Winds of change
By Johanna Marmon
Wind energy in Arkwright.
Photo by kc kratt.
To hear town supervisor Frederic Norton talk about the benefits industrial-scale wind farming will have on his tiny community of Arkwright—tucked into the northeast part of Chautauqua County on the southern shore of Lake Erie—it’s hard not to share his enthusiasm. Never mind the fact that wind farming harnesses a clean, renewable energy source, a fact that Norton says isn’t lost on the residents of Arkwright, which according to the 2000 census has fewer than 1,200 people living within its thirty-five-odd square miles. It was another kind of green that really caught the town’s attention.

“The financial aspect of the project is critical for us,” he says. “We are a small town; we have no water line, no sewer system. It’s wells and septic systems. We have no church, no shopping plaza … we’re totally farming and residential.” It means, Norton explains, that the money Arkwright generates in annual real property taxes is only $270,000. “We don’t have a revenue base to take care of our forty miles of roads, thirty of which are dirt,” he says, adding that the town should spend at least $10,000 per year per mile on roadway upkeep. “We’re well under the amount necessary to maintain a level of repair.” And that, Norton says, is just one small example that illustrates how strapped for cash the town really is.

So when Horizon Wind Energy approached Arkwright with a plan to build forty 1.8-megawatt wind turbines in the town—each of which will stand upwards of 400 feet tall, the equivalent of a ten-story building, with the ability to power 600 homes annually at full capacity—Norton and other officials were all too happy to listen to what the developer had to say. Not only would the $100 million wind farm supply clean energy to the power grid (as opposed to coal-fired power plants, for example, which spew harmful particulates into the air), Horizon would pay to Arkwright and various taxing jurisdictions an impressive $640,000 per year as part of a “host community” agreement and payments in lieu of taxes, based on a per-megawatt-of-production estimate. That’s not to mention the fact that some thirty Arkwright landowners would benefit from substantial annual lease payments—Horizon wouldn’t comment on the amount, but Norton says the payments are in the thousands of dollars—for twenty years’ use of the land from which the turbines would rise.

“There’s no question what these landowners are getting,” Norton says. “It means their property will benefit from revenue that will help them pay their taxes … If you’re a farmer, it means you’ll be able to sustain farming.” The project, dubbed New Grange Wind, hasn’t gotten the green light yet. The Houston-based Horizon has filed a project application with the town and is currently in the middle of putting together a draft environmental impact statement required under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) that will note any environmental issues associated with the wind farm, which the company is then required to present to Arkwright and a number of state and federal agencies for approval. But if everything falls into place, Arkwright will become one of a growing number of rural communities in Western New York that have allowed wind-farm development to become a part of its landscape.

A burgeoning WNY trend
Indeed, the region is experiencing something akin to a gold rush in terms of wind farming, which literally harnesses wind power and turns it into electricity by connecting the turbines to a power substation that eventually feeds into the grid. It’s a resource that Western New York—flanked as it is by two Great Lakes that send winds howling ashore—has no shortage of. It means that the region is ripe for development of industrial wind farms, with some insiders pegging the number of projects in the pipeline (meaning that developers have begun talks with towns or are currently going through the application and/or environmental review process) at two dozen or more, with the numbers growing virtually every day. Some towns are actually able to take their pick of developers clamoring to lay claim to the wind. In the Chautauqua County town of Pomfret, for example, local press reports say that three different developers (including Horizon) were actively wooing a group of landowners before they entered into contracts with Australia-based Babcock & Brown, an asset management group that operates twenty wind farms across nine states through its Babcock & Brown Wind Partners arm.

While New York State already ranks eleventh in the nation in terms of installed megawatt capacity—according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a Washington, DC- based trade group, 425 megawatts are currently online—a much smaller number of wind farms are actually under construction or have been completed here, meaning that development is ramping up but has yet to truly explode. Noble Environmental Power’s sixty-seven-turbine, $200 million Bliss Windpark in the Wyoming County town of Eagle became “energized” earlier this year, for example, while its eighty-five-turbine project in Wethersfield (also in Wyoming County) is just beginning build-out. Then there’s BQ Energy’s well-known Steel Winds eight-turbine project in Lackawanna, the nation’s largest urban wind farm, which went into service last summer. In the end, however, it means that if even a small number of the proposed wind farms actually make it from the proposal stage to reality, Western New York’s rural landscape of gently rolling hills, winding country roads, and farmland will be radically changed.

