Association of EnergyEngineers
New York Chapter
February 2011 Newsletter Part 2
Gulf Coast Wind Farms Spring Up, as Do Worries
ByKate Galbraith, The Texas Tribune via NYTimes, Feb 10 2011
SARITA — On the 400,000-acre Kenedy Ranch along the southern Gulf Coast, the wind coming off the water nearly flattops the clusters of oak trees. Towering above the trees, above the long grasses, sand dunes, grazing cattle and the occasional antelope, are scores of wind turbines, each about as tall as a football field is long.
Eddie Seal for The Texas Tribune
Wind turbines tower above the trees at the Iberdrola Renewables wind farm on the Kenedy Ranch.
“It’s always nice to be cranking,” said Daniel Pitts, who manages the wind plant for its owner, Iberdrola Renewables, as the blades spun in the breeze.
The wind farm, which began operating in 2009 and doubled in size last year, reflects the new geography of wind power in Texas, the country’s leading wind state. The vast majority of Texas turbines have gone up in the west, harnessing fierce winds that sweep southward from the plains. But the West Texas projects have been hindered by a lack of transmission lines to carry the power.
Meanwhile, several big wind farms have begun operating in the general vicinity of Corpus Christi in the past few years, and it is likely that more coastal projects are on the way.
“The short term for coastal wind is great,” said Patrick Woodson, the chief development officer for E.ON Climate & Renewables North America, which last year expanded a wind farm that it owns just north of Corpus Christi. “There will be a number of prime sites that get built out in the next two to four years.”
South Texas now accounts for roughly one-ninth of the state’s total wind capacity. A substantial amount of the recent growth on the Texas electric grid, which gets nearly 8 percent of its power from wind, came from the coast, said Barry Smitherman, chairman of the Public Utility Commission. Transmission infrastructure is plentiful along the coast, unlike that in West Texas. And coastal winds are strongest in the afternoons and in the summer, wind experts say. That correlates well to the electric grid’s needs. West Texas winds, although more powerful, tend to blow strongest in the evening and overnight, and in the spring.
But the arrival of turbines along the Gulf shores has spawned a range of concerns, like their impact on birds and coastal habitat and the turbines’ effect on military radar.
“I think it’s a tragedy for the state and the coast,” said Jack Hunt, the former chief executive of the storied 825,000-acre King Ranch, which is next door to the Kenedy Ranch, where Iberdrola and another developer, Pattern Energy, have recently erected wind farms.
A few years ago, the King Ranch teamed with a local chapter of the Audubon Society and other environmental groups and sued — unsuccessfully — to try to stop the Kenedy Ranch wind projects. Mr. Hunt, who remains a consultant to the King Ranch, said the ranch was concerned about the potentially damaging effect on coastal wetlands and wildlife, and was irked that wind farms in Texas could be built essentially without permits.
This part of the Gulf Coast lies along a major migratory bird path, and wind developers say they take extra precautions to guard against bird deaths. Iberdrola and Pattern have installed a new type of radar that is supposed to detect large flocks of approaching birds so the turbines can be turned off at critical times.
Iberdrola has completed the first year of a three-year survey of bird deaths on its coastal wind farm, and it estimates that there have been a handful of bird and bat deaths per turbine. That is in line with turbines elsewhere in the country, said Stu Webster, Iberdrola’s director of wind permitting, who added that no member of an endangered species had been found dead (though some birds have proven impossible to identify).
David Newstead, president of the Coastal Bend Audubon Society, based in Corpus Christi, said that little substantial data on bird deaths had been made public by the wind farms, and that the turbines’ effect “remains a major cause of concern around here.”
The Naval Air Station Kingsville, a training ground for jet pilots, worries about the turbines interfering with its radar; the spinning machines look like airplanes on the screens of military radar operators. Capt. Mark McLaughlin, the station’s commanding officer, said the Navy had had to “tweak” its radar to block out the Kenedy Ranch turbines, even though they are more than 20 miles from its airfields.
Filings with the Federal Aviation Administration show that there have been proposals for additional wind developments 5 miles to 25 miles from the base, Captain McLaughlin said.
“We are very concerned about how close these wind turbines are,” he said, adding that nationally the Navy would like wind farm construction to stay outside a 30-mile radius of its facilities.
Wind developers have encountered some unusual issues along the coast. Mr. Pitts said that no hurricanes had struck since Iberdrola’s wind farm began operating but that corrosion posed problems for the turbines because of the “salt fog” that envelops the area. Mr. Woodson said workers at E.ON’s coastal wind farm, which is built above cotton fields, had spotted alligators in drainage ditches.
