The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

First, a coal mine explodes in West Virginia. Twenty five miners are lost.  Then, an oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven lives are sacrificed to Oil (Big Oil). Meanwhile, two gas pipelines explode in Texas (large ones, as befits the Lone Star State), and three are dead. The gas explosions go unreported — the mainstream news media are too occupied with the continued exuberance of Mother Nature in the Gulf. Everyone is fuming about BP (British Petroleum) taking shortcuts to drill, baby, drill 15,000 feet into the seabed under 5,000 feet of water, with no Plan B in the event of a blowout. The multinational oil companies altruistically don’t raise the price of gasoline. Maybe they were afraid the enmity towards BP might spread to Exxon, Chevron, and the rest.

Some few folks ask why we are still burning oil to make electricity and run our cars, trucks, and trains, instead of saving what little oil is still easily accessible to make hi-strength plastic for airplane wings and hi-flex plastic for bungee-jumping ropes. The common sense folks note that there is enough wind on our mountains & ridges and across the Great Plains to supply power for the entire Western Hemisphere.

• Big Oil says it will be years before we can bring enough wind mills on line to replace oil and gas.
• Never mind that a line of big-blade wind turbines can be put up in a matter of months.
• Oh, but we don’t have the transmission lines to bring electricity from the Midwest to the cities of the east & west coasts.
• Why not, at least, start with Chicago, the windy city? And, why not Green Bay and Duluth, too.  There must be either on-shore or off-shore winds on the Great Lakes most of the time.
• Why not give Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, a couple of billion to develop new efficient batteries that can store all the electricity generated by the wherever wind. Bolivia has 50% of all the lithium in the world.
• And, what about the birds that are killed by the whacking long blades of the new windmills, the ends of which travel faster than any bird can fly?
• Oh, you oil men are slippery. Suddenly you are worried about birds, but not about polar bears or the endangered short-tailed albatross as global heating hits the Arctic.
• Well, what  do we do about the Kennedy clan who won’t like the looks of giant wind turbines off the shores of Martha’s Vineyard?
• For the playgrounds of the rich and powerful south of Massachusetts, there are many small wind turbines of helical design that would threaten neither birds nor aesthetic sensibilities. These designer contrivances  could be mounted on roofs of art galleries and in the backyards of beach houses on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The concept of distributed generation on the islands can bring celebrity to a clean, renewable  alternative to the fossil fuels.
• But windmills are so 18th century. It would be embarrassing to rely on windmills in this age of instancy.
• Isn’t oil a fossil fuel? Doesn’t coal, a sister fossil fuel that presently produces half the electricity in the US, also go back to the 18th century?

Wind power has come up with enough innovative designs and ideas for harnessing enough energy for a hot tub in every home. The different wind turbines have various blade types, many with helical design, and most spin with all wind directions. Here is a partial compendium:

•  The Quiet Revolution has helical blades on a vertical axis and looks like a work of sculpture that could stand outside an art museum. They’re deciding whether to call it Qr5 or XCO2. Gadfly votes for the latter.

• The Wind Spire is nine meters tall and has thin vertical blades connected to the top and bottom of a central axis with several horizontals that also function as blades. It spins at a wide range of wind speeds. As sculpture, it is not distinguished, but to harness the wind, it is beautiful.

• The Starck Compact is small, simple in design and, best of all, inexpensive — about $3500.

• The FloDesign has multiple blades and looks like a fan-jet engine. The turbine can operate over a wide range of wind speeds. Maybe they are recycling old fan jet engines.

• The Japanese Loop Wing is mounted on a horizontal axis and can spin in winds as low as 1.6 mph. Parts of the framework look to have no function. But, East Asians are known to be inscrutable.

• The British Egg Beater, with three vertical blades 14 feet high, can spin at even slow wind speeds, and despite its silly looks, is reportedly highly efficient.

• The Wind Bridge has five paddle wheels mounted on a long horizontal axis. Paddle wheels? How 18th century, but it seems to work in the prevailing wind stream above small river valleys.

The above are some of the designs of wind turbines that are set upon the earth. Another series is airborne — a logical concept inasmuch as wind velocity generally increases with height above the earth. Way up where jetliners travel, the jet stream is pretty much constant and not influenced by the vagaries of the weather. Rather, the wind is driven by the density gradient between the air masses of the Equatorial and Polar Regions and as a reaction to the rotation of the Earth. The Gadfly Revelry & Research gang says they only vaguely understand the physics of it, but it’s the simplest explanation they can offer. They say “Ask us about politics.” At any rate, the engineers and inventors got busy and came up with a few ideas so we could inherit the (real) wind and forget the metaphor.

• Magenn Power proposes to tether inflatable turbines 1000 feet high where the wind is better. The first blimp is to be over Ottawa. [Magenn is a Canadian company.] Pakistan and India are fighting (verbally) over who will get the second one. The two countries will fight over most anything.

•  Sky WindPower, • Laddermill, • KiteGen, and • Makani, all have designed kite turbines to be flown at high altitudes to harness the winds of the jet stream. They all project the cost of electricity at 1¢ to 2¢ per kilowatt hour. What do you say to that , dirty coal? (shown – Chetwood Associates)

With all these ways to harness wind power, there will be an occasional glitch as each comes on line. It’s Murphy’s Law. But none will bring us explosions, fires, oil spills, chemical pollution of aquifers, or nuclear meltdowns. Insurance costs will be minimal. So, why not fast track matters with government grants and loan guarantees for companies developing and commercializing wind power? Why not rebates on wind mills and property tax reductions for home owners and small business proprietors who install such clean renewable energy? The World Bank and the IMF must have a few billion dollars to spare. Changing their mandates to support only clean renewables should be an easy matter.