Future Energy

Wind Energy Siting: Will Environmental Guidelines End the Conflicts?

 

Source:Clean Technica

If you are concerned about global warming and the effects that atmospheric carbon levels are even now having, then wind energy looks like a no-brainer.  Clearly not everyone agrees.

February 1st, the first appeal of a Renewable Energy Approval certificate in Ontario began, focusing on a small wind farm being developed by Suncor Energy Inc.  The Kent Breeze wind farm, once constructed, will  have eight turbines with 20 MW total capacity.  At issue are claims that the windfarm will cause serious harm to human health as a result of exposure to to the infrasound and/or low frequency noise and shadow flicker from wind turbines.  The appeal hearing is expected to take until March 31st and involve 16 days of testimony.

Similarly, High Country News has long followed the controversy regarding wind power development in Wyoming.  On the surface the debate in Wyoming appears to be about preserving Sage Grouse and the aesthetic of undeveloped ranchland.  However, digging deeper and it becomes a conflict between oil and gas interests and wind (see Wind Resistance: Will the petrocracy - and greens - keep Wyoming from realizing its windy potential?, Deccember 2009):

"Look closer, however, and you'll find that much of the resistance to wind actually comes from the fossil fuel industry and the politics it bankrolls.  Wyoming is the largest coal producer in the nation and the third-largest producer of natural gas; at least one town is named after an oil company. Severance taxes and royalties from these industries keep the state's government, schools and other services afloat. In an indirect and sometimes convoluted way, wind threatens that old-school energy dynamic. At an August symposium on wind energy at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Aaron Clark, an advisor to the governor, put it candidly: "We can't let wind development hurt the state's revenue stream from extractive minerals."

The Cape Wind went through a nine year of regulatory process with opposition from no less than Sentaor Ted Kennedy, who appeared to fear the impact on his holiday home's vistas over Nantucket Sound - and its still in the courts!

And its not just in North America.  Back in August 2009, Greenpeace U.K. voiced its concerns about local councils' negative stance towards onshore wind farms:

".... of the reasons Britain’s green industrial revolution is yet to take off is the lack of domestic demand for wind turbines, and a key reason for that has been the attitude of many Conservative councils ..... a key factor behind the woes is a backlash against onshore wind farms by local authorities concerned about damage to the value of citizens’ property and to the environment — including local bird populations."

Much of the negative sentiment seems to arise because some people don't like looking at the turbines (from one description of 1.5 MW turbines: "From its base to the tip of its rotor, the GE 1.5 megawatt wind turbine is 380 feet tall. Each rotor blade is 122 feet long.") or see them as a threat to their property values (although, some of the controversy appears to be driven by entrenched industries with no interest in change).  In a word, a classic case of NIMBY'ism.  And while these types of arguments always seem to be advanced in terms of environmental or human-health claims, how real are the claims?    

Earlier this month, in an effort to address the burgeoning concerns, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service issued voluntary Draft Land-Based Wind Energy Guidelines. These Guidelines have been a long-time coming.  The Fish & Wildlife Service introduction to the Guidelines that is on their website suggests a gestation of more than eight years:

"In July 2003, the Service released for a set of voluntary, interim guidelines for land-based, wind energy projects to assist developers in avoiding, minimizing and/or compensating for effects to fish, wildlife, and their habitats. Following an extended two-year public comment period, the Secretary of the Interior established the Wind Turbine Guidelines Advisory Committee under the auspices of the Federal Advisory Committee Act in March 2007 to provide the recommendations for the final guidelines. The Committee was comprised of a diversity of stakeholders, including federal, tribal, state, private industries and conservation organizations. After two years of deliberations, the Committee submitted their final recommendations to the Secretary on March 4, 2010.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service then convened an internal working group representing several Service programs to review the Committee recommendations.  The working group used the recommendations as a basis to develop the Service’s proposed wind energy guidelines."

The Guidelines are intended to guide site-selection of land-based, wind energy projects, addressing the potential negative effects of wind energy development on fish, wildlife, and their habitats.

