Focus 580; Wind Energy: Research, Development and Application

In this hour of focus we will be talking once again about energy. We decided that one of the things that we wanted to do this summer was to spend some time talking about energy and energy policy and one of the things that we wanted to focus on was alternatives to fossil fuels. And to we have talked so far about solar power we are talking about doing some things on bio mass and other sorts of energy. And in this part of focus 580 we will be talking about wind wind energy which is the fastest growing electricity generating technology now in the world. Over the past decade global installations of wind energy systems have grown at least 10 times and here in the United States. Wind energy installations have tripled in five years we'll be talking a little bit about the potential for this technology in this hour of focus 580 with Robert thresher. He currently serves as director of the national wind technology division of the national rate. Noble Energy Lab and that's based in Golden Colorado he's worked as program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington D.C. and then he spent four years as assistant professor of

mechanical engineering at Oregon State University and was the acting director of the Energy Research and Development Institute. He is talking with us this morning by telephone. And as we talk of course questions are welcome I know he will do his best to give you an answer. The number here in Champaign Urbana if you'd like to call in 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line that's good anywhere that you can hear us. If you're listening around Illinois and Indiana over the air or if you're listening on the Internet anywhere in the United States you may use the toll free line that is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 so again 3 3 3 WRAL if that makes it any easier. Three three three W I L L and toll free 800 1:58 W while I'm Dr thresher Pelham. Thanks for talking with us today. We certainly appreciate it. You're welcome. Maybe just as a general question to start off with. If you look at the mix of energy sources now in the United States you look at

what comes from. What comes from fossil fuels. What comes from. And I guess. I'm thinking about electricity generation. What comes from nuclear what comes from burning coal. What comes from renewables. If you if you set the renewables next to the fossil fuels what what percentage of the mix are. If you look at all of the renewables what percentage is that. Well it depends a little bit on how you do the bookkeeping. If you if you include the hydro power that is that the dams in the river system that's over 4 percent of the electrical generation wind energy which is the next biggest renewable and electric generation area is less than a half a percent of our energy comes from wind when this. And renewables typically they classify those as a new renewable. And I go power's been around for quite a while.

So when you when you look at so far the contribution of wind is small but I do understand that there has been significant increase in the amount of wind generation that we now have. That's that's correct. In this country we've got around almost 7000 megawatts of wind energy which is not a lot. It is around 10 years ago 15 years ago there were there were more like 15 hundred megawatts. So we've gone up dramatically it's been growing at 20 to 25 percent per year over the last five years or so or worldwide it is also growing dramatically worldwide. There are there's over 47000 getting close to 50000 megawatts of wind cells worldwide. Europe is probably the

leader installing the new wind systems. Germany Spain Denmark the U.K. or Britain and they're pretty much the leaders the Netherlands and they're the the desire is to cap the amount of carbon. Missions to reduce carbon emissions if they go to wind which produces bay almost none except during the manufacturing of the equipment. So during the electricity generation there is no carbon emitted. And that's that's been a goal under the Kyoto Accord and Europe has bought into that and is moving to put in place alternate sources a generation that don't count on it and burning fossil fuels. So while the we can say that while the contribution to

date of wind energy to the total energy mixes is small we can also say that here in United States at least we can also say that it is growing. It is increasing what's anybody's guess about what the potential would be for wind. That is what what do you think an optimistic sort of estimate would be about how much energy it could. Provide there. There's a lot of arguments about that but let me look at just the brute resource potential in other words. Do we have a lot of windy regions in the country. And the answer is an emphatic yes. Just in terms of areas with win that sufficiently high over average windspeed over the year that it would warrant the installation of wind generators. We have vast areas of the country that would would qualify for wind installations in fact just in terms of

India land area. There's enough out there to easily supply just to the brute amount of electrical energy we we would need now won't come at the right time or at the right place but we could supply the entire nation's electrical needs using wind energy. And it we could also free looked offshore because off off the coasts there's tremendous amounts of wind also. So there's plenty of wind to supply the electrical needs of the country at least twice over. So we're very rich in terms of wind energy. So if you help me I'm just going to say if you if you ask that question where the biggest technical challenge is then it sounds as if it's not so much in constructing the turbans the things that the windmills essentially would do we sort of know how to do that maybe there is a bigger challenge than how it is that you get the energy that you produce from the place where the wind farm is to the place that it's needed.

