Clean Power Collateral Damage: Of Birds, Tortoises And The Transition From Fossil Fuels
Posted: 03/11/2013 8:00 am
Is kickstarting a clean-energy industry and accelerating a
movement away from fossil fuels worth the expense of, say, a few desert
tortoises or a collection of piping plovers? If so, how many of these
threatened species would you be willing to sacrifice to build a
commercial wind farm, or a utility-scale solar array?
It's a stark and oversimplified way to frame things, of course, but
the exercise helps to highlight the reality that renewable energy has
environmental impacts, too. It's a point that was raised with me
recently by
Eric Glitzenstein, an attorney representing, among other groups, the
Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, a determined and
well-funded coalition of residents in and around Cape Cod who are opposed to the construction of an offshore wind farm in nearby waters.
Giltzenstein was responding to my
recent story on the ongoing effort to build that offshore facility, called
Cape Wind,
and he argued that over the course of the 12-year conflict, which is
usually depicted as a not-in-my-backyard dispute, real impacts to local
wildlife have been overlooked.
As
many as 100 or more golden eagles fall victim to spinning turbines at
California's Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area every year.
According to a recent
legal brief filed by Glitzenstein -- part of a
larger lawsuit
brought on behalf of a coalition that includes the Alliance and an
assortment of conservation groups like Public Employees for
Environmental Protection -- these wildlife threats have been
inadequately considered by federal regulators, who signed-off on the
project in 2010.
"While you raised valid questions concerning the length and
complexity of the process," Glitzenstein said in an email message, "one
of the unfortunate ironies is that, notwithstanding - indeed, perhaps
because of - the byzantine nature of the process, important wildlife
protection concerns raised by the project have never been meaningfully
addressed by the relevant expert agencies."
Cape Wind, of course, spent years undergoing extensive environmental
review, first by the Army Corps of Engineers and then again, by dint of
new federal energy legislation in 2005, by the Department of the
Interior. Some
800 pages
of impact analysis was ultimately completed in 2009, and it included
input from a battery of federal agencies like the Environmental
Protection Agency, the Fish & Wildlife Service and others. According
to those reviewers, the wind farm posed no major threats to local
wildlife.
But in their lawsuit, Glitzenstein and his clients argue that
construction and operation of the project will, among other things ...
... [kill] migratory birds, including endangered and
threatened species, harass federally listed sea turtles, and place the
gravely endangered North Atlantic right whale at increased risk of ship
strikes - the leading cause of the species' imperilment. In the course
of approving the project, defendants contravened the safeguards that
Congress established for the affected wildlife.
Whether the relevant federal agencies erred in their analysis
remains, obviously, a matter for the courts, but it's worth pointing out
that Cape Wind is also supported by virtually all of the major
environmental organizations in the United States, including
Greenpeace, the
Sierra Club and the
Natural Resources Defense Council.
Presumably none of these groups would argue that Cape Wind -- or any
major infrastructure project, for that matter -- is without impacts on
local wildlife and the nearby environment. But in the case of the
Nantucket wind farm, these groups seem to suggest, the trade-offs are
reasonable.
Glitzenstein found this somewhat ironic. "All I can say is that many
major renewable energy projects raise very difficult questions of
balancing, and each group has to make its own call as to how that
balance should be struck," he said in a follow-up email. "It seems clear
that if the wildlife risks and impacts associated with this project
were instead associated with a massive oil and gas drilling operation
(e.g., if such a project risked a major oil spill that might kill
thousands of migratory birds), there would be strong, uniform opposition
from the environmental community."
Whether or not that's a fair characterization is an open question,
but environmental tensions surrounding renewable energy projects are, as
Glitzenstein suggests, hardly unique to the Nantucket Sound wind farm. A
long and sometimes bitter fight over, among other things, tortoises,
has relentlessly dogged the
Ivanpah solar thermal power project
in California's Mojave desert. The massive, 3,500-acre facility will
use nearly 200,000 mirrors to focus the sun's rays on centralized
towers, generating steam and producing a nominal output of 377 megawatts
of electricity -- the largest facility of its kind in the world and
enough capacity, developers say, to power some 140,000 homes.
It was known early on that the project site overlapped with the
native habitat of the desert tortoise, but as BrightSource Energy, one
of the project's developers, began prepping the site for construction,
it
became clear the number of impacted tortoises was far higher than government biologists had predicted in
reviewing and ultimately permitting the project, which is being built on public land.
The solar facilities' developers have since been spending princely
sums in an attempt to corral, rehabilitate and ultimately re-locate the
tortoises it finds underfoot -- with only modest success,
according to The Los Angeles Times last spring:
BrightSource has spent $56 million so far to protect and
relocate the tortoises, but even at that price, the work has met with
unforeseen calamity: Animals crushed under vehicle tires, army ants
attacking hatchlings in a makeshift nursery and one small tortoise
carried off to an eagle nest, its embedded microchip pinging faintly as
it receded.