Still controversial
Critics of wind farming in Western New York and around the country—easy to find with a few well-placed keywords tapped into Google—say that the green technology isn’t without its problems. For one, wind doesn’t always blow, so we could never fully rely on it for all of our energy needs, while many reports state that wind turbines generally operate at just twenty percent capacity. Then there are the turbines’ impact on migratory birds and bats (collisions) and the substantial land requirements of each turbine (road construction, tree clearing around the turbine’s perimeter, and so on). And what about the health effects the turbines reportedly have on their human neighbors? Noise issues and sleep disturbances as a result of turbine noise are generally the most commonly cited, though developers are quick to point out that the effects vary widely from person to person and are controlled with adequate setbacks (the very definition of which is controversial in and of itself) from residential homes.

“There’s no real issue,” says Bob Maxwell, New York project manager for the Connecticut-based Noble, which is majority-owned by JP Morgan Partners Fund, an investment group. “So long as the towns enact land-use laws that have adequate setbacks and so long as developers act responsibly and turbine manufacturers make nonnoisy, safe equipment, I don’t think that there are legitimate complaints.” Maxwell also notes that there are aesthetic criticisms, which may be justifiable on one level but don’t really affect a project’s viability—or safety.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Tom Stebbins, Horizon’s project manager for the Arkwright wind farm. “The turbines have been designed to be as unobtrusive as possible,” he says. “The tubular tower you see now is an industry standard.” As for the possibility of ice throwing—when the turbine blades shed winter ice buildup while rotating—Stebbins and Maxwell both say it’s a nonissue. “The ice forms and it breaks and falls down under the turbine,” Maxwell says. “If the icy conditions are bad, the turbine shuts down. They don’t rotate quickly at 20 RPM.”

Most towns in Western New York that have crafted local laws governing wind farming require setbacks of at least 1,000 feet from a residential dwelling in order to mitigate turbine-generated noise and preserve human safety, while noise limits at residential property lines are generally set at fifty decibels. (At least one town, Centerville in Wyoming County, for example, which is negotiating with Noble for a sixty-seven-turbine farm, passed a law requiring a 1,000-foot setback, though the law is currently being fought in court.) But the World Health Organization recommends that nighttime “community” noise be limited to thirty decibels. And Concerned Citizens of Cattaraugus County, Inc., (CCCC) a watchdog group that has compiled substantial research regarding industrial wind farming’s effects, cites guidelines set up by the Ontario [Canada] Ministry for the Environment specifying that only wind turbines more than 1,000 meters—upwards of 3,200 square feet—from a dwelling or other “sensitive land uses” have insignificant noise impact.
The problem, of course, is that everyone reacts differently to noise; what bothers one might not affect another, and vice versa. In Europe these days, however (which has been farming wind for a generation), CCCC says that conventional wisdom dictates turbines should be at least a half-mile from a residential dwelling to guarantee against any ill effects. “The bottom line is, towns should enact local laws so they have the ability to make yes or no decisions based on local values,” says Daniel Spitzer, a renewable-energy attorney with the Buffalo-based Hodgson Russ who represents both towns and wind-farm developers in Western New York and who helps craft local legislation. “There are certain areas of concern that each community has to decide on, and the purpose of a good statute is to reflect those values.”

And what about the effects of turbines on migrating birds and bats? Terry Yonker, the founder of Marine Services Diversified, a Youngstown-based environmental consulting firm that has conducted avian risk assessments for BQ’s Steel Winds project and Noble’s Bliss project, says that birds don’t fly low enough to create a hazard with the turbines—generally. “There are certain conditions, such as during advancing storm systems, that cause birds to decrease their altitudes and then crash,” Yonker says, adding most injuries and fatalities occur (a few hundred to several hundred per year) when birds collide with the towers themselves, not the rotating blades. “What we’ve recommended is operational mitigation—for turbines to shut down when there’s risk.” On the nights the birds descend, Yonker says, he’s talking about a shut-off period of an hour or two at most.