That's actually one of the challenges. But if you if you look back at the reason that let me talk about the technology challenges sort of in general the first one is that. The price that you pay for when the energy is still higher than you would pay for the energy coming from a coal plant. So when the still more expensive than coal it and it's only been in the last two years that wind has become cheaper than natural gas as the price of natural gas rose over the last few years. Then when this become more competitive in addition the price of wind has gone down pretty dramatically over the last several years. But going even further back up wind in 1980 when it was first installed in commercial quantities in California costs

actually cost something like 40 cents a kilowatt hour or as now it's more like four cents a kilowatt hour. And so when the price of natural gas is high and wind can compete successfully with natural gas. But it still has the technology ology challenge to get cheaper than that coal and that's one challenge. The next challenge is you're absolutely right. The places that the wind blows the hardest are not where the load centers are. And North and South Dakota have vast amounts of wind energy. Wyoming Montana all the way down to Texas but that's not the load center of the load centers are. I'm quite removed from that Chicago and the Midwest Minneapolis on the coast. Fifty percent of our loads are on the coast so having the transmission to be able to get that out of the Midwest to where you need it is indeed a challenge and that adds in fact to the price

you pay for the wind energy. The further you have to ship it the more it would cost. We have a caller here to bring into the conversation. I want to do that and perhaps also I should just very quickly reintroduce our guest for this hour of focus 580 We're talking with Robert thresher. He is the director of the national wind technology division of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that's based in Golden Colorado we're talking about wind energy the potential of using wind to generate electricity and have that be part of the mix of energy here in United States. Questions are certainly welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 that's for Champaign Urbana toll free eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Well color here in Atlanta Illinois on our toll free line line for. Hello. Good morning gentlemen. And just think. Recession thank you for taking my call I've got three quick questions. I've been seriously seriously considering installing a wind generator at my house from southwest wind power it's about a 1 K

generator a cost with the tower and everything about $7000 and in my case I wasn't going to use batteries are just going to feed that back into the system to help deduct my bill 5:1. I want to ask you what you think about doing that and the other. Next question is I live right on the edge of a nature preserve and one of the main features of the nature preserve is the bird habitat. Well that one general if I start chopping up birds with the wind generator My wife's going to divorce me for sure and I don't want to do that I wonder if that possibility in the third question is that I'm a backup meter reader for corn belt electric company which is a co-op that serves the you were all areas of central Illinois and tried. Went around to over 100 sites are made in the reader it looks to me like every site has at least some possibility because of its remoteness there in central Illinois to run a wind generator would it be viable to for CoreValve to answer the Bill of subtracting the amount of

energy produced from your bill to an aspect of paying for these when generators 1000 K when generator 105 helped contribute to the power of the economic all these away and I'll set up. Well first of all I applaud your efforts to use when that at your house and I know there are a lot of people in the windy areas that are better doing that we have a couple of those. The southwest wind power machines running here to site and they seem to be very very reliable machines. The weather you can pay back the cost of the wind turbine or not depends on what you're paying the rate you're paying for electricity because I think you're doing what they call net metering and basically when the wind is blowing then you're subtracting from your electric use and you just buy even that build to the to the utility company. And it depends on your

Tilley rate and how much wind you have it at the exact location of the wind actually varies quite dramatically from site to site a. Even a 1 mile per hour difference can significantly change the energy capture and kinetic energy in the wind and is the cubic function of the actual wind speed. So very small a 10 percent change in wind speed. It's about a 30 percent difference in the kinetic energy in the wind. So small differences make it make a big difference. Installing your machine try and install it in the open. The most open location where it's not blocked by trees and the prevailing wind direction and is blocked by the house. And also that'll help the Avion issue because if the birds can see it they'll try to avoid it. And so keeping that clearly visible and out of places that a lot of birds tend to congregate and don't locate the bird feeder near the winter been a devious