History has shown the tortoise to be a stubborn survivor,
withstanding upheavals that caused the grand dinosaur extinction and ice
ages that wiped out most living creatures. But unless current recovery
efforts begin to gain traction, this threatened species could become
collateral damage in the war against fossil fuels.
BrightSource and its partners
fired back
shortly after that item ran last year, arguing that The Times failed to
note that the tortoise has a poor survival rate even left entirely
alone, and that "the Ivanpah project owners - NRG, Google and
BrightSource Energy - are going to great lengths to ensure minimal
impact to the desert tortoise population at and near our project site."
This includes, the company noted, caring for as many as 170 juvenile
desert tortoises -- including "53 newborn hatchlings."
Biologists working for BrightSource "translocate" desert tortoises away from its massive solar facility.
A regional green group, the
Western Watersheds Project, did file
a lawsuit
in an attempt to block Ivanpah's progress -- citing, among other
problems, the failure to properly consider impacts on the tortoise. But
in August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
denied
a motion by the group to force BrightSource and its partners to halt
construction while its lawsuit was pending, and all signs suggest that
Ivanpah might well
start producing electricity this year.
For all of the friction, and regardless of how successful the
developers' ongoing reptile rescue efforts prove in the long term, the
fact remains that some tortoises will necessarily be sacrificed in the
pursuit of what is, presumably, a higher purpose. So, too, will fish
habitats be disturbed if giant turbine towers are ultimately driven into
the seabed of Nantucket Sound. And it is
virtually certain
that some number of piping plovers, roseate terns and other unwitting
water birds will fall victim to an unfortunate and summary thunk while
trying to navigate Cape Wind's hundreds of giant, spinning turbine
blades.
Compared to the
thousands of birds and fish
and other critters that have been offered up as collateral damage in
the nation's thirst for oil, or the saturation of local wildlife and
habitats with mercury and other poisons that arise from coal-fired power
-- not to mention the widely documented impacts of fossil fuels on
human health and the global climate -- some might argue that a fair bit
more local fauna could be sacrificed before the tradeoffs of renewable
energy proved worrisome.
An
analysis published in January,
for example, estimated that while wind power had killed approximately
20,000 birds in the U.S. in 2009, the combined pollution from fossil
fuel plants was responsible for more than 14 million avian deaths. The
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has put the number of birds killed by
wind turbines far higher -- on the order of 400,000 annually, according
to its
budget justification report for fiscal year 2013.
But then,
another 7 million birds are knocked dead
by the 84,000 television and radio towers in North America, according
to a 2012 study from the University of Southern California. Is that a
worthy trade-off?
These are important questions, but Kit Kennedy, an attorney with
NRDC, suggested that, at least as it relates to Cape Wind, this sort of
grim reckoning is unnecessary. She pointed by way of example to the
Massachusetts Audubon Society
-- presumably a steadfast friend to birds -- which concluded, based on
four years of bird studies from regulators, Cape Wind's developers and
its own independent analyses, that the project posed no "ecologically
significant" threat to birds of Nantucket Sound.
"By combating climate change, the Cape Wind Project will help to
protect the wildlife in the region and around the world," Kennedy said
in an email message. "The project will tap into Nantucket Sound's
abundant offshore wind resources and provide enough pollution-free and
carbon-free power to meet 75 percent of the electricity demand of Cape
Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. That's good for
the planet, for us humans, and for wildlife."
Kennedy, whose organization joined the Conservation Law Foundation and Mass Audubon in filing an
amicus brief
in support of Cape Wind and disputing the wildlife endangerment
arguments of project opponents, also took issue with Glitzenstein's
suggestion that major green groups would be blocking the Nantucket
project if it involved coal or oil, rather than wind power.
"This just doesn't hold water," Kennedy said. "NRDC has done
groundbreaking work to ensure that renewable energy is 'smart from the
start' -- meaning that siting avoids areas that are high conflict in
terms of wildlife and ecosystem protection." While NRDC has not sought
to derail the Ivanpah solar project, Kennedy noted that the group has,
in fact, taken aim at other desert solar projects, going so far as to
sue the Department of the Interior over approval of a location in the Mojave that would have unacceptable wildlife implications.
"Cape Wind just does not present the same concerns," she said.
Glitzenstein and his clients, of course, hope to ultimately prove otherwise.
"What is clear is that no one group is the repository of ultimate
wisdom on these matters and groups can (and will) disagree in good faith
on where the balance should be struck -- which, in the long run, is
probably healthy," Glitzenstein said.
The environmental community, he added, must "discern the proper path
for promoting renewable energy and curbing greenhouse gas emissions
while, at the same time, ensuring that other ecological catastrophes --
such as needlessly decimating bird populations -- are not inadvertently
created in the course of doing so."
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