Improper lighting of the turbines can also cause problems for birds, which use the sky and stars as visual cues, says Yonker, a strong proponent of wind farming in the region. “If tower lights don’t flash or are white, birds can confuse them with stars,” he says, adding that bats are at a higher risk, since they turn off their sonar systems during migration.
Communities at odds
Beyond environmental and health impacts, there’s yet another effect that wind farming is having on rural communities: it can polarize them when there’s not 100 percent support, which is very rare. “The lease-holders in general are a fraction of the total population of a community,” says Gary Abraham, an environmental attorney who is representing a group of plaintiffs in the aforementioned Centerville suit over the town law. “This has created a wedge and driven people apart because those who aren’t getting their beds feathered have to live with the noise and impact. It’s created rifts in communities.”

Dennis Gaffin, a member of the Centerville suit, also sees wind farming in his community as fractious (a number of other towns, including Arkwright, have vocal opponents as well), though he does say he’s not antiwind. “At the risk of sounding arrogant, long before we knew the size of the project, the first issue I raised was what it was going to do to our community,” says Gaffin, a professor of anthropology and ecology at Buffalo State College. “There are people I know who no longer exchange favors, who no longer have neighborly relationships that have existed for generations. It’s made for irreparable problems already and we don’t even have one wind turbine built.”

Noble’s Maxwell, who did not comment specifically on the Centerville suit, says the company needs to be mindful of the “rural character” that makes up the fabric of the communities in which it’s looking to develop. “At the same time, one can’t ignore the economic situation facing farmers and other residents of rural New York,” he says. “That is, there’s a declining population and rising property taxes. We think this is a viable way for farmers to have another source of income … They’re able to keep their land and thus, the rural character is saved and not damaged.”

While it does appear the financial gain for rural communities can be large, others question how fair the distribution of funds really is—especially when you begin to wonder just how profitable wind farming can be. For one, the industry, albeit capital-intensive, is subsidized by the federal government; it gets a 1.5-cent per kilowatt-hour production tax credit (the credit was recently renewed in Congress), while in New York, developers are eligible for various state grants administered by the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority.

Even so, it’s difficult to estimate how much money wind farms actually make; Horizon and Noble wouldn’t say, as they are private companies, and the cost of energy rises and falls as the market fluctuates. AWEA’s website says, however, that pricing is competitive with other energy forms, having dropped from nearly $.30 per kilowatt-hour in the 1980s to less than $.05 per kilowatt-hour today with the production tax credit. “The reality of it is, these companies are expecting double-digit rates of return, while it seems like the local communities aren’t really getting a very big piece of this huge financial pie,” says Keith Pitman, president and CEO of Empire State Wind Energy, an Oneida-based company. “I’d say it is definitely upwards of ten percent annually, and even that might be an absolute gross underestimate.”

Pitman says his company has a different approach: to offer host communities majority profit sharing to the lofty tune of 75/25. “We think that’s doable,” he says. “It’s a true partnership in that if we win, everyone wins. As it stands now in the industry, if the investor wins, the investor wins.” The company currently has agreements with four towns outside of Western New York in Wayne County: Butler, Huron, Wolcott, and Rose, while in Yates County, an agreement is in place with Benton.

For his part, environmentalist Yonker hopes that stakeholders can get past their various differences and come together on what ultimately boils down to a very grave issue: climate change and the role renewable energy plays in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. “I’m looking at this from a climate standpoint and from a scientist’s point of view,” he says. “We need to find a way to get around the problems and make wind farming work in the Great Lakes region, but it has to be done right.” As it stands now, the right way is still very much up for debate.

Joanne Marmon is a freelance writer living in Burt, near Olcott.


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