thing to draw them in. Typically the area of a small turban is so small that you don't you have a very low probability of birds flying into it. If you keep it out in the open where the birds won't tend to congregate. Very interesting. Well what about the crisis in the Corn Belt in general what that be economically feasible for them if if if but the winner is determined a matter of fact they're doing a site study for some other. When generating system I just put up the tower the other day with the mechanisms on it for putting a large wind farm near here so there is typically if you get a large wind farm being located near you you probably get something on the order of 13 miles per hour at it and a tent measured 10 meters above the ground. Something in that order we'd call it a class four winds. And that that gives you a pretty good wind resource. So you have to go through the numbers and there are

there are some ways you could calculate that but. Usually you don't make a lot of money on it. If you break even you're really doing well. But but if a lot of people did do that it is feasible and it does reduce the load to the utility so it does contribute to what what we would call distributed generation and that it tended to its hits a generation source of stripy did and when the wind blows it helps reduce the load fee to Lety. OK all right now buys lots of electricity so our rates are proportional to other rates in the state are pretty extremely high so I was thinking of trying to get some kind of presentation to go talking to him about it so that there might be some possibility that that could be of interest with you know a relatively small investment. The $7000 for a fight

is an extremely expensive. No that's not that's not terribly expensive at all out of out of the one case stack up per household they say if you had a just my meter district here I think selfless wind power picked that size because. That is a typical build in with a reason. Reasonable wind resource that size would would generate on on the basis of a year about the amount of energy you would consume. So they tried to pick that kind of for the average house I think. I think it's about a thousand kilowatt hours a month is what the average house would use. That machine was sized to sort of provide provide about the right amount for an average sized resident. If you have

a bigger residence you could buy two but you need you need to have the acreage and the space to put it in and you need to be a little bit remote because. If you're in a residential neighborhood some of your neighbors might not appreciate the winter but I'm very high wind conditions they can get a little noisy LNH truck try to turn out the way they are the way I understand that they actually turn out the window a little bit and that causes the buffeting of a propeller and stuff that where they do make some noise at that time right. So you need to be. You need to be prepared that they are going to make a little noise and and you know high winds and that you if you've got you need to have the space to put them in so that they're not blocked by houses or trees and things like that. You need to have a little bit open space to put a man that typically means you need some money in order of an acre or so to have enough space that it all depends on your situation.

But I thought all these subscribers to carve out the middle of corn fields these hundreds of drivers so there's virtually nothing blocking any of them and they are all you know a least a quarter mile from each other early so they throw a mile for that. That would be good if I made this proposal to carve out that they do this would be a cost effective for them to do this. They have 105 wind generators running around you know small and in this area which is rather remote. And what what would that help. I think that right now it's it's more of the environmentally conscious that would do this. According to our numbers sort of the average cost for a small turban is the cost of electricity is close to 10 cents a kilowatt hour. When you in spite of the low cost of that turban you still you add it up and it ends up being very expensive electricity. So the best you can do is kind of hope to break even on it's not going to probably make

you a lot of money or help the ability a tremendous amount so it's still up on the the R&D side in terms of the entrepreneur who wants to who's very conscious about the environment wants to avoid some emissions and supply a little of these energy it's not going to be a money maker at this point. Well I thank you very much and that was most helpful thank you. All right well thanks for the go. Just to make sure that I get this straight you were talking earlier about the fact that. When the energy now just only recently has become cheaper than natural gas it's still more expensive than coal and that you're looking about at about if you if you were talking about a large array of turbans a large wind farm where you have a very large machines and they're put in such a way that to basically to make money

and that the difference is it's all about the rotor size the small machines that are for residential units the moneymaking part of the machine is the rotor and that that ends up being fairly small. There are also smaller machines that are closer to the ground and so they're not in as energetic care the higher you can get them up the better you're off you are. The problem with the residential units is a lot of the zoning restrictions require fairly short towers like 30 feet. You're just not far enough up to get into the ion or G air. And you also have with a small rotor diameter the tower cost and the infrastructure cost the fixed costs the power converter and whatnot and to be fairly large compared to the rest of the cost. So the cost per kilowatt hour turns out to be more in the 10 cents a kilowatt hour range than the 4 cents a kilowatt hour.