Briefly, the Guidelines are based on a five tiered approach to habitat and wildlife protection, including:

Tier 1 – Preliminary evaluation or screening of potential sites
Tier 2 – Site characterization
Tier 3 – Pre-construction monitoring and assessments
Tier 4 – Post-construction monitoring of effects
Tier 5 – Research

At each of the site-selection levels, users are asked to assess the risk of future impacts on wildlife and wildlife habitat based on consideration of the species available, presenece of high value habitat (including "intact habitat" - as the Fish & Wildlife Service states in the Introduction, "many of North America's native landscapes are greatly diminished or degraded from multiple causes unrelated to wind energy".  So as the dispute in Wyoming shows, wind may just be the latest layer of impacts in the cake - and probably not even the most significant.)  

Once the decision to site a wind farm has been made, the Guidelines also provide best practice mitigation and management approaches - although, not in great detail.

As someone who sits down from time to time to develop similar types of guidelines, I would say that they are well thought out and drafted. And they are complimented by guidance to address risks specific to eagles in the Draft Eagle Conservation Plan Guidance as well as by the creation of a new website which the Service is promising to maintain with new and emerging best practice as it becomes comes available.

Will this address many of the concerns around wind farms and wind turbines?  I suspect not. 

It appears to be a useful tool for addressing wildlife concerns associated wind development.  However, much of the concern around wind farms and many other kinds of development is much more visceral than the objective environmental or health concerns often cited.  It comes down to a fear of change and a desire to control the change in our own environments.  The conflicts also say something about the uneven spread of impacts and benefits.  For those living next to a wind farm the global environmental benefits of wind energy may mean little to them.

I was struck by the author's statement at the end of the article about Wyoming's wind farm conflicts:

"I slither through the fence and walk up to a turbine, until I'm directly beneath its blades. The only sound is a low-pitched sort of watery sigh, kind of like a slowed-down version of an unborn baby's heartbeat on an ultrasound. No gears grind or scream on this solitary giant, nothing spews out of it, no drill bits penetrate, and no strange fluids are shot into or sucked out of the earth. The wind blows, the arms turn, and electrons flow through cables, down the tower, under the ground, and into the power lines where they'll join up with the coal-generated electrons 13 miles away. They flow into the bloodstream of the omnipotent, tentacled organism called the grid. Somewhere, someone flips a switch. And there is light."

It says a lot about these types of conflicts - our points of comparison, our awareness of the effects of our decisions and our choices - and much too rational for most of us.

Australia is Recognizing Aboriginals in its Constitution ... I Think

Source: Thriving in the Desert blog

With repatriation of our Constitution in 1982, Canada took the step of ensuring recognition of Aboriginal rights.  With Section 35 of the Constitution Act, the country provided constitutional protection to the existing aboriginal and treaty rights. 

35. (1) The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.

(2) In this Act, "Aboriginal Peoples of Canada" includes the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples of Canada.

(3) For greater certainty, in subsection (1) "treaty rights" includes rights that now exist by way of land claims agreements or may be so acquired.

(4) Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, the aboriginal and treaty rights referred to in subsection (1) are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.

From an energy development point of view, Aboriginal recognition was and is significant because of the string of court cases that followed, establishing an Aboriginal role in the development of natural resources.  In particular, a series of landmark court cases have established the responsibility of the Crown to "consult" with Aboriginal peoples and, where appropriate, accommodate Aboriginal rights or interests when considering development proposals. (A position paper by Weyerhaeuser does a particularly good job of articulating the issues and ways of addressing.)

In practical terms, the Crown's responsibility is frequently effectively handed-off to industry and others proposing to develop resources and rarely does it seem to be done well.  Evolving understandings of what constitutes consultation and how to consult have been huge factors in the complication of regulatory processes for approving projects.

Now Australia seems to be stumbling towards similar accommodation of aboriginal peoples rights and interests (See Coalition to put Aboriginal Recognition to Referendum, August 10^th). 

