Wind farms blow an ill wind

A Senate inquiry into wind farms heard evidence last week that the largest wind farm in Australia, at Waubra, near Ballarat, had been causing health problems for people living close by for the past two years. A doctor treating some told ABC-TV the cause was unknown, but its effect was measurable when the wind farms turbines were operating.

Victoria has the most polluting power station in the world, at Hazelwood, and a deadline of generating 25% of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2020 to meet.

Waubra wind farm operator Acciona Energy told the Senate Inquiry they believed their neighbors health issues were real, but doubted the wind farm by itself caused them. Acciona Energy and other wind farm operators receive government grants through the Renewable Energy Target funding scheme. Another operator told the inquiry complaints about wind farms are so few they should be dismissed out of hand. But the new Liberal Victorian government is proposing a two kilometer buffer around wind farms, a suggestion that outraged environmental activists Friends of the Earth. Spokesperson Cam Walker told the ABC thousands of jobs and billions of dollars are on the line if wind farm operators cannot build near people's homes.

Victoria needs to boost energy supplies to cope with growing demand from an expanding population. The operators of the Hazelwood power station expect to be burning 18 million tonnes of coal each year for the next 25 years or more.

Aside from electricity, wind farms bring wealth and economic activity and steady income to country regions dependent upon the vagaries of drought and flooding rains. Some wind farms are community owned and operated, like the The Hepburn Community Wind Park Cooperative at Leonards Hill, south of Daylesford. As more wind farms are built the State will become more economically productive, and can expect a larger share of tax revenue for effort from the Commonwealth treasury as a result. Everyone is happy, and the establishment of large scale wind farms in regional Victoria looks for all the world like a grass-roots effort toward to a better society.

So why would the new Victorian government rock the boat, and slow the gravy train down?

Almost counter-intuitively, wind farms totter if not on the edge of sustainability then close enough to sweat about falling off.

The sun provides all the world's energy, one way or another. Burning coal and other fossil fuels releases energy stored since the sun shone on a very different, carboniferous age. The sun heats the earth and causes weather, waves, and the wind. While a rustic waterwheel or modern windmill takes some energy from those, the climate has some energy spare.

But energy taken from the weather by wind farms cannot be later put back, and in the opinion of geoscientists

"...climatic effects at maximum wind power extraction are similar in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of atmospheric CO2"

and

"Given that only 0.03 TW of wind-derived electricity was produced in 2008, there is still substantial wind power development possible with relatively minor climatic impacts. However, future plans for large-scale wind power development must recognize the finite potential of the Earth system to generate kinetic wind energy." (pdf)

In other words, wind farms are only sustainable in the short term. If we build too many, the weather will change as if we burned twice the coal we do now. I'll say that again another way. There is a price for everything, and energy is no exception. Only a finite number of wind farms can exist before their numbers take too much energy out of the wind for it to keep on blowing the way it does now.

Australia has an abundance of cheap energy from coal, an accident of luck. But I don't know whether it is just to take wind from the sails of other nations on purpose, getting in first to maintain a comparative advantage.

I wonder what Murray Bookchin would have thought of this wind farm affair. "...the natural world itself is not cooptable. The complexity of organic and climatic processes still defies scientific control, just as the marketplace's drive to expand still defies social control" he wrote in 1991. Bookchin argued that the environmental movement was indistinguishable from economics premised upon a supposedly unavoidable conflict between insatiable needs and scarce natural resources, the so called Dismal Science of Thomas Carlyle.

In Enemy of the People, an 1882 play by Henrik Ibsen about a commercial enterprise that makes people ill, one character asserts that in moral matters the individual is superior to the multitude, which is easily led by demagoguery and the promise of easy money. While Ibsen has long since been claimed by the sisterhood as an early proponent of feminism in A Doll's House, Enemy of the People puts the individual at the centre of things, a distinctly humanist view.

And one that might be shared at the top of a new, Liberal, Victorian Government determined to stamp its mark.

Green politics is a posthuman, if not extropian, anti-humanist project that reverberates with themes of humility, introspection, and passivity consistent with the politics of European Feudalism. Green prophet Arne Næss taught that humans only had potential as part of a diverse whole, the ecosphere, where every thing, human, animal, vegetable and so on, has an equal right to be. I don't think there has been such a mystical political movement as the Greens since the Dark Ages. Which weren't really dark at all, just nothing much changed for hundreds of years.

Anathema to the humanist, reformist administration the Victorian Liberals aspire to be.

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