And and most of that is the hardware cost essentially the cost. Buying it and putting it up. Yes basically it's all up front cost if it comes in the purchase price and then we use the energy streamed to to basically purge T-cell as electricity to pay it off over a period of time. So it's like taking out it's like buying a house only you buy when turbaned you put out a loan and then the energy that you generate you sell and you pay off your loan. So when you do the calculations it turns out that that typically a small interurban is around the order of 10 cents a kilowatt hour. Now if you've got a little better wind regime as I said before that goes. It's dramatically different if the wind speed is fairly high so if you're in a high wind resource area you do much better. Typically the smaller machines are in and near houses. People don't like to live in really really windy areas. So it would be unusual to have a very high wind speed or people

enjoyed living. All right let's talk with somebody else we have someone next in the champagne. Why number one alone is interesting. Could you discuss storage advances in storing electricity and like super cool transmission that would allow areas with wind to send power to big cities and also up here during a very hot weather sometimes as a public service announcement says try to use less electricity but the news says In Europe they have these signals somehow they send and it just shuts off your air conditioner. Do we have that here yet. That's that's called the demand control. And that where you you turn the loads off. And that's a control and you need a two way system where you can you have certain loads that for example your water heater you might going to turn that off if the utility had control

of that they could turn that off during very high peak demand times middle of the afternoon on a hot summer. And they could turn that off so they could run more of conditioners and. That that would that would help that part I mean can you give me the the other part of your question. Well the caller with was asking and we've kind of touched on this a little bit about transmission and storage particularly storage storage because. Here obviously the problem is you know you need the the win may not necessarily be blowing at the time that you need the energy. And so then the issue as well as there. Do we have some really good way that we can store the energy when the wind is blowing and then some at some later point use it. The story has been a real sticky issue. I've been working in with and and and in energy in general for

30 years since the first oil embargo and that when technology has progressed dramatically as indicated by the costs I described earlier dropping from 40 cents to four cents over the past 20 years 25 years. But storage has has not seen the dramatic technology improvements. Batteries are are not terribly cost effective. There are get we are getting better and better batteries for running computers and things like that for small loads large amounts of storage to run a house all or for storage for for transportation systems for example for electric car. Those are just that not progressed as fast they're heavy and fairly expensive. And so storing bulk power is very difficult. The only effective means a cost effective means today is probably hydro

power and the storage that that we try to take advantage of with wind systems because they're intermittent. They only produce when the wind blows which what you'd like to do is have on your same grid or same electrical system some capability that is to store water while the wind was blowing and then when the wind wasn't blowing to use the water. And that's probably the most effective and cost effective storage at this point time. Other than that there's there's the batteries which are local storage. There are some systems that you can use for small amounts of power. There are some developing technologies. No one is compressed air storage. Typically that used to to compress air in a salt dome or underground or and some kind of a vessel and then

use that compressed air to assist a gas turbine to produce electricity that's called a compressed air energy storage. Typically it's called KS and then. After after batteries there's making hydrogen and I'm going kind of from the least expensive to the most expensive so the technology is just not cost effective for bulk storage except for the hydro power at this point so it is not progress technically as far as AZ and some of the generation technologies like solar and wind. The other issue in that again is some of the we talked about is the deals with the basic problem that the windiest places might be a long way away from the places where the greatest demand for the energy is so that you have to get it. From one place to the other. Is there anything that. What's the what's current state of the art or what are people thinking about in

terms of perhaps exotic technologies as a way of improving the efficiency of the transmission from where it's produced to where the people are who what. Well the exotic technology of course is to improve the efficiency by using super conducting materials. And there's a lot of research going into how to do that. And that covers up the ability for what they call high temperature superconductivity materials basically can go into generators or and transmission systems. And what you'd like to do is be able to make wire and right now they're having trouble making the wire and then you have to cool it. But eventually there the hope is to be able to develop some wires that had much less resistance and. And that would greatly improve the efficiency of transmitting the power.