I say stumbling because, in 2007 John Howard's government committed to holding a referendum on whether the preamble to the Australian Constitution should be changed to explicitly recognize aboriginals.   The promise was then reiterated by Kevin Rudd in 2008. 

Now as a national election approaches, the current Labour government under Julia Gillard has suggested that it would form an expert panel to build support for the constitutional recognition of indigenous people.  And, needless to say, the conservative Coalition thinks it has a better idea.

As indigenous people across remote Australia began casting their votes in mobile polling booths for the federal election on August 21, the Coalition's indigenous affairs spokesman, Nigel Scullion, said there was no need for another committee and he would guarantee a timeline for constitutional recognition to be delivered to Australia's first people.

"We are not only committed to it, we certainly aren't going to flick this very important matter to an expert panel," he said.

"There's been a lot of conversation with the wider community about it. I haven't met anybody who doesn't think it should be reflected in our Constitution and it is down to words and there's not a great deal of angst in the community about the words."

Its hard to see the difference between the two positions beyond a knee-jerk bias against "committees".  Both say they are going to referendum, with Labour suggesting a need to build support among voters, presumably to ensure the issue doesn't blow up in their faces (i.e. get rejected by Australians). 

I wish them luck as they proceed down this path.  Australia has done a lot of interesting work developing innovative regulation and reducing regulatory barriers to development.  I would hope to see some lessons for Canada to come out of this.

Ancient History: the Northeast B.C. Access Management Initiative

Source: Muskwa-Kechika Management Area

Once upon a time, I worked for a Canadian bank.  Shortly after I joined that august institution, the Chief Credit Officer, a man with a long history in the bank and in lending circulated a memo that roughly said .... when he began his career, it used to take 25 years for the bank to forget the lessons of the past and make the same mistakes all over again.  In contrast, he suggested that at the time of the memo, it was only taking the bank 10 years to recycle all of the mistakes it had formerly made.  He attributed the change to the price of progress. 

I have often thought about those remarks in connection with the work I do today.  poking around oil and gas companies in Calgary and energy regulators in western Canada, I would have to say that institutional memories have continued to shrink.  So much so that I would suggest many organizations are working on a forget-fullness cycle of five years or even less as people change jobs, reorganize, restructure, etc. more or less continuously. 

Bearing this in mind, over the past couple of months, triggered by some recent work on access management, I decided to track down and scan some of the reports, etc. that were developed as part of the Northeast B.C. Access Management Initiative.  The Northeast B.C. Access Management Initiative was a multi-party process that was initiated in 1994 in an effort to understand the issues and find some solutions.  It was also the first time I became involved in trying to develop land-use management processes to address access concerns.

Back in 1993 I was helping a Canadian gas pipeline company (Westcoast Energy Inc., now Spectra Energy) develop a series of projects in northeast B.C.  Then, as now, the cumulative effects of access development and its subsequent uses were among the most significant concerns associated with oil and gas development among public land-use managers (primarily the B.C. Ministry of Environment) in the area.  In the words of one environmental consultant I worked with at the time, "the creation of motorized access has the greatest impact of any activity on the type, pattern and amount of use of public lands and resources". 

Like any issue associated with cumulative effects, the best solutions were not likely to come out of any single infrastructure project then being developed.  So, with the help of several people in the oil and gas industry and the financial support of my employer, I set out to bring everyone that could possibly have an interest in the issue to the table.  Eventually, with the support of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the B.C. Government, we were able to have individuals working in oil and gas and forestry sat down with government staff, guide/outfitters, local landowners and others to try to understand the issues, some of the possible solutions and agree on a path forward.  After less than two years, and having written a series of documents, the initiative was ultimately subsumed into the land use planning processes (Land and Resource Management Planning), then raging across the process.

Despite this early initiative, the pace of industrial development on western Canada's  public lands and the explosion in the number of people looking to these same lands for recreation have ensured that concerns for access creation and management remain much as they were 16 years ago.  And, needless to say, few remember either the initiative or the work that was developed during its short life. 

