Poor Planning

Remember way back in 2007, when we tweaked the United Kingdom for building wind farms in areas that don’t get enough wind?

Well, we have a similar problem here now; according an article in Wired magazine, a significant number of turbines in rural areas, especially in west Texas and Iowa, are situated in sparsely populated areas that lack the high-power lines needed to carry electricity back to the big cities where it’s needed.

The problem is so bad that some operators actually have to pay the local utilities to take surplus electricity off their hands, instead of selling the juice they feed into the grid. (Technically, it’s called “negative electricity pricing.”) Wow, that just seems amazingly… dumb.

Why does this happen? Well, here’s the part that does make a little sense. Wind farms take up space, a lot of space, and people in the cities and the suburbs don’t want to devote precious acreage to turbines. Hello, NIMBY politics!

Out in the country, of course, there’s a lot of space, often filled with struggling farmers who see windmills as a potential new source of revenue. Tax subsidies for running wind farms makes turbines even more appealing. But the low populations in these areas (as well in the deserts and other undeveloped areas where wind and solar projects spring up) mean utilities have never built the transmission lines needed to bring the juice back where it’s needed.

One expert says developers can build a wind farm in a year or two, but it takes about five years to install the transmission lines needed to carry the power back to the cities. And that’s assuming there aren’t any bureaucratic headaches getting the rights to string the wires through public and private lands.

The lesson here is that government incentives, like the ones that encourage people to build alt-energy project, are good, but they also need to be smart. And sometimes it seems like “smart” and “planning” are two words that rarely go together.