Powerful wind

CARBON-FREE KILOWATTS | DONALD MacGILLIS - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Editorials - News: "NYSTED, Denmark: IN THE EARLY 1970s, before Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, before anyone was worried about climate change, the Danes decided to harness the wind and not the atom to generate much of their electricity. Today, the design and production of state-of-the-art windmills is this small country's biggest industry. As most of the rest of the world seeks to slow down or reverse the production of greenhouse gases from fossil-fuel power plants, Denmark provides an example of one way to make electricity without emitting carbon dioxide.

In the coming days, this page will evaluate wind and other alternatives to power plants that contribute to the atmosphere's carbon blanket. Scientists are convinced that humankind's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have been raising average temperatures and could have unpredictable effects on weather patterns, sea levels, and agriculture. Editorials will examine nuclear power, conservation, and coal plants that cleanse the fuel of carbon dioxide by first gasifying it.

In the United States, electricity generation accounts for about 40 percent of all greenhouse gases. That share will increase if plans in the next decade for 100 new coal-burning plants are not revised. China and India also plan to build hundreds of new plants burning coal, which produces more carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels. The resulting increase in CO{-2} will greatly exceed the reductions in greenhouse emissions planned by the countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol.

Wind, the world's fastest-growing form of electricity production, deserves consideration in the United States and elsewhere as a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuel power. In Massachusetts, the Army Corps of Engineers' draft impact statement on Cape Wind's 130-turbine proposal for Nantucket Sound found it would not have a major effect on birds or marine life, a first-stage green light that should move this well-designed project closer to completion as the nation's first offshore wind farm.

Much opposition to Cape Wind comes from residents of the Cape and islands who worry that it will mar the seascape. Here at Nysted, one of Denmark's first two big offshore wind farms stands 6.2 miles offshore in the Baltic Sea. For an observer on land who extends his arm full length and sights in on the 72 turbines with his raised thumb, the array is about half the size of a thumbnail on the horizon. When the rotor blades are straight up, they are 367 feet above the sea, somewhat lower than the 417 feet height the Cape Cod blades would reach, and Nysted's shore is about 10 percent farther from the turbines than Craigville Beach on the Cape would be from Cape Wind's proposed turbines. From the Cape, Cape Wind's turbines might measure two-thirds of a thumbnail.

Many residents of Nysted and Denmark's west coast, where the other offshore wind farm is located, initially opposed the projects, fearing their effect on tourism and housing values. Even onetime opponents now admit that the turbines have not had an impact on either. ''It's all going up," Nysted's mayor, Lennart Damsbo-Andersen, said of property values in his harbor town of 5,500. The town's chief engineer, Hans-Erik Johnsen, said his and others' fears that tourists, especially German boaters, would shun Nysted because of the windmills were misplaced.

Denmark shows both the pluses and minuses of wind power. The great advantages are that it relies on a source -- wind -- that costs nothing and emits nothing, not sulfur dioxide or mercury or carbon dioxide. There are two major disadvantages: Wind power production depends on fickle weather, and building and installing wind turbines, especially in the North Sea or the Atlantic, is expensive.

Power grids always rely on backup sources for periods of peak demand or shutdowns for maintenance or equipment failures. A grid with wind turbines -- Denmark now gets almost 20 percent of its power from wind, and its Wind Energy Association is aiming for 50 percent by 2025 -- needs backups for days when the wind doesn't blow or blows so hard the turbines have to shut off.

Denmark's way to compensate power producers for the high capital cost of wind is to guarantee a firm like Energi E2, which is managing the Nysted wind farm in the Baltic Sea, a 10-year price of about 7 cents a kilowatt hour. Fossil-fuel power in Denmark costs about 5.3 cents. The production of ever bigger and more-efficient turbines should shrink the cost gap. The economics for wind could become even more positive if the growing demand for fossil fuels in countries like China, India, and Brazil drives up their cost. Taxing carbon emissions or capping them, as the McCain-Lieberman bill pending in the Senate would do, would help make wind power preferable to coal, the lowest-cost fuel, even if wind power companies were obliged to post bonds for the cost of any future dismantling of the turbines, as they should be.

The uncertainties surrounding fossil fuels make wind look like a conservative hedge bet for a future that could put a premium on nonpolluting power sources. Congress should renew the production tax credit for wind, due to expire at the end of this year, and it should pass comprehensive legislation governing use of offshore waters for renewable energy and similar purposes. Any energy bill Congress passes should include a carbon tax or cap and a requirement that utilities get increasing percentages of their power from renewable sources. Massachusetts already has such a mandate, and electric consumers here should consider themselves lucky to be, for the first time, close to an energy source: the windy Atlantic Ocean."