So as my public service for the day, I have posted on my company website (Eos Consulting) the documents that I've tracked down and scanned thus far, including:

1. A Compendium of Physical Access Control Measures for Roads and Other Rights-of-Way, prepared by Axys Environmental Consulting Ltd.(now part of Stantec), March 1995.
2. A Review of the Coordinated Access Management Planning (CAMP) Process in British Columbia: Applications and Lessons Learned, prepared by Carmanah Research Ltd., February 1995.
3. Agenda for the 1994 Initiative Workshop: Access Management as a Component of Planned Petroleum and Natural Gas Development, June 1994, prepared by Erlandson and Associates.
4. 1995 Workshop Summary Report for the Access Management Initiative, June 1995, prepared by Ehrlandson and Associates.

[There are two further documents - very bulky - that I will post as soon as I can arrange to have them scanned.]

I doubt these materials are going to provide anyone with the solution to cumulative effects associated with access  and access management, but they can offer a starting point for some of the initiatives that are following.

Backtracking: More Grizzly Bears and Access Management

 

Source: Alberta Wilderness Association

I just spent some time helping my father-in-law clean up an overflowing stack of mail, magazines and much other paper, and came across an old article relating to access management and grizzly bears, the subject of a post May 2^nd.  A year ago, Westworld Alberta magazine included an article by Jeff Gailus, (see Bear-ly With Us, April 2009) the author interviewed by the CBC's Anna Maria Tremonte April 29^th, about efforts to save Alberta's grizzly bears. 

Mr. Gailus sounds a bit more upbeat in the article than he did on the radio two weeks ago. However, he once again highlighted the role of high road densities and public use of those roads in the bears' Alberta demise.  Its a good article and it does explain the connections between roads and bear recovery in a bit more detail than was possible in the CBC interview.

Interestingly, the article quotes Chris Servheen, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator, on managing access without removing roads.

"That's a Holy Grail question ... in the U.S. we have what's called the Knucklehead Factor: it's always five to 10 per cent of the people who cause all the problems.  We don't even count gated roads as closed because we can't get people to obey the closures.  So if the Knucklehead Factor exists in Alberta, you can't reduce access without closing roads."

After my post two weeks ago I got a message from a friend reminding me of the position taken by then Petro-Canada, now Suncor, at the ERCB hearings for a natural gas pipeline/wells proposed south of Alberta's Kananaskis - the "Sullivan project":

"One thing that I noticed in the ... commentary and response from Jeff Gailus  was that there was no mention of open access vs controlled access - simply access.  In [the] ERCB Hearing re: Sullivan - this distinction was made and had to be re-inforced on the premise that not all access is created equal.... and that properly controlled access isn't much different than no access."

Petro-Canada's position is consistent with my conclusions in work I did during 2008-2009 regarding access management (the reports are here) for the Foothills Research Institute.  Its difficult and it requires a well coordinated strategy (rather than just a gate) but access can be controlled once it has been created.  The insurmountable hurdle appears to be the will and the resources to create an effective strategy - so Shell Canada has been able to make a success of managing access in the Waterton region of south-west Alberta and Petro-Canada/Suncor may be able to do so as part of the proposed project development for Sullivan.  Governments though, in both the U.S. and Canada, have a harder time saying no to the Knuckleheads. 

So, perhaps it is better not to create the access in the first place if that's an option.

FYI, Jeff Gailus was kind enough to add some comments to my original post that you might find interesting.

Access Management and Grizzly Bears in Alberta

Source: CPAWS_southernalberta.org

This week, grizzlies and access management were in the news on The Current, CBC Radio One's current affairs program hosted by Anna Maria Tremonti.  In Grizzly Manifesto (April 29th), Ms. Tremonti was interviewing conservationist Jeff Gailus, author of The Grizzly Manifesto.  Mr. Gailus quickly linked the future of grizzlies in Alberta to access and access management.  Mr. Gailus tied the future of grizzly populations in the province to habitat security, which in turn requires few or no roads and/or limited motorized access.  In particular, Mr. Gailus pointed to the Land Use Framework process currently underway and called for that to ensure "no more habitat is degraded with additional roads ... need to put a plan in place to restore some of those areas by obliterating roads".

