TCLP wanted to build, or at least seriously evaluate building, a wood gasification power plant—wood being a renewable energy source.”

Citizens concerned about industrial development have every right to express themselves and to debate the merits and risks of big projects. The four Benzie and Manistee townships that are the targets of Duke Power’s big wind proposal unfold across a landscape of forests, orchards, clean streams, and Great Lakes vistas (see pix above) unrivaled in Michigan and the Midwest. The wind towers Duke wants to spread across 12,000 to 16,000 acres would establish a new and visually dominant industrial corridor along U.S. 31 at the southern entrance to Benzie County, and northern entrance to Manistee.

A good number of people — some summer folks, others retirees and long-time residents — very clearly see a phalanx of wind towers as the geography of abomination, a threat to property values, and a wicked insult to the little towns and the woods and fields that surround them. Others view the new electrical generating zone as an income producer, a statement of modernization and change, a curtain-raiser for a new era of clean power for the region, state, and nation. What the wind turbines clearly won’t do, as Jim Dulzo’s article reports, is produce infrasound that jeopardizes human health.

– Keith Schneider

Earlier this month, on a snowy afternoon, the newly renovated Garden Theater held the largest crowd I’ve ever seen indoors in the small Lake Michigan coastal town of Frankfort, with the exception of girls and boys basketball games. On tap that day was a polemical documentary film, “Windfall.” Two groups of citizen activists held the screening to build civic momentum in opposition to a good-sized utility-scale windfarm proposed for Benzie and Manistee counties.

Afterwards the big crowd, composed principally of local residents, many of whom I have known for years, heard from Ray Franz, the newly-elected Republican state House Representative, and from Elizabeth Wheatley, an assistant professor of sociology at Grand Valley State University in Allendale.

The film and the post-screening remarks by Franz and Wheatley also were unrelentingly critical. Franz announced his intention to campaign for dismantling the state energy tax credits, state renewable energy standards, and other public investments and policies that attracted Duke Energy to consider building 112 utility-scale wind turbines in our beautiful and gusty corner of the country. He essentially said such measures were a waste and an overreach by government to influence free markets. Wheatley described attending the first-ever international symposium on the health effects of wind power, held in Ontario in October. She reported, based on anecdotal evidence she collected, that low-level sound waves from wind turbines could cause spontaneous abortions in farm animals.

I’ll be writing about the fate of Duke Energy’s $360 million proposed clean energy investment in future postings. For background, Glenn Puit of the Michigan Land Use Institute just posted a first-rate assessment of the project and the issues. Jim Dulzo, the Institute’s managing editor, is readying an online report for Sunday that is meant to clarify some of the science related to wind turbines and health effects.

More significant to me is what that January 16 event illustrates about the condition of our community, and in a larger sense,  our country. Stripped to its core, the meaning of that event is this: We’re afraid of the wind.

I’ve spent a career documenting in precise detail the consequences, unintended and otherwise, of technology scaled up and applied across industrial sectors. In March, 1979 I covered the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, watching as General Public Utilities engineers vented radioactive gases to prevent a hydrogen-fueled explosion that could have torn the top off the melted reactor’s containment vessel.

Ten years later I was in Valdez, Alaska, reporting on a drunken Exxon captain who’d been asleep when the bottom of his tanker was ripped open on a reef that every sea captain on Earth knew was there and had been studiously able to avoid. The rest of that assignment, and two more to Alaska, focused on the aquatic effects of crude oil in cold maritime environments, and the cultural fracturings all that oil prompted in Cordova and the other fishing villages of Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

Fifteen years after that I took clear note of the changes in northern Michigan’s snow sports industry as a result of warming temperature. And four years later reported on the 12-year drought in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, the nation’s pimary food-growing region, where entire farm sectors were being put out of business by the most visible example of the effects of climate change in any industrial nation.

In between all of this my pen, notebook, now laptop computer and IPhone, traversed the various risk-benefit, economic, scientific, and political experts, the grassroots activist offices, corporate suites, and major media newsrooms that form the basic geography of vigorous environmental dispute in the U.S. I’ve explored in too many published words to remember, as well as broadcast interviews and public speeches the gathered facts about the toxicity of farm chemicals, the wisdom of introducing genetically-engineered organisms into the environment, the safety of burying radioactive wastes in underground dumps in New Mexico and Nevada, the hazards of nuclear weapons production and disposal, the cost and risks of incinerating dioxin-contaminated wastes, just to name a few.

