WINDMILLS A Disputed Treasure
	November 2003

by Chris Scott
Photos by Brad Shifflett

The windmill farms lining the sides of the approaches to Altamont Pass are part of the Altamont Wind Resource Area. The graceful structures provide one of the most impressive visual experiences in the East County. Over 6,000 of these wind turbines cover the hillsides, and on sunny, windy days they delight passing motorists with their twirling, twinkling, dancing movement.

New Use of Ancient Technology
The windmills on Altamont Pass, driving turbines and generating electricity, have a history going back almost 800 years. The first windmills, appearing in 12th Century Europe, replaced animal power in grinding wheat or corn.

Windmills were most famously used in the Netherlands to pump out the water behind the dikes in order to reclaim rich farmland from the bottom of the sea.

Windmills were a familiar feature on the landscape of the American West throughout the 20th Century. They provided electricity for farms and ranches before the coming of rural electrification. They irrigated fields and pumped water into tanks for livestock.

People have always appreciated the inherent beauty of windmills. Old Dutch Masters captured their haunting appearance in a number of famous paintings. Thousands of pictures of rural America show the struts and veins of a windmill standing in somber loneliness in the corner of a meadow or farmyard.

Even casual observers note that the windmills are of two radically different designs. The “horizontal axis” design windmills, with distinctive propeller blades, are by far the most common. Interspersed among them, the “vertical axis” windmills twirl their odd eggbeater blades. The Altamont windmills are one of three major windmill regions in California. The other two include Tehachapi and San Gorgonio.

The great numbers of windmills came into being because a former Californian tax incentive made building these things a wonderfully profitable enterprise for shrewd investors. Many of them are currently in a state of disrepair. Others still continue to spin merrily around, making their contribution to California’s exploding need for energy. New models of more efficient design are replacing the older ones.

Under the Hood
Any windmill will run at about 50% efficiency or less. (Sometimes far less.) You might imagine that the faster the windmill turns the more energy it produces. This is not the case.

Most wind-powered generating systems are designed to produce constant power within a limited range of wind speeds. For example, a turbine might increase in efficiency until the wind speed reaches about 30 MPH, at which point power generation reaches maximum efficiency, producing, for example, 250 kilowatts.

From that point on, the generator produces the same 250 kilowatts no matter how much harder the wind blows. When wind speeds reach 60 MPH, or so, the windmill must be stopped before it spins itself into pieces.

What They Accomplish
One question many people who drive by the windmills must ask themselves is, “How much energy does a windmill actually generate?” Another question is, “How much do California windmills contribute towards meeting the State’s power demands?”

Altogether there are about 3,200 windmills in California producing, in ideal wind conditions, about 300 megawatts of power. To put this in perspective, it would take four times more windmills (12,800) to produce output equal to an average size nuclear facility.

To put this in more understandable terms, each windmill can generate enough electricity to operate about 20 houses. In other words, the wind farms in the Altamont Hills should be capable of supplying enough electricity to serve 64,000 California households annually.

Picturing windmills’ accomplishments on a macro scale, the power output of all of California’s windmills operating at peak efficiency would generate enough power to meet the requirements of the State of Connecticut.

Wind Power — An Elegant Solution
Who could ever object to building windmills? They seem to offer a perfect, if not complete, solution to the problem of California’s terrific energy appetites. Not only are they delightful to see, but they take no fuel and consume no resources. They provide energy at no cost beyond initial development and occasional maintenance.

The advantages of wind power provide a strong case for deployment:

• Wind power is cheap (only coal is cheaper).
• Wind power is easy to implement quickly. (Environmental studies only take a year, plus about six months for installation.)
• No one owns the wind — not Exxon or OPEC.
Nevertheless, the use of windmills for generating power is coming under strong, even shrill, attack by people who claim that the technology is flawed beyond repair.

For one thing, there seems to be lack of agreement about the facts. For example, one opponent declared the cost of wind power to be 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The source declared this to be the highest cost paid for power, and compared it to four cents per kilowatt-hour for nuclear energy. That’s in sharp contrast to the point above that wind power is cheaper than anything except coal.

