WIND TURBINES The Bargaining Phase of Addiction
I did some thinking after my talk with the president of wpd canada. Ian and his little group of workers were at a meeting last week in Cobalt. It was advertised as an information session but, following the prescribed routine of these things, it was announced, at the last newspaper printing on Friday, that it was a Job Fair, too. So people arrived to find stations around the room with the local Aboriginal Chief (Terrence), the President (Ian) and some other young folks with whom I did not speak. I felt no need to hear but I did get an earful or two this week from residents who were insulted, offended and aghast!
We'll cover the Chief and Timiskaming First Nations after we have a formal visit with them in a couple of weeks. We have a tentative date for the 27th of July at the Tri Town Ski Village if possible. So more on the Aboriginal front later on but suffice it to say that there is an Aboriginal Renewable Energy Fund (which had 250 million added to it last year and now totals over 600 million for just this sort of heartwarming inclusive partnership) and the points gathered for Aboriginal support has been touted world wide as a great little "gimmie" for the guys on top of the turbines!
For now, however, I want to pursue the concept of GREEN.
Ian told me that the interior of wind turbines were made like cars, with the gears and inverter and charge controller all working to send the energy captured by the blades into the electricity grid. He further assured me that the usual vehicles, cranes, transports and graders and tractors would be used to transport, change the landscape and erect the turbines. The photo I found online shows the enormous efforts required to put up a wind turbine and, as we can see, the busy little workers are using masses of fossil fuels and electricity galore to get their GREEN on! Fascinating how we position things in the minds of people to appear to be one thing when they are, in numerical terms, the fiscal opposite. The only Green I see in this photo is the colour of money.
I checked and the blades and bodies are some sort of material made from the usual stuff we have on the planet and the pads are reinforced concrete. Being a logical thinker (most of the time) I started at the bottom with my question about Carbon Footprint.
We did some math here and the resident 'recovering engineer', who used to design steel plants for Stelco in his misspent youth, gave me some information on rebar!
These kilograms of CO2 we will discuss here are per metric ton of finished steel for the rebar used in the base of one wind turbine.
1500 kg CO2 in coke oven and blast furnace (to get the pig iron out of the iron ore)
300 kg CO2 in steel making (boiling out the 4.5% carbon in the pig iron to make it into steel)
1460 kg CO2 in making the rebar from the cast ingots of steel (heating/cooling three times)
So one pad for one turbine creates about 3,260 kg. of CO2 per metric ton of rebar. I can't find our how many tons of rebar they use but I am sure it's a couple of tons based on our calculations for the perimiter foundation of our house.
Adding in the rest of the stuff I mentioned above means our Independent Energy System Operator is awarding contracts to build and install Wind Turbines who's entire life span of 20 (maximum estimated) years at 30 (maximum estimated) % efficiency could NEVER fill in it's own Carbon Footprint. Neither could Solar. And the scary stuff in the Nuke; likewise of course.
So, here's what I have learned after 4 years living without electricity and 9 years of living with tiny little solar panels (100watts increased 4 years ago to 480watts) and a couple of little tanks of propane (not a greenhouse gas as it's been explained to me) each summer since the bugs got so bad after the bats died that we couldn't stand the summer kitchen stove so cooked on a propane stove inside instead.
We have VERY cheap hydro power (5 cents) and ugly wires draped all over the countryside. If people were coherent enough to modify and moderate usage we'd be fine with the existing infrastructure and the already running scary nuke (i mean, it's already there but let's not make more, OK? Same guys thinking this'll work were in charge of that mess, eh...profeshunals!)
We have, in Ontario, in Western Culture, an addiction to comfort, self satisfaction and selfishness (defined as the enjoyment of self at the expense of the other) that makes my old junkie buddies look like "wanna be's".
People want what they want when they want it. Now I am not saying it is easy living within a minimal use of hydro. It would be hard for people and most likely impossible to achieve.
Ian and I talked about that the other nght, too.
He told me that in BC the government of the day tried to get people to voluntarily reduce their use of electricity and there wasn't a notch lower on the meter after a HUGE effort of public encouragement and expenditure. Sad truth is that we are messing everything up faster than we can learn to clean up after ourselves. I feel sick about most of it but my own little efforts have almost always been observed from an "aren't you wonderful but I could never do that", position.
And a bird who fouls it's own nest sits on rotten eggs.
So go turn off your lights and be sure to come to the meeting on Tuesday, July 21st 2015 if you are in the area of the Tri Town Ski Village in the gorgeous Lorrain Valley at 7pm.
Our Group is going to organize and provide everyone with many, many ways to explain to the confused government officials, wacky energy system operators and the confident wind turbine installers why we, The Community of Lorrain Valley, cannot accept their flawed plans to install Wind Turbines on Crown Land in general and in the Lorrain Valley in particular. It's a long shot but then so was I.
Even junkies can get better, eh.