The decades of the late 20th century and the earliest years of the 21st that formed the heart of my career were largely defined by the central idea of American environmentalism. The industrial world was a danger to air, water, land, wild creatures and people. But sound law, effective regulation, civic activism, and strong reporting could be applied to substantially reduce the risk. America, in short, showed itself capable of mitigating harm, cleaning up pollution, and preserving the wild places that supported the nation’s natural diversity. I have lived for 20 years in northwest Michigan, a clean and beautiful place that proved the effectiveness and value of these ideas.

I just never thought we’d be afraid of the wind.

More than three years ago my work shifted to a new path fostered by the understanding that climate change, national security risks, and the nation’s crying need for innovation to spark job growth represented a remarkable opportunity for environmentalism. One of the most important solutions for the warming planet, oil-related wars, and new jobs was pursuing clean energy development here at home. Nature offered an answer in unlimited quantities of energy from the sun, the wind, the earth (geothermal), and from converting plants to fuel. Applying our intelligence to harvest these sources, including producing cars that didn’t need oil-based fuels, represented a much safer way of conducting our affairs.

The basic construct of a transition to new energy sources seems sound. By no means, though, are Americans convinced about the benefits or the risks. As I noted in an earlier post this week, Republicans are suspicious of the science of climate change and ideologically opposed to public investment in clean energy. Grassroots activists are resisting construction of clean energy projects of scale all over the country and especially here in Michigan. Most everybody else is hardly paying attention, driven instead by concerns about job security, falling incomes, the price of gasoline, their liberal neighbors, their conservative neighbors, China, terrorism, you name it.

Boiled down, the country is expressing its fear of the future. Fear is the dominant American emotion of our time. Fear could halt a major clean energy investment in my home county and has already done so in many others across the country.

How is it that a nation so fearless that it put a man on the moon, built an interstate highway system, protected civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights, made industrial workers the highest paid on Earth, instituted an environmental protection program that grew the economy eight-fold, strengthened its great universities, and elected a black president has become immobilized? How is it that we’ve become afraid of the wind?

– Keith Schneider

At the national level America’s environmental movement is in a period of befuddlement. Not exactly a giant mope. But with the big issue of the day — how to gain ground on reducing carbon emissions linked to global warming — the policy and campaign staffs of the big national groups are tagging along as political momentum to deal with climate emmissions is stalled at best, or shifting to reverse.

In Tianjin this month progress was measured in diplomatic centimeters. In the U.S., almost every Republican running for governor or national office is campaigning on a platform that insists the scientific evidence for climate change is specious.

The regional and local wings of the movement, though, display no such confusion. While their national colleagues push hard for limits on climate emissions and m0re clean energy investment, local groups in dozens of states are pushing back with active civic campaigns to block those very same clean technologies. Though there are exceptions, dozens of big clean energy and renewable projects — solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, biomass, and transmission lines — are encountering protests, lawsuits, and popular opposition led by environmental groups.

More evidence was documented earlier this month in the New York Times in an article by Felicity Barringer. In the hours after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved a new solar thermal power plant on federal land in California’s Imperial Valley, local greens announced they would step up their opposition. Felicity, a Times colleague of mine in the 1980s and 1990s, reported that Basin and Range Watch, a regional environmental group concerned about the Sonoran and Mojave deserts said this about the plant:  “The project will scrape 10 square miles of habitat for flat-tailed horned lizards, burrowing owls, Pensinsular bighorn sheep and rare plants. Hundreds of cultural sites will be destroyed.” The group’s Web site says it supports renewable energy, but only in certain places.”

Todd Woody reported in Yale Environment 360 last February on local green group influence in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to secure a large chunk of the Mojave as a preserve in order to block new solar development.

Nick Cain reported in Circle of Blue in August on how big solar thermal power plants were inviting opposition from the Sierra Club because of how much land they needed for operations.

And here on Mode Shift, I’ve reported on the gathering opposition at the grassroots to big and small clean energy plants including solar. My interest was stirred by the fierce opposition to a high-tech biomass plant proposed by Traverse City Light and Power, a local northern Michigan utility that asked me to help develop a public engagement campaign in support of generating 30 percent renewable energy by 2020. Green opponents, armed with the same kind of fear and anti-science hysteria that characterizes Tea Party campaigning, stopped the plant and the 30 by 2020 goal cold. The default position: more coal.

– Keith Schneider