Another technology is just some very simple incremental improvements would be things that people are looking at putting in carbon fibers to to to to either wrap or as part of the conductor bundle to support the electric wire. What tends to happen is that as the conductor heats under high load it sags and that sags it into treason and causes short so if you put the carbon in there it helps support the structural load or carry the weight of the copper conductor and you can run it much hotter under high load conditions. So there's people looking at at some incremental technologies too so that you can do re conduct I mean put in the wires on the same towers but up to capacity and that's probably in near near term solution compared to the more exotic. I tempers temperature

superconductors we are a little bit past the midpoint here. I have another call we get right to in just a second. But for the benefit of anybody who might have tuned in recently here I want to introduce Again our guest Robert Thrasher is a mechanical engineer by his academic training he worked as a program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington. He spent four years as assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State University was the acting director of the Energy Research and Development Institute and currently he serves as the director of the national wind technology division of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado and we're talking about wind energy in this hour of the show and questions are welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 we do also have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us. That's eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. When we next we'll talk with someone up in northern Illinois on our toll free line line for Hello.

Yeah I'm at the center of a 250 tower 1.5 project and we're concerned that in 20 years all these towers become obsolete and we're stuck with a bunch of steel and concrete in middle of a cornfield. What's that possibility actually that the experience in California is. That what's happening there is that retiring that once the wind site you put in let's say a technology today for a wind turbine might be one and a half megawatts is I'm assuming what you're talking about yeah right or it might five and they're talking about maybe in two to three years go to a 3 meg tower is that feasible. Yeah. Well what would happen is they'll probably take out the old towers and turbans and scrap them but they wouldn't. They would they would replace those because once you develop the insight. You have a certain capability to run

power in and out and probably a substation and it it's a proven win site so you would go back and then put in the newer technology which typically is banned to put in fewer larger turbans and replace the older smaller turbines the way that that they have achieved better economy is to scale the turbans to larger and larger sizes as we understood how to the technology enough to be able to build very large wind turbines. OK so the likely that they would be replaced with a new generation that would be more efficient quieter and probably larger. OK what about do fossil fuel plants have to be running on standby when the wind dies down are we really saving that much power. Actually you do save power but you're absolutely correct. There needs to be a plan that is on

standby or idle to pick up the load if the wind goes down and. That that has a small cost associated with it to continue to do that but the carbon emissions are low and the fuel use is minimal for that situation because you're not. You're not producing power you're sort of on spinning reserve. See you do need a certain amount of spinning reserve to help help alleviate the problems of bringing plants up and down. A lot of the wind people the people are running the wind plants have gone to forecasting the wind so that they can forecast the day had or two days ahead. Kind of what the wind resource is going to be and then they they can basically tell the ability dispatcher give him a little information on how to better forecast what units to bring on whether there's going to be a little bit of wind or a lot of

wind. It isn't perfect but it certainly it certainly helps the situation in terms of bring having the right amount of reserve ready for for for whatever the wind outputs going to be. OK well that seems to be the the biggest news in the neighborhood as 250 towers fell. Sounds like a big big plan. Yeah there are three companies trying to compete for options for the same land. So right now are trying to make decisions on which company would be the best long term event. Well typically the local community I've been to several wind sites particularly in Minnesota where they've been very pleased over a period of time because of the increase to the tax base. Yeah and then of course about that to the people that have wind wind units for five wind units located on their farm or their land. They get a royalty payment much like an oil having an

oil well. You get paid as a percentage of the money from the electricity sold it typically amounts to two or three thousand dollars a year so I think the there talkin almost three or four thousand minimum now OK. That's most of the bigger units right. Right. So it goes up with size so typically it's been very beneficial to the local economy and and just direct payments and tax base. But it also does generate some longer term jobs in. And you also think about a little bit is the balance of trade in that there's money that it's not going to buy fuel someplace else natural gas or or something of that nature so. There is some economic benefit locally low on the downside you do have to put up with the visual appearance of the turbans and it's bothered a lot of people and there's been quite a bit of

discussion some people are very much against having one plants an area because of the visual appearance they feel it's industrialize in the countryside. And there are other folks that that that seemed like up so it's somewhat a matter of taste. What do you think about what would a fair say that back from residents be. Oh probably. I don't know the sparrow are typically setback rules and some rules of thumb but. Typically I would say something on the order of five to 10 rotor diameters away. You shouldn't really notice much in the way of any of the known ound that people claim they're noisy but they really just make a swishing sound. And once in a while you get a clunker a generator sound and a tip. It tends to be worst when the winds are low because the sound will carry better when the winds are high you tend to hear the wind