As a counterpoint to Mr. Gaiilus' point of view, Jim Allen, the head of Game and Priority Species in the Wildlife Management Branch of the Sustainable Resource Development ministry, was called on to defend the Alberta government's approach to managing grizzlies.  Focusing his remarks on the province's Grizzly Recovery Plan, he certainly didn't disagree with Gailus on the importance of roads and access management to the grizzlies' future in Alberta.  However, he did suggest that in fact the province was addressing concerns for access, ensuring that road densities in the "core recovery areas" were currently below the threshold of 0.6 km per square kilometre often identified as the impact threshold for the bears.

Interestingly, both men talked about the role of the forest industry and its development of roads to access timber resources.  Neither mentioned the large role oil & gas development is playing.

If you had to separate the two views, it comes down to the author's belief that access be managed by not building roads and removing those that already exist versus the province's view that the industrial access was going to take place so access must be managed by reclamation and other means.  In a province that is developing oil & gas, forestry and mining resources as fast as Alberta is, the differences in approach can quickly become very significant for wildlife habitat and populations.

Having examined the issues of access and access management in detail for the Foothills Research Institute a year ago, I think that it is a bit more complex than either man presented (in fairness to both Gailus and Allen, it may be too complex to be addressed in a 25 minute radio program).  I developed a decision tree that would allow public land managers to work through a hierarchy of approaches depending on the extent of current development and land use.  The hierarchy reflected the range of approaches available to address each particular situation - and the need to employ multiple, mutually-reinforcing approaches in each situation.  A summary of my work can be found here (there is also a detailed report and a PowerPoint presentation).

Restoring the Great Plains

  Source: dailykos.com

I started out a day or two ago trying to track down some information on a new book by a Saskatchewan author I have enjoyed in the past, Trevor Herriot.  What I found instead was his blog, Grass Notes, and in particular a February blog post regarding the "American Prairie Reserve".  Herriot introduces the concept and highlights a book about the concept by Richard Manning, entitled Rebuilding the West -Restoration in a Prairie Landscape.  In Herriot's own words:

"Richard Manning’s big idea is to work with private and public conservation agencies and the people of the northern Great Plains to find a way to draw a border of ecological protection around 3.5 million acres of native prairie centering on the Missouri River passes through the Missouri Breaks National Monument and the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. They call it “The American Prairie Preserve” and estimate that for $250 million (about ten days of the Iraq war expenditure), enough of the necessary private land could be purchased to create “a Yellowstone of the Plains.”"

Richard Manning's "big idea" is in turn, based on a 2004 ecological assessment prepared by the Northern Plains Conservation Network, which identifies key prairie grassland landscapes where opportunities exist to restore large-scale ecological processes and provide habitat for significant populations of native wildlife.  Supported by a consortium of 16 ENGO's (including the Denver Zoo, if you can call them an ENGO), Oceans of Grass: A Conservation Assessment of the Northern Great Plains provides a detailed blueprint for conserving and restoring these landscapes.   

Source: Trevor Herriot's Grass Notes

What I find most interesting about the American Prairie Reserve are the parallels with the Buffalo Commons, a concept put forward by Frank and Deborah Popper in 1987.  I first read about Buffalo Commons in the Wall Street Journal, I think about ten years ago, but the idea was first advanced in 1987 in an article published in Planning.  The Poppers were proposing that the drier portions of the Great Plains, an area totalling 360,000 square kilometres in ten western states, be restored to native grasslands and stocked with buffalo.  The idea was driven by the exodus of people from the Great Plains, which continues unabated even today, and the expectation that the Ogalalla Aquifer was approaching exhaustion.

The American Prairie Reserve and the Buffalo Commons reflect a desire to return a vast and increasingly empty section of North America back to their pre-European settlement condition.  There are those that would step even further back, towards a re-wilding that restored Pleistocene megafauna, or their nearest relatives, to some big landscapes.  I suppose it all depends on what you consider the baseline to be.

