Wind power's not wind energy

Chris Stimpson and the Clean Power Now organization are so obsessed by their support for the wind farm in Nantucket Sound that they have lost all objectivity. His guest commentary on March 9, a condescending discourse on ocean-based windmills versus land-based windmills, uses a mathematical formula interwoven with the typical mocking NIMBY invectives we have come to expect to make his point.

However, the fact that he and his formula totally miss is that it is not power in terms of Watts that is important; it is Energy in terms of Kilowatt Hours that is essential for any power source to be viable. The promoters of the Nantucket Sound wind farm use the word Power (kilowatts) to hide the fact that the Energy (kilowatt hours) produced by windmills is unreliable and cannot generate the constant power required by power grids because its source, the wind, is unreliable and constantly varies.

Mr. Stimpson states deﬁnitively that the average wind speed over the Shoal is 19 mph. Sounds impressive. But, it is not possible to run the Northeast Power Gird on averages. When you apply his formula (P = 1⁄2 rV3A) to the varying winds over the Sound you ﬁnd that as the wind speed decreases from his 19 mph average to half that, his output of 6859 Watts will be reduced by the cube of the wind speed: i.e. 1⁄2 x 1⁄2 x 1⁄2 to only 12.5 percent or 857 Watts, and that fact, that Law of Nature which you will never hear from the wind farm proponents, is why wind energy can never replace traditional power generation plants to any signiﬁcant extent.

E.ON Netz GmbH, the largest grid operator in Germany, and the largest manager of wind facilities with over 7,000 wind mills, had this to say in their Wind Report 2005: "Wind energy cannot replace conventional power stations to any signiﬁcant degree." "The more wind power capacity is in the grid, the lower the percentage of traditional generation it can replace." Consequently, traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90 percent of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently on line. Also, due to wind gusts, wind energy causes other facilities on the grid to operate less efﬁciently, thus less clean.

This probably isn't enough to silence the cleaninexhaustiblejobproducingrenewablepowersourcereducerelianceonimportedoilandgas mantra we hear so often. Sorry, funny how those tend to run together. Frankly, for the billion-dollar price tag there are more effective ways to increase production, clean up the atmosphere and conserve energy than building 130 windmills in Nantucket Sound. If being concerned about preserving a fragile environment from the encroachment of industrialization is NIMBYism, then Cape Wind Associates, who certainly knows how ineffective large-scale wind installations are, is at best a New Robber Baron.

Barry J Thompson

A council or efﬁciency experts?

The Council response to the recall effort in Precinct 6 seems to be taking the same low road as the bloggers who support the recall. What happened to the days when people actually spoke and discussed issues in person? Methinks modern electronics are doing our society a disservice with our cell phones, e-mails and Blackberrys.

When I speak at town council or write letters to your paper, I represent only myself as a concerned taxpayer in Hyannis.

Without Eugenia Fortes, our town is losing day by day to a governing body is more concerned with the speed of its sessions than their quality.

Wake up, voters. This is your government, believe it or not. You receive what you vote for at the polling place. That, is if you at least bother to vote

John D. Alden