and it kind of masks the kind of white noise of the wind masks. And in any swishing sound from the rotor. But it is a fifteen hundred foot that back me reasonable. That's sounds reasonable to me. OK well the county I don't think they've come up with anything yet but they're trying to come up with some type of a setback because I think some of these other larger projects ran into trouble when they put him too close to the residence. Yeah you can. There are some. You do get a little bit of noise if they're very close to residences. And you can get some just a visual disturbance it seems to bother some people. Other people seemed to enjoy it. So I'm not sure I I could sort out who would like him and who wouldn't. Well I've been to him and I don't think they look that bad especially if you get paid for info. Well if you're getting paid for it that seems to make it like a raisin hog the smell doesn't

isn't it doesn't it. I'm not sure I would use that analogy. I understand it. OK well thanks for the call. I thank you. Let's go on here to someone here in Champaign That's our next caller line 1. I live out in the country here near champagne and for a long time I've toyed with the idea of trying to figure out how to put wind power to use because it blows here about three hundred sixty of 365 days a year I think. Is there any project to like have individual homeowners be able to have like a wind power on their property. That would be like solar where you could feed it back to the the electric company if. If you had too much but you could use it yourself. Anything like that going on.

Well the there are some units for commercial sale. One of the earlier callers indicated that he had a he had purchased the southwest or was considering purchasing a southwest wind power machine which is about which is a 1 kilowatt machine which is intended for residential use. And so I think he said it cost $7000 for that particular machine. And so that it's it's a new order of buying a car. Yeah. So it's it's not terribly cheap. The electricity is not not all that cheap but if you if you're really environmentally conscious and you want to to pay part of your electricity bill and generate a little less carbon emissions and other emissions then those are the folks that are buying them at this point and the people that want to be. Some people want to be self-sufficient also they just like the idea of generating their own power. But there's quite a bit of

work going on to reduce the costs and improve the machines both reduced. Make them more cost efficient and less noisy they tend to be able to generate noise and if they're in your yard they're much closer than the bigger machines. And so there are several machines out there there's you could go to the American Wind Energy Association website and they have a small machine section there. The American Wind Energy Association is a Debbie 88 a dot com CEO amp. And I'm sorry it's that be a Debian Debian dot a Debian a dot or RG org. And they they have information on small machines. There's a couple of prominent machine makers in this this country there

are several that are selling small machines for homeowners. And so you can buy those machines and they work quite well but they are a little more expensive. I quoted some numbers earlier from the very large turbans that at 45 cents a kilowatt hour these are more like 10 cents a kilowatt hour. So you have to be in a good windy location and and have high enough power demand to paddle or high enough power rates that that would make economic sense. Does the cost of the machine and the like include installations that somebody would hook it up to. You can get it installed I don't know about the costs on those but typically people install or own it. They're enthusiastic not not just dumb people who want to. There are people that have a business of installing them for you so you can get that done I don't know anything about the costs for that.

OK well thank you very much. OK thank you we have about 10 minutes left in this part of focus 580 Again our guest is Robert Thrasher. He's the director of the national wind technology division. The National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden Colorado we're talking about of wind energy and questions are welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. I think that we have now touched on the three. When you when one reads about wind power you read about people concerns and the things that they find to object to we have touched on all of them now. That is some people think the turbines are unattractive. Some people are concerned that while they may not produce air pollution that they produce noise pollution. So there's a noise thing they're concerned about and they're concerned about the impact on wildlife and birds as we're talking about. People are really concerned that birds are going to fly into them and be killed in it. And you said it in response to an earlier caller that chances are that if you had one of these turbans in your on your property so you're going to do that that the birds would be smart enough if

