I am appending this e-mailed response from Rick Webb and Dan Booth, publishers of the Virginia Wind website, to my column, “Voltage Hogs.”
It’s very appropriate that you highlight Virginia’s extravagant electricity use in your commentary, “Voltage Hogs.” You have identified our real problem with respect to both energy supply and air pollution. Unfortunately it seems that you have been misinformed by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN). With their extreme pro-wind development agenda, the CCAN folks are less than careful with the facts.
First, you aren’t getting the whole story on the proposed Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) legislation. CCAN was a participant in a Virginia Conservation Network (VCN) energy committee that developed the VCN position on RPS legislation. The position that VCN adopted was to support an RPS, but only if wind project siting standards for protection of natural and cultural resources were in place prior to implementation. (For details, click here.) CCAN subsequently worked to ensure that siting guidelines were not included in the bill, and the bill that went before the legislature would have resulted in significant environmental tradeoff for little benefit. For details, click here.)
Second, claims about the potential benefits of wind energy in Virginia are wildly exaggerated. Your commentary repeats one of the most outrageous of the assertions — the claim that the proposed 39 MW Highland County wind project will serve 39,000 homes. That’s off by a factor of more than 13.
The 13,666 kWh per capita figure you cite appropriately accounts for the electricity use of all sectors (commercial, industrial, residential, etc), and it doesn’t treat households as if they exist in isolation from the rest of the infrastructure. Given that there is an average of 2.54 persons per household in Virginia, the average per household use of electricity is 34,701 kWh per year. So how many of these average households can a 39 MW mountain-top wind project serve?
39 MW x 365 days/year x 24 hours/day x 0.30 = 102,492 MWh/year, where 0.30 is the approximate maximum annual capacity factor associated with Appalachian wind projects.
102,492 MWh/year / 34,701 kWh/household/year = 2,954 households/year It’s also important to recognize that households don’t run on average annual electricity. Electricity is needed all the time, and wind power is intermittent, seasonal, and often unavailable. The average capacity factor for wind projects in August is only about 0.10. A 39 MW capacity wind project could serve fewer than 1000 households in August. On individual days when the wind isn’t blowing, a 39 MW capacity wind project could serve zero households.
Rick Webb
Dan Boone
Virginia Wind