E.ON is looking at other coastal sites, Mr. Woodson said. Iberdrola and Pattern both have the option of putting additional turbines on the Kenedy Ranch, which is closely tied to the Roman Catholic Church and gives its wind royalties to charities.
But coastal wind farms cannot proliferate indefinitely. Mr. Woodson said that good sites are hard to come by on the coast, especially given the environmental and airspace concerns. Moreover, once a $5 billion statewide transmission line expansion to aid wind power is completed, wind farms will most likely resume their rapid growth in West Texas, where land and good winds are plentiful. In particular, the Panhandle, which has the strongest winds of any Texas region but is currently beyond most transmission lines, “will be really hard to compete with,” Mr. Woodson said.
Texas is also hoping to develop offshore wind power in the Gulf of Mexico, and the state’s General Land Office has leased out four parcels for offshore wind development since 2005. No turbines have gone up. But Herman J. Schellstede, a Louisiana-based official with Coastal Point Energy, a development company that has taken the leases, said he aimed to put up a test turbine on an offshore platform nine miles south of Galveston and have it operational by October. The turbine would replace a meteorological tower that has measured the winds there for over three years.
“Two hurricanes have gone directly over our tower without any damage, thank God,” Mr. Schellstede said.
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Sea Level Rise Could Turn New York Into Venice, Experts Warn
By Jim O'Grady, WNYC News, Feb 9 2011
Photo left, Prof. Malcolm Bowman of
Stony Brook University in Long Island
Malcolm Bowman, an oceanography professor from Stony Brook University in Long Island, recently stood at the snow-covered edge of the Williamsburg waterfront and pointed toward the Midtown skyline. "Looking at the city, with the setting sun behind the Williamsburg Bridge, it's a sea of tranquility," he said. "It's hard to imagine the dangers lying ahead."
But that's his job.
He said that as climate change brings higher temperatures and more violent storms, flooding in parts of the city could become as routine as the heavy snows of this winter. We could even have "flood days," the way we now have snow days, he said. Bowman and other experts say the only way to avoid that fate and keep the city dry is to follow the lead of the Dutch and build moveable modern dykes. Either that or retreat from the shoreline.
Higher sea levels will give severe storms much more water to funnel toward the city. Bowman pointed first north, then south, to depict surges of water coming from two directions: through Long Island Sound and down the East River and up through the Verrazano Narrows toward Lower Manhattan. The effect could be worse than anything seen before.
“Straight across the river, we could expect the FDR Drive to be underwater. We would expect the water lapping around Wall Street," he said. "We could see vital infrastructure, hospitals, sewage treatment plants, communication conduits all paralyzed by flooding with seawater, which is very corrosive.”
The city got a glimpse of such destructiveness with the December Nor'easter of 1992, when massive flooding shut down and the PATH train and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Again, in the summer of 2007, a flash storm dumped so much rain so quickly that the subways were paralyzed. Afterward, the MTA removed 16,000 pounds of debris from its tracks and spent weeks repairing electrical equipment.
Neighborhoods vulnerable to storm surge (Courtesy of NYSEMO GIS)
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Panel on Climate Change said an increase in the number of such devastating storms is “extremely likely.”
John Nolon, a Pace University law professor with an expertise in sustainability law, said city officials have done a good job of at least describing the problem: “A lot of New York City is less than 16 feet above mean sea level. Lower Manhattan, some points are five feet above sea level. These areas are vulnerable and New York City knows it. Compared to other cities, which are only now beginning to wake up to this issue, I think New York City is much further ahead.”
But what to do?
David Bragdon, Director of the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning & Sustainability, is charged with preparing for the dangers of climate change. He said the city is taking precautions like raising the pumps at a wastewater treatment plant in the Rockaways and building the Willets Point development on six feet of landfill. The goal is to manage the risk from 100-year storms – one of the most severe. The mayor’s report says by the end of this century, 100-year storms could start arriving every 15 to 35 years.
Klaus Jacob, a Columbia University research scientist who specializes in disaster risk management, said that estimate may be too conservative. “What is now the impact of a 100-year storm will be, by the end of this century, roughly a 10-year storm,”he warned.
Back on the waterfront, Bowman offered what he said is a suitably outsized solution to this existential threat: storm surge barriers.
They would rise from the waters at Throgs Neck, where Long Island Sound and the East River meet, and at the opening to the lower harbor between the Rockaways and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. (See image below) Like the barriers on the Thames River that protect London, they would stay open most of the time to let ships pass but close to protect the city during hurricanes and severe storms.