It might be easy to take a tongue-in-cheek attitude to these proposals, except that they represent what is likely to become one of the biggest focuses in future environmental management - restoration and human management of wild landscapes.  Certainly thats the premise put forward by Stephen Meyer in The End of the Wild.  His argument is a bit more complex than I can hope to capture in a couple of lines, but it rests on a the belief that "we have lost the wild for now.  Perhaps in five or ten million years it will return."   Meyer's prescription includes:

• Coming to terms with what we have wrought;
• Research to apply "the cold light of a necropsy to dissect the collapsing processes of natural selection";
• Protecting the landscape and the integrity and complexity of ecosystem processes; and
• Intensive management of plant and animal populations.

Its a bleak outlook but probably realistic.  With a human population of six billion growing to, arguably, 10 billion, there will be little no opportunity for the global environment to go back to where it started.  Restoration and hands-on management will almost certainly be required.

The Red and the Dead

Last week, Yale's environment 360 has provided two stories focusing on forest management in an era of global warming.  Forest management is not a usual focus for me except that it is increasingly being affected by the global weirding of the weather and that is an energy issue, so on we go.

In the first story, Whats Killing the Great Forests of the American West?, Montana writer Jim Robbins looks at one of the most visible impacts of global warming here in western North America.  Exploding populations of mountain pine beetle and other bark beetles that are carving a swath through western forests from Alaska to Mexico.  Mr. Robbin's report connects the mountain pine beetle infestation to a phenomenon of insect infestations that extends the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, impacting more than 70,000 square miles of forests - and that's just since 2000.

Living in B.C., mountain pine beetle's assault on the province's forest lands has been unfolding for more than a decade now (and covers much more of the province than just the Rockies, beetle killed forests can be found less than two hours drive east of Vancouver).  The most recent Ministry of Forests estimates suggest 14.5 million hectares of forest land have been impacted, changing the economy of many of the province's small towns and the ecology of large parts of the province.

And beginning in June 2006 a significant infestation spread into Alberta as strong winds lifted beetles over the spine of the Rockies and into the west-central part of the province - a distance of more than 400 kilometres.

That's just two provinces. 

Beetle kills are the result of a warming climate and they are likely to have a positive feedback effect on the climate, flipping forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.  Wikipedia reports on Canadian Forest Service modeling of the forest carbon cycle that suggests that by 2020 the pine beetle outbreak will have released 270 mega-tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere from Canadian forests.  But with Mr. Robbins suggesting that B.C.'s forests crossed that tipping point in 2008 are we ahead of schedule?

From where I sit, Mr. Robbins seems to have done a good job of stating the obvious when he points out that:

"While people in some places have the luxury to doubt whether climate change is real, it's harder to be a doubter in the Rocky Mountains.  Glaciers in Glacier National Park and elsewhere are shrinking, winters are warmer and shorter, and the intensity of forest fires is increasing.  But the most obvious sign is the red and dead forests that carpet the hills and mountains.  They have transformed life in parts of the Rockies."

  Still on the topic of forests and climate change, environment 360's second story points to fire as a potentially important tool for mitigating climate warming impacts to the region's forests.  In Prescribed Burns in U.S. West Would Cut Carbon Footprint, 360 cites a study published in Environmental Science and Technology by Christine Weidinmyer and Matthew Hurteau (link to full paper).  Ms. Weidinmyer and Mr. Hurteau point to significant carbon management benefits using controlled burns and to the protection from wildfires that would also result.

"Using satellite imagery and models that calculate carbon emissions related to wildfires from 2001 to 2008, researchers predicted that prescribed burns could reduce such emissions by 18 to 25 percent - and as much as 60 percent in some areas."

Clearly forest management needs to change - along with the changes that are happening in the way forests are used.  I'm sure there's more to come.

Mountain Pine Beetle  

All photos courtesy of: BC Ministry of Forests