Sunday, June 18, 2006
Going around and around on windmills
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
I was driving week before last across the scrub lands of the American Southwest when I caught my first sight of giant windmills.
These are supposed to be the nation's salvation, I know, an environmentally clean energy alternative, one treatment for our oil addiction that comes without a lot of dangerous side effects.
Other than in photos, I had never seen one. And I liked what I saw. There.
Yet I still haven't been able to work up much enthusiasm for windmills here, where energy developers want to build them on the lush mountain ridgelines of Southwest Virginia. Or might want to build them, I should say, depending on how the wind blows.
This might be NIMBYism on a grand scale, I grant you. I haven't made up my mind about that yet. But does a general enthusiasm for wind energy mean environmentalists should support all windmill farms that anyone proposes, even those that would crop up in their own back yards -- which happen to be beautiful mountainscapes?
I was having a similar discussion the other week in a brew pub in Albuquerque, N.M., with friends who had moved from here about a year ago. They are both avid cyclists who love the outdoors, but one, I would say, goes beyond avid to rabid. He has spent a good chunk of his waking hours on a mountain bike, here and there, and once told me his most satisfying religious experience comes on the trail, in constant awe of God's creation.
He loves the windmills, was surprised I didn't share his enthusiasm wholeheartedly.
We need clean energy, I acknowledged. But, I asked, should wind farms be developed wherever they are economically viable? Or should other factors, even aesthetics, sometimes bar them -- when, say, nature itself is a regional economic draw? And he wasn't so sure.
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We drove the next day up to Sandia Crest, more than 10,000 feet above sea level, in the Sandia Mountains east of the city. He had ridden his road bike up the day before. This is not quite as grueling a feat as it might sound to my fellow couch potatoes. The elevation of Albuquerque itself is something over 5,000 feet. But still.
The view was stunning. No windmills broke the ridgelines.
The next day we drove to our friends' home in Portales, a little town in southeast New Mexico on the Llano Estacado, Spanish for "staked plain" or, perhaps, "palisaded (or stockaded) plain." Writers differ on the translation.
We rode for hours through brushy flat land to get there, my companions stoically bearing my various renditions of "Cool Water," in which I did my earnest best to capture the authentic Western twang of the Sons of the Pioneers.
I searched all the while for every subtle change in the landscape: every distant mesa, unexpected gully, slight variation in vegetation. The land was so stark that the shadow of each cloud lay as a notable feature on the Earth, changing colors and shapes, sometimes painting pictures of water where there was none.
It was all strangely beautiful -- but repetitive. And that didn't change when we reached our destination.
The Llano, stretching from West Texas to eastern New Mexico, is a plateau between 4,000 and 5,000 feet above sea level, the southernmost part of the High Plains. It is dry and flat and the wind always blows.
On Day 3 of our trip, we headed for mountains: the Sierra Blanca, around the touristy little town of Ruidoso. To get there, we drove for hours across the plain. But heading south, between Portales and Elida, is the San Juan Mesa. And as we approached it, we could see giant windmills breaking, one by one, through an uncharacteristic haze.
I have to admit, they were lovely things, looming elegantly over the otherwise unbroken tableland, their sleek propellers turning slowly in the wind.
It was a windmill farm I could love.
But windmills along the ridges of Highland County? Or Patrick County? Or Roanoke County, even closer to home? The prospect dismays me.
I know that we -- meaning all of us -- have to get serious about clean energy. Our thirst for oil not only makes us vulnerable economically, but the burning of fossil fuels also is contributing heavily to global warming -- to potentially catastrophic effect. If the choice is between a string of giant turbines on Bent and Poor mountains or cataclysmic changes to the Earth, I can live with windmills marring the views.
But if we can harness wind energy elsewhere, develop other clean energy sources and spare the ridgelines, I'd prefer that.
I guess I'm a typical, spoiled rotten American. I want it all.
But in a crisis, I can settle for less.
Elizabeth Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