The structures at their highest points would be 30 feet above the harbor surface. Preliminary engineering studies put the cost at around $11 billion.
Jacob suggested a different but equally drastic approach. He said sea level rise may force New Yorkers to retreat from vulnerable neighborhoods. “We will have to densify the high-lying areas and use the low-lying areas as parks and buffer zones,” he said.
In this scenario, New York in 200 years looks like Venice. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have melted ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and raised our local sea level by six to eight feet. Inundating storms at certain times of year swell the harbor until it spills into the streets. Dozens of skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan have been sealed at the base and entrances added to higher floors. The streets of the financial district have become canals.
“You may have to build bridges or get Venice gondolas or your little speed boats ferrying yourself up to those buildings,” Jacob said.
David Bragdon is not comfortable with such scenarios. He’d rather talk about the concrete steps he’s taking now, like updating the city’s flood evacuation plan to show more neighborhoods at risk. That would make the people living in them better prepared to evacuate.
He said it's too soon to contemplate the "extreme" step of moving "two, three, four hundred thousand people out of areas they’ve occupied for generations," and disinvesting "literally billions of dollars of infrastructure in those areas." On the other hand: "Another extreme would be to hide our heads in the sand and say, ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’”
Bragdon said he doesn't think New Yorkers of the future will have to retreat very far from shore, if at all, but he’s not sure. And he would neither commit to storm surge barriers nor eliminate them as an option. He said what’s needed is more study—and that he’ll have further details in April, when the city updates PlaNYC.
Jacob warned that in preparing for disaster, no matter how far off, there's a gulf between study and action. "There’s a good intent," he said of New York's climate change planning to date. "But, you know, Mother Nature doesn’t care about intent. Mother Nature wants to see resiliency. And that is questionable, whether we have that.”
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NASA Uses Out-of-This-World Technology to Build Ultra-efficient Facility
[From ASPE Industry News]
NASA’s 50,000-sf Sustainability Base in Moffett Field, California, uses 90 percent less potable water than a similar-size code-built facility via a forward-osmosis system that treats graywater and reuses it to flush toilets and urinals—a system originally developed for the International Space Station—as well as drought-tolerant landscaping and a groundwater irrigation system. The office/research center also features a geothermal system, composed of 100 140-ft-deep wells, which connect to a pump that runs water through copper tubes in ceiling panels. The water stays at 58°F, and due to basic physics, the cool air falls from the panels to the workspace below.
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Table for Four (Elements) Please!
By Carlin Romano, Critic-at-Large, Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 10 2011
Two recent events on the radar screens of philosophers stirred long looks in the rearview mirror.
IN what some in the profession jokingly called the New York Times Book Review’s “Special Issue” on philosophy (January 23), three pieces—a review by Montaigne biographer Sarah Bakewell of James Miller’s Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); a review by Susan Nieman of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (Free Press); and a piece by New York Times Magazine editor James Ryerson on the philosophical novel—all seemed to suggest a desire by philosophy lovers everywhere for a more old-fashioned sort of activity than supposedly practiced in academic philosophy departments today.
You know, “How should we live?” rather than “How do we know?” Or “What is the meaning of life?” rather than “What is the meaning of meaning?”
Later in January, a panel at the New School entitled “Does Philosophy Still Matter?”, organized around Miller’s Examined Lives and including such participants as the author, Cornel West, and Simon Critchley, also produced heartfelt appeals for the good old stuff.
Without taking sides on the larger issues, we’d like to note here that Penn State University philosopher David Macauley beat these folks at their own game last year.
They’re carrying signs screaming, “Back to Socrates!”
He’s declaring, more or less, “Back to Empedocles!”—before going forward again.
Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (SUNY Press, 2010, paperback due this July) is, make no mistake, a very serious book of philosophy. It’s also wonderfully comprehensive, impressively resourceful and superbly imaginative—yet down-to-earth—in bringing the loftiest philosophical thoughts about earth, air, fire, and water together with the excrement, breezes, stoves, and water fountains we live with. Macauley observes regretfully at the beginning: “‘Once considered profoundly animate, social and even divine—whether in the guise of localized bodies, purposeful forces, or powerful deities—the elements now strike us as largely impersonal, lifeless, and without agency.”
Why try to reverse that attitude? Macauley, who teaches at Penn State’s Brandywine campus, explains in his preface that getting caught in elemental terrible weather while out for a run—he was studying the Presocratics at the time—started him thinking about this project.