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New Energy, New Sources (continued...)

May 2003 IBEW Journal

Very Low Maintenance

Journeyman wireman John Young, Local 596 connects switchgear in the base of a windmill.

After IBEW members perform the wiring necessary for construction of the wind farm, Snyder said, there’s not much need for maintenance. "They create a few jobs initially but not like a big coal-fired unit," he said. "It’s like solar energy, once you put it up, you’re basically done."

The intense interest of state and local government officials in alternate energy sources is expected to cause more wind farms to spring up across the country. Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., is already acting to purchase 5 percent of its power from wind farms, which would be among the largest public usage of wind power in the nation. Washington, D.C., which is approximately 200 miles east of the Mountaineer Wind Energy Center, is in violation of federal ozone standards and must set restrictions on traffic, power plant and other emissions by 2004 or risk losing federal transportation funding.

"Diversifying our sources of power is just one of the creative methods that we can use to reduce air pollution," said Montgomery County Councilman George Levanthal, who added that wind energy will help the county meet its energy needs at a reasonable cost to taxpayers. "I am excited that the county will be on the leading edge and I’m confident that other local governments and large energy buyers will also be following our lead."

Not a Big but a Growing Source

Even with the increasing number of projects in various stages of development, wind still represents less than one percent of the energy production in the United States, said Christine Real de Azua of the AWEA.

"It’s not a big industry yet but it’s growing fast," de Azua said. Wind farms are operating in 27 states, producing 4,685 megawatts, enough to serve more than 1.3 million households.

The cost of producing electricity with wind power has come down by more than 80 percent in the past 20 years, encouraging investment by FPL Energy and others. During that time, electronic technology has precipitated an increase in the size of the windmill because the larger the surface area for capturing the wind, the more power it generates.

But wind turbines that large are considered eyesores by people who don’t want to see white towers atop mountains or on windswept coastlines, where they are often the tallest manmade structures for hundreds of miles. Just ask Cape Wind Associates, the developer of a proposed wind farm on New England’s tony vacation destination, Cape Cod. A 130-turbine wind farm on Nantucket Sound has been mired in months of debate. Former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, who owns a home on nearby Martha’s Vineyard, has come out against the project for aesthetic reasons. Even the Mountaineer Wind farm, which was three years in the development, experienced protest from people complaining about what they called "vision pollution."

Although a half dozen more windfarms are proposed for New England, De Azua said the future for wind as an energy resource is likely to be in America’s heartland, where wind projects are usually sited on farmland. "Landowners are eager to lease their land for wind projects," she said. "We get calls here all the time." For each turbine located on a property by a power company, farmers earn approximately $2,000 a year.