“Any Way the Wind Blows”
One objection to windmill technology is based upon the fact that windmills necessarily provide only an intermittent supply of power. An obvious limitation of windmills is that the wind actually has to be blowing for them to work. And the wind must blow at least 12 MPH (which, by an interesting coincidence, is the average annual wind speed in the Altamont Pass). On the other hand, windmills can’t work when winds are blowing more than 60 MPH.

Some opponents of wind-based energy point out that the problem is made more severe by the fact that the wind hardly ever blows reliably in the evenings and early mornings, which are the times of peak demand for electricity. Also, during times of exceptional energy demands — those 110° Cornfest days — the windmills can only stand motionless in the hot summer sun.

Strategies have been suggested for stabilizing the supply of energy from wind sources. For example, the suggestion has been made to locate the windmills offshore or to widely diversify the locations on the assumption that winds are bound to be blowing somewhere.

A different kind of solution would be to store the excess energy that is generated during times when the wind is blowing steadily. One suggestion, for example, is to use the extra energy to create hydrogen for fuel cells.

Bird Killing Machines?
The most serious objection raised about the area’s windmills come from the perceived threat they pose to wildlife, particularly to birds. The California Energy Commission reported that windmills in the Altamont Pass kill more than 30 golden eagles per year. Since golden eagles are listed as endangered species, this apparently is a serious threat indeed. Particularly venomous foes of windmill technology have gone so far as to refer to windmills as “the Cuisinarts of the air.”

Unfortunately, the Altamont windmills actually pose the worst threat to birds of all the windmill sites in the U.S. Many of the current windmills still use old technology and the ones in the Pass itself are unfavorably situated near bird flyways. Critics of the industry, in fact, reportedly use figures from the Altamont windmills in order to extrapolate skewed bird mortality rates for the entire industry.

Responding to Critics
Some environmentalists maintain that windmill farms are less destructive to wildlife if they are not built in bird flyways. That raises another problem, however, since deserted areas where the winds blow most strongly tend to be precisely the places where bird flyways are most apt to be.

Defenders of windmill technology counter the objection by pointing out that other forms of energy probably damage bird populations even more. Strip mining for coal, for example, reduces bird habitats. Toxic emissions from power plants threaten all kinds of wildlife and contribute to the climate changes coming from the burning of fossil fuel. Some environmentalists agree, claiming that the problem is overstated.

Proponents of wind technology also point out that even though birds might sometimes crash into windmill blades, they find other ways to die every day. They fly into windows, get run over by vehicles, are sucked into jet engines, and are shot. Windmills are a concern to environmentalists, but not higher than the other dangers on their list of threats to wildlife. Experts from the Audubon Society claim to be more concerned about the thousands of new communication towers that are planned for construction in the next few years than they are about windmills.

Also, experts point out that the threat windmills pose to birds is negligible compared to the damage done to birds by loss of habitat and by the nation’s 40 million domestic cats. The Cato Institute (which is funded by revenues from the oil industry) calculates that if all the power needs in the U.S. were met by windmills, the turbines would kill 4.4 million birds a year. Environmentalists question that figure, but even if the figures were accepted as true, they point out that the number would still be minor compared to the number of birds killed every year by our nation’s cats.

The apparently fuzzy thinking of people who are funded by oil interests leaping to the defense of birds, causes some environmentalists to question the motives of people who use bird deaths in lobbying for the destruction of windmills rather than, for example, lobbying for mandatory muzzling of cats. An Audubon spokesman made the bold comment, “I think they (the critics) are being disingenuous. I don’t think they’re worried about birds at all.”

It should also be noted that defenders of windmill technology claim newer windmills to be more bird friendly than the older technology. “In general, the wind energy industry has substantially reduced bird deaths and has been successful in addressing the problem,” one Audubon representative said.

Whichever side is right in the ongoing dispute between wind power advocates and detractors, most of us appreciate the windmills as at least a visual treasure. Many of us East County residents relish opportunities to view these things scattered across the hillsides like a forest of magical trees. And when the blowing wind sends the windmills twirling and dancing together, some of us might joyfully rephrase Wordworth’s old poem:

And then my heart with rapture fills
And dances with the great windmills.

I guess that’s bad poetry, but it is an accurate summary of my actual feelings on some sunny mornings.