by Michael Renner


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This is not your grandfather’s windmill

    Think of the Netherlands, and what may come to mind is a quaint countryside of historic canal houses, fields of tulips, and–of course–those ubiquitous windmills. Though the Netherlands today is a highly urban and technologically sophisticated nation, that image of the "old" country still plays a large role in the country’s economy–as a lure to millions of tourists. It’s fascinating to consider that these windmills were, for centuries, the main sources of mechanical energy before the dawn of the fossil fuel age–that such silent, pleasant-looking contraptions could have provided the power needed to pump water, grind grain, saw timber, and do a wide range of other tasks now done by loud, polluting machines. To the tourists, the relation between these quaint windmills and the modern diesel turbines or giant coal-burning power plants that have replaced them may seem as distant as that of schooners to speedboats.

Enter the new high-tech wind generators of today, which began appearing two decades ago and have proliferated in the Netherlands and in some 40 other countries so far. Unlike their predecessors, the modern wind turbines do not directly operate pumps, sluice-gates, or grindstones, but generate the basic commodity–electricity–needed to run any modern industrial economy. These new wind turbines are as different from the old windmills in their use of wind as a telephone wire is different from a 19th-century church bell in its use of copper.

While providing a means of reducing global-warming gases and other air pollution in a way that is now becoming competitive with coal and oil in sheer cost per kilowatt-hour, the new wind-power also offers an advantage that has been largely ignored during the last few years of booming stock markets–but that will prove enormously important as the 21st century unfolds: it is not only a clean, competitive energy source but is a rich source of new employment. Whereas some defenders of the entrenched oil and coal interests predict that major efforts to stabilize climate change will spell economic doom, the evident capacity of wind power to deliver cost-effective power and new employment makes a compelling case that good environmental policy can also be good economic policy.

As far back as 200 b.c., windmills were used to pump water in China and to grind grain in Persia and the Middle East. In medieval Europe, merchants and crusaders returning from the Holy Land introduced this technology to their homelands, and windmills were erected in numerous places on the continent. By the early 15th century, in England alone, the use of animal power to grind grain–cattle pulling large stones in circles–had been supplanted by some 10,000 windmills. But it was in the Netherlands that windmill design evolved most over the ensuing centuries, producing incremental improvements in aerodynamic lift, rotor efficiency, and rotor speed. The Dutch relied on wind power to help drain the numerous lakes and marshes that made the Rhine river delta barely habitable and to hold their own against frequent and devastating floods. From the Netherlands, England, and elsewhere in Europe, wind technology reached the New World with the waves of settlers crossing the Atlantic. In the late 19th century, windmills were used on a massive scale to pump water for farms and ranches in the American West. Between 1850 and 1970, over 6 million mostly small units were installed in the United States.

Predictably, when it became apparent that electricity would be the elixir of the new industrial economy, efforts were made to put wind energy to use in generating it. Wind-electric machines first appeared in Denmark and the United States around 1890. The development of a utility-scale system was first undertaken in Russia in 1931 with the 100 kilowatt Balaclava wind generator on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Operating for about two years, it generated a cumulative 200,000 kWh of electricity. During the next few decades, experimental wind-power machines were built in the United States, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Germany, and Great Britain.

Despite these efforts to "modernize" wind energy use, wind mills were eventually retired from active service and preserved only as tourist sites. A principal reason for their demise was the invention of the steam engine, which had to be powered by heat–and which thus created a huge new market for coal. The steam engine was soon joined by a plethora of other coal- and oil-driven machines. Wind-powered machines went into a gradual decline, first in Europe and then in North America. In 1895, there were still some 30,000 windmills operating in Germany, providing the equivalent of 87 megawatts of power, but this amounted to only 1.8 percent of the country’s total power requirements–compared with 78 percent provided by steam engines.

Moving into the 20th century, the world’s industrial economies developed appetites for growing amounts of coal, oil, natural gas and, later, nuclear power. By then, it was clear that fossil fuels were simply too convenient to compete with; whereas wind could only be used on site–and only when the wind was blowing–coal or oil could be transported anywhere and used anytime. It took another half-century for the environmental costs of coal and oil to become a serious issue, but by then there was a new competitor on the horizon–nuclear power, which was initially expected to prove "too cheap to meter." Substantial subsidies cemented these energy sources’ advantage.

