We had a chance several days ago to interview Mr. Dave Bradley, a chemical engineer with an interest in industrial processes. Mr. Bradley volunteers with the Buffalo Wind Action Group and is also a frequent contributor to the Stranded Wind Initiative's web site as well.
We got to hear about the members of the group, their activities, and their big success in the creation of a wind farm in Lackawanna, NY atop what had been a thousand acres of useless steel slag lands.
Bradley is the technical brains behind the group, with a formal education in chemical engineering and a solid background in all things related to wind. The other group members are two environmental lawyers, a person with expertise in government affairs, and someone who handles public relations. Notice this mix: renewables are technically quite doable and the problems always seem to lie on the playing field that is badly tilted to favor the status quo, which means fossil fuel power generation.
The Wind Action Group got its start in part due to the efforts of the Western new York Climate Action Coalition. This group formed initially to block the construction of new coal plants in the region, but has evolved to help push positive solutions as well as blocking bad ones.
The Buffalo Wind Action Group has had one very notable success - the creation of the Lackawanna, NY wind turbine farm.
Western New York used to have steel mills and over a century one of them dumped enough steel slag into the shallows of Lake Erie to produce a thousand acres, or roughly 1.5 square miles, of new land. The steel wastes are rich in various metals, poor for growing things, and should not be disturbed lest the metal rich dust contaminate the surrounding areas. This space could be neither farmed nor developed ... at least not until the concept of using the land for wind turbines was brought forth.
The shores of Lake Erie are a perfect location for wind turbines. The wind is strong, steady, there are population centers that can use the power, and best of all the terrain has water and hills. One of the big problems with wind is that it is not dispatchable. One gets power when and only when it blows, unless some sort of "firming" method is available. Given the hills of two hundred or more feet within easy reach of the lake constructing a pond in an elevated valley is an easy proposition both physically and in terms of permitting. The pond is pumped full when the wind is blowing, creating a dispatchable hydroelectric power source to firm the renewable wind generated electricity.
Western New York wind resources taken from Wind Explorer
The market in the area is big enough and the eight 2.5 megawatt Clipper turbines' total output was small enough that they were simply interfaced to the grid. The pumped water firming plans would be more important when there are farms a hundred times the size of the Lackawanna plant being built. Oh, and the wind plant construction meshed nicely with the need to not disturb the ground for fear of contamination being released. The turbines need a little bit of a base, a crushed rock service road, and the rest of the land was left undisturbed. Construction costs to work around these concerns were only marginally higher than those associated with building a turbine in an Iowa corn field.
Bradley has a far ranging vision for renewable energy in Western New York. All of that purple stuff in the above graphic is 7.5 meter/second average wind speed and the gold is 8.0 meter/second. The water isn't terribly deep, the wind flows are perfect as they've got mile upon mile of nice smooth water to cross before they get to the shore, and if we could produce the political will to develop these resources the power available is enormous. A 5.0 megawatt turbine will produce an average of about 1.6 megawatts when installed in the shallow water offshore, powering about 800 homes each, and there are room for thousands and thousands of them.
We can only hope that the confluence of spiraling energy prices due to peak oil, collapsing economy due to the mortgage scam unwinding, and the ever more urgent concerns regarding global warming will lead to the people of New York insisting that the renewable energy possibilities available in the Great Lakes be fully exploited for energy, for local job creation, and for the sake of the environment.