August 10, 2010, 11:06 am
Beyond Fossil Fuels: Costs and Benefits
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Wind turbines have become part of the landscape in much of Europe over the last five years. They dot roads in Sweden. You see them on the fast train from Madrid to Barcelona. I saw them last weekend as I drove through the heel of Italy on a brief vacation. Even the most ardent environmentalists here accept their white swirling presence as being worth it for the relatively cheap, clean energy they deliver.
During my reporting for Tuesday’s article in The Times on Portugal’s renewable energy transformation, I ran into a woman named Margit Kegel, 50, who had relocated 25 years ago from her native Germany to Portugal’s remote and blustery Alentejo coast to raise sheep and to live “off the grid.” Instead, she now lives in the middle of it: there are 25 towering, whipping wind turbines on the hills around her farm. “For me I thought this land was much nicer before, but you need this kind of energy,” she said with a shrug.
Portugal’s energy transformation has relied heavily on land-based wind power, often twinned with hydropower. My article invokes Portugal’s experience as a way of sizing up the costs and benefits of renewable energy. In coming months we will return to this theme again and again in a series of articles titled “Beyond Fossil Fuels.”
This year the International Energy Agency classified onshore wind as “potentially cost-competitive” with fossil fuels for the first time. But as the agency noted, that calculation varies greatly depending on what alternative energy sources are available.
Does a country have a domestic supply of fossil fuel? (Portugal did not.) Does it have good wind resources — that is, is it sufficiently windy to make the investment in turbines pay off? Does its government factor the cost of pollution or emissions into the price of power? (Europe effectively tries to do that through its emissions trading system.)
The cost-benefit analysis for renewable energy varies, depending on the technology used, and is different for Europe and for the United States. But even this is a broad generalization, as the cost-benefit equation for renewable energy depends very strongly on highly local factors.
Portugal is tiny compared with the United States as a whole. But think of Plains states like Iowa or Kansas, which import coal from other states for electricity. But do they have to? These are places with plentiful wind resources and prodigious space. Siting wind turbines in either state might be far easier than it was in tiny Portugal. Some energy analysts say that the cost of generating energy from wind is in fact far lower on the Great Plains than it is in Portugal.
So maybe someday we’ll grow more accustomed to seeing turbines in wind-rich states. How would you feel about seeing wind turbines from your home? If you already live near turbines, what is it like?
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