The brutal climate could finally be Lewis’s salvation. The place has been growing poorer and more desolate for generations, as young people seek sunnier prospects elsewhere. But now the energy industry has discovered the storm-swept island. The multinational engineering and construction giant AMEC and the electricity generator British Energy are talking about plans to erect some 300 outsize wind turbines across a few thousand acres of moorland and peat bog. If the $700 million project goes through, the array will be Europe’s largest wind farm, capable of churning out roughly 1 percent of Britain’s total electrical needs–and generating some badly needed jobs and cash for the people of Lewis. “We have been slowly bleeding to death,” says Iain McIver of the Stornoway Trust, the proposed site’s owners. “The benefits from this project will continue to flow for as long as the wind blows over the Western Isles.”
It sounds like the answer to a lot of prayers–and not only on Lewis. Enthusiasts around the world call wind a perfect alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power: safe, inexhaustible and free. “This is simply one of the cheapest ways of reducing our output of greenhouse gases,” says Christian Kjaer of the Brussels-based European Wind Energy Association. Still, not everyone is such a fan. “I find it incredible that organizations which describe themselves as ‘Green’ or ‘Friends of the Earth’ can contemplate the ravage of our hills with these industrial installations,” says Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham, a champion of nuclear power. Even environmentalists confess to a few reservations. “The wind industry is as capable of environmental insensitivity as any other,” says Roger Higman, a senior campaigner for Friends of the Earth.
The energy industry isn’t bothered by such quibbles. For the last seven years the world market for wind turbines has grown by an average of 40 percent annually. Last year alone, generating capacity worldwide jumped by almost a third. The more wind plants you build, the cheaper and more powerful you can make them. Turbine makers are now mass-producing giant machines–the rotors’ 211-foot diameter is wider than the wingspan of a jumbo jet–that once existed only in theory. Today one standard-issue turbine can produce at least 1 megawatt of power, more than double the typical model’s output of 20 years ago and enough to provide electricity for as many as 800 modern households. The next generation, capable of more than twice that output, is already emerging.
The new turbines are not just bigger; they’re smarter. The basic design, a triple-vaned rotor atop a vertical shaft, hasn’t changed much in 50 years. The big difference is that the towers are taller; the new ones rise almost 300 feet above the ground. The higher they go, the stronger and steadier are the winds they catch. But scientists keep tweaking the specs in subtler ways, too. Tough, light structural materials have been borrowed from the aeronautics industry. Likewise for “vortex generators,” tiny fins added to the surfaces of wind rotors and aircraft wings. They induce turbulence that helps prevent stalling at low speeds. Best of all for people who live nearby, improved design on the latest models has cut noise to a relative whisper.
Still, some nature lovers hate wind power. Turbines seem to hold the same fatal attraction for birds that bug zappers have for mosquitoes, although no one is quite sure why. And the best sites for wind farms are often previously unspoiled hilltops. “We don’t think esthetics are an ecological criterion,” says Sven Tiske of Greenpeace. “If we opposed a nuclear power station just because it didn’t look good, everyone would laugh.” Not everyone. Ask Robert Woodward, a British art historian who campaigns against the spread of wind farming. His holiday residence is in Wales, at the edge of the Cambrian Mountains, and since the early 1990s the view from the hillside above his house has encompassed more than 100 turbines, all flailing out of sync. “A staggeringly beautiful landscape is being devastated,” says Woodward, who used to support environmentalist groups–until wind power blew him away. “This is the first time in the history of the conservation movement that concern for the landscape has become a dirty concept.”
Such gripes are one reason the industry is experimenting with offshore facilities. Viewed from land, even the tallest offshore farm is a tiny thing. Besides, sea breezes tend to be stiff, and steady enough to raise a turbine’s output at least 20 percent. Denmark is already proving the idea can work. Take a walk on the beach in Copenhagen’s northern suburbs, and you’ll notice that the horizon is broken by a distant line of 20 turbines. They’re built on a submerged limestone reef, almost two miles out to sea. Billed as the world’s largest offshore wind farm when it opened last year, the installation generates enough power for 30,000 city households. Now vast tracts of open water are being staked out, from western Ireland to the Baltic. Nick Goodall, director of the British Wind Energy Association, says: “The great thing about offshore wind power is that you are limited only by your imagination and the amount of money that the banks will lend you.”
Bankers aren’t getting too swept away. Building and running a farm at sea costs up to 40 percent more than onshore. Consider just the price of laying undersea cable to deliver electricity from turbine to grid. Construction is tricky, usually requiring a pile driver to sink the turbine’s concrete foundation deep into the seabed, and maintenance is inconvenient and expensive. “Offshore is a luxury,” says Per Krogsgaard of the Danish consultancy BTM. “And it will be for a very, very long time.”
Which leaves one question: can the wind industry undersell its competitors? The answer seems easy. After all, the fuel is literally as free as the wind. The chief expense is setting up a turbine farm. That’s still too high a price to drive fossil-fuel plants out of business. “It is still cheaper to put more coal into an existing power station than to build a new wind farm,” admits Kjaer. If you built a new coal-fired plant today, wind enthusiasts insist they could put up their own power installation and equal your rates. But no one is staging any such contest: unlike America, Europe has a chronic surplus of generating capacity.
Even so, the question is not academic. Sometimes there’s no choice but to build new generating facilities. Conventional plants get old and obsolete, and environmental laws keep getting tougher. A recent British government report on energy policy includes a projection that by 2020, wind is likely to beat nuclear’s prices and roughly match those of natural-gas power stations. But the wind industry seems unable to offer a solid cost-comparison against other power sources right now. Why? “That’s really a political question,” says Andrew Garrad, of the wind-power consultants Garrad Hassan. “Scratch anywhere beneath the surface of energy economics, and you will find politics.” It’s officeholders, not engineers, who set subsidy levels for different energy sources, and their decisions can be far more inscrutable than the wind. Not that wind advocates are complaining. So far wind power is thriving only in countries–notably Denmark, Spain and Germany–where governments force utility companies to pay their suppliers premium rates for wind energy.
Wind still has one big drawback: sometimes it refuses to blow. Users need a dependable backup power supply for days when the turbines won’t turn. Hard-core enviros say wind is only a stopgap; in the long run, they argue, there’s no alternative to the tough conservation measures that are too painful for any politician to espouse. At present, though, wind has no eco-OK rivals. Environmentalists have fallen out of love with big hydroelectric plants, and Europe has few suitable sites left anyway. Solar technology remains prohibitively expensive and space-consuming. And biomass–burning fuel crops such as wood chips or agricultural waste in steam-powered generators–is a messy business that requires the right equipment on the spot. You can’t just burn the stuff in a conventional coal-fired plant, for example.
The people of Lewis are putting their money on wind. “This is all about preserving the environment,” says Nigel Scott, who moved here seven years ago. “If we don’t go down the wind-energy road, in the long run there won’t be any habitats to protect.” No one seems too worried about turbines’ spoiling the peat bog’s vistas–or about what might happen if the winter gales should ever turn gentle.