it was visible enough and open enough they'd be smart enough to to learn how to go to know how to go around it. It seems that maybe we're having a bigger issue if we're talking about big wind farm although maybe the general may still apply and you would do your best I would hope not to locate it in two in a major flyway where there would be a lot of birds. Is there anything else that though we can do other than simply relying on the birds to be smart enough not to fly into them. Anything that people are thinking about to try to just make sure. That that's not going to happen. Yes that's that's bad. I'm glad you brought that up again. There has been quite a bit of publicity concerning some a wind farm in particular in California that was once one of the very first wind farms put in in the 1980s. And there's it's got quite a bit of bad publicity because it's killed a lot of raptors over the years. So there's been a tremendous amount of

research. I've been involved in it and this laboratory funded research to look at the problem and see what was going on and basically what we found out is that wind farm was sited in the middle of a very large population and local population of raptors. So the first principle is do and everybody does this now is to do a survey to look for the wildlife in the area what birds do there and to look at it. And a number of different season seasons summer winter fall and spring. To get an idea what birds are using area and whether or not they might be in danger. And so you avoid high concentrations of birds local populations. You want to avoid flyways and areas where

birds might congregate. Some feeding area something of that nature and while I biologists in the local area typically know that and so you sow most wind farm operators will commission a review and environmental review that includes avian issues and a look for that and if they think there's going to be a problem they will walk away from that site because of the avian issue. So the first principle is don't side them with there's a high concentration of birds. We found another wind plants that are not located in high concentration areas kill kill very few few birds. Probably your car you kill more per year with your car than the wind and even the big wind turbines to. Another thing that's happened is the turbans have gotten bigger. Rather speed is dramatically slowed down so that they don't turn as fast so they're much more visible and there's more open space so.

If there's a longer period of time for the bird to actually fly through the rotor and get through safely then with the smaller high speed turbines that's made the better. We've done some research to kind of look at other issues associated with that. Things like somehow inadvertently enhancing the paper prey base that might draw birds in the area for example in California when on wind farms making the roads the way they were done. Made it a great habitat for ground squirrels which actually drew more Raptors into the area. So you've got to you've got to look at the way you do the environment on the ground so that you don't kind of created tract of nuisance. We've also reduced perching opportunities so birds aren't as likely to come and fly and and I think that the wind turbine is a tree that you put in for them to

perch on which would again draw them into the area. So there's been a number of things steps taken and the turbans have been changed by design changes that slowing the rotors down has has or has helped that and that's been part of the technology evolution and the big issue though is just a lot better siting to avoid large populations. We have some other callers let's do that talk at lease. Wanted to. Next is Bloomington wine for Hello. Yeah I think you pretty much answered my question while I was waiting. That just another one to add dimension perching you know what do they do to prevent that and then too when there are introspective builders of these. Are you projecting around to see you

know the different characteristics of the lion was a result of it. Who do they contact I mean is it too about the birds situation and wouldn't the fly way I know that California thing is really been a mess. So what agency then supplies that information and when the Ottoman society be in on that and so forth. Thank you. The West regard to that information. It's really sometimes it's quite difficult to find that in one spot. So a lot of looking at the wildlife and avian issues in particular is to go to the local universities and contact them and then to look a bit at what's in the open literature that's been published about a certain area. So a lot of it goes to local people.

They would contact if there's an autobody representative to see if what information they might have about the local bird populations. In addition they would contact Fish and Wildlife Service. There are state agencies typically there's a State Department of Natural Resources. They would contact all of those folks to and there are several. Local and national level consulting houses that do environmental assessments and some their's and a number of folks that specialize in doing that for wind farms and they kind of have a group of people that they know and they they know the local bird people and they go to them sometimes they'll hire them to help with the studies. The local universities are or are a classic place to go to get the right information and get some people to do a

basic of the sit out and watch the birds and count birds in and see what times they come by and what seasons and how many and what species and and look at the area and the terrain and certain species like certain habitat so they can I justify things that way it's it's quite well-developed in terms of doing these kinds of studies now they've had over 10 years to get to get better and better not that we know all the answers but they're getting good at spotting when things might be a problem. Well there we're going to have to stop we've used our time apologies we have a couple of people we can't take. If you're interested by the way in renewable energy there is a website for the National Renewable Energy Lab that's w w w dot n r e l dot gov so you can go there and take a look at it. Our guest this morning is the director of the national wind technology division at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden Colorado Robert Thresher and Dr. Gershon thanks very much. Thank you.