It was only with the advent of the modern environmental movement that some economists began to reassess the economics of the prevailing energy system, and to recognize that the sizable environmental and health costs–the burdens of air pollution, acid rain, climate change, toxic mining and radioactive wastes, "black lung," and respiratory diseases–were not being accounted for by conventional measures of cost per kilowatt-hour. Instead, they were "externalized"–not accounted for on any balance sheet. But at the same time that environmentalists were making this argument, defenders of the status quo were making a counter-argument: that industrial reforms made for environmental reasons would have prohibitively damaging impacts on the economy because they would take away jobs. Restricting clearcutting of forests, for example, would take jobs away from loggers; restricting fishing of depleted species would take jobs away from fishermen; and so on. In the energy sector, it was said, cutting back on coal and oil would take jobs away from miners and refiners.

Since that argument was first promulgated, however, an ironic shift has occurred. In the coal and oil businesses, massive job losses–counted in the hundreds of thousands–have occurred in the past decade without their having been driven by environmental regulation and despite the continuing preferential subsidies they have received. Meanwhile, wind power is beginning to benefit from technological advances that will diminish its historic disadvantages of not being subject to transport and storage. Wind is now poised to compete economically with coal and oil on even terms in many places–and to do so not only with the advantage of being environmentally benign, but with the important added advantage of providing more jobs per unit of cost than the fossil-fuel industries it now challenges.

Wanted, To Run With the Wind

It was only in the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s that interest in wind turbines revived after more than half a century of dormancy, setting the stage for the emergence of a whole new, futuristic tech wind energy sector. It took a decade or so to take hold, but since the beginning of the 1990s, the new sector has been growing at a breathtaking rate. Worldwide installed generating capacity grew from about 2,000 megawatts in 1990 to 15,000 megawatts by mid-2000, an average growth rate of 24 percent per year. That’s still tiny in absolute terms, but it’s comparable to the position automobiles were in a century ago. And the prospects for continued expansion are good. Electricity from the wind is now rapidly closing the price gap with conventional power plants. In October 1999, the European Wind Energy Association, the Forum for Energy and Development, and Greenpeace International jointly released a study, Windforce 10, that contends that wind energy could meet 10 percent of the world’s electricity demand by the year 2020. Under their scenario, installed capacity would grow to 1,200 gigawatts (1.2 million megawatts).

Windforce 10, in its assessment of the number of jobs that might be generated over the next two decades, concludes that 17 job-years of employment are being created for every megawatt of wind energy capacity manufactured and an additional five job-years for every megawatt installed, or a total of 22 job-years per megawatt. As labor productivity rises, the per-megawatt job figures are expected to gradually decrease to 15.5 by 2010 and 12.3 by 2020.

Assuming these ratios hold, the study projected that total wind power employment will climb from something under 100,000 jobs today to almost 2 million over the next two decades, with most of the growth occurring in Europe, North America, and China.

This growth includes the "direct" jobs of manufacturing and installing wind turbines, as well as the "indirect" jobs in supplier industries. It does not include any jobs that may be produced by the still embryonic off-shore wind industry. Nor, significantly, does it include the work of maintaining wind installations once they are built.

Offshore installations, which would be placed in relatively shallow waters somewhat like offshore oil rigs, were not included in the Windforce study. But they are expected to play a growing role in coming years, particularly in Europe. A study released by the German Wind Energy Institute and Greenpeace in October 2000 ("North Sea Offshore Wind–A European Powerhouse") concludes that five North Sea countries–Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark–have the potential to generate almost 2,000 terawatt hours of electricity per year from offshore wind, an amount that is more than triple their current combined demand for power. Tapping just one percent of this wind source in a year would provide electricity for 6.5 million homes and could employ 160,000 persons, according to Greenpeace.

Additional employment is generated through operating and maintaining wind turbines, though reliable numbers are unavailable. The European Wind Energy Association estimates that between 100 and 450 people are employed per year for every _terawatt-hour of electricity produced, depending on the age and type of turbine used. In 1999, when about 29 terawatt-hours were generated, that would have meant anywhere from 3,000 to 13,000 _additional jobs worldwide. As wind power capacity expands, obviously so will these numbers. Even at the lower end of this range, there may be some 3 million jobs in running and maintaining the world’s wind energy turbines by the year 2020, if the Windforce 10 projections hold up.

Continued, go to Part II