WIND FARM GIVES HOPE THAT WE CAN CURE OUR ENVIRONMENT CRISIS

You can call this posting Atlantic City Part 2 or you can call it Atlantic City and Our Environment in Crisis. As impressed I was with the casino and commercial development that I saw during my fiftieth high school reunion in Atlantic City in early October, nothing impressed me more than what I caught sight of as my wife Harriet and I were heading out of town in our rented dark purple Hyundai and back to the airport in Philadelphia.

There, to the right of the Atlantic City Expressway, were five giant wind turbines, each towering well over 300 feet in the air. That glimpse almost took my breath away, and I felt I had to know more about this awesome sight.

Atlantic City Wind Farm

Thanks to the Internet, I was able to find out a lot. Operational since December 2005, the Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm is located at the ACUA (Atlantic County Utilities Authority) Wastewater Treatment Plant, near the Marina section. The five turbines stand 380 feet high, and each is capable of producing 1.5 megawatts for a total of 7.5 megawatts, enough energy to power approximately 2,500 homes. The equivalent of 23,613 barrels of crude oil are expected to be saved per day by the facility. Multiply that out over a year, and the number is an impressive 8,618,745 barrels. (Source: http://www.acua.com/alternative/)

That Atlantic City is the location of a wind farm, a wind farm that is making such a contribution to lessening our dependency on oil increases my pride in the fact that I once called Atlantic City home. About 20 years ago, I saw my first wind farm when my friend Brooks Townes, writer and photographer, took me for a memorable ride in his dark green Volvo sports car a hundred miles or so due east of the place where he was then living on Morro Bay in California.

No Al Gore Back Then

I was impressed with that facility as well, although none of those turbines were anywhere near as tall as those in Atlantic City, but the experience didn’t have the impact that it should have. Although I was well aware of the danger of the depletion of the world’s oil reserves back then and could readily see the value of a wind farm as an oil saving method, I was no Al Gore. The danger to the environment posed by hydrocarbon burning and the resulting elevation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was not in my range of awareness.

Now everywhere on earth the glaciers and ice caps are melting. They are melting as a result of the rise in the average temperature. And why is the average temperature of almost every spot on earth rising? Al Gore and every other creditable climate expert alive today has told us why. It is rising because of the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The increase in the carbon dioxide concentration is known as the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is the byproduct of hydrocarbon burning. In other words, the more oil and coal we burn, the more we are contributing to the greenhouse effect.

Polar Bear in Trouble

How much warming of the earth can we tolerate? How much melting of the glaciers and the ice caps can we tolerate? We are just starting to find that out. We already know that rising temperatures are having an adverse effect on some of the world’s flora and fauna. We know that low lying areas of the world with large populations such as Bangladesh and parts of Indonesia are especially vulnerable, vulnerable to flooding and the high loss of life. Animals that depend on the Arctic ice pack such as the polar bear are in grave danger because of it. At the same time, those communities that have depended on hunting on the ice packs of the world are faced with a radical change of life if they are going to survive.

On the other hand, global warming is resulting in longer growing seasons in areas on earth that previously were not as hospitable to agriculture as they are now or previously not hospitable at all. Examples can now be found in places like Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia. The idea of Greenland as an agricultural powerhouse remains a startling concept, but some of us may live to see that reality.

What About Weather Extremes?

An increase in the arable areas on earth due to global warming is a positive, but what about the effect on weather? Are the increases in weather extremes—for example, between the areas receiving an excess of rain and too little rain, that is, between flooding and drought, such as we have been witnessing in the eastern United States—a temporary phenomenon or a permanent fixture of global warming? Are more powerful storms, that is, more Katrinas, what we have to look forward to?

Landfills and Overpopulation

The fact is that global warming is only one of the challenges we have ahead of us with respect to the environment. What to do about all the waste we have generated since World War II and have not made the effort to recycle represents another immense challenge. Landfills are no longer a satisfactory answer. A related issue has to do with population. We need to face facts. There are just too many of us, for example, too many of us to tolerate the continued use of landfills. I will be returning to these topics in upcoming installments of Mind Check.

As for the twin problems of oil depletion and global warming from hydrocarbon burning, the Atlantic City wind farm and the wind farms everywhere else show us a path to a solution. We must have our alternative energy forms. Not just wind farms, but solar power, power generated in outer space and beamed to earth, and nuclear power.

Overcome Nuclear Fear

Yes, we must overcome our fear of nuclear power and start building nuclear power plants again. An increase in nuclear generation of electricity will take us a long way toward putting a damper on the global warming danger. In this respect, we need to follow the example of the French and their commitment to this technology. As for the issue of nuclear waste, improved reprocessing procedures are showing the way toward lessening the nuclear waste challenge, but, yes, more research needs to be done on nuclear waste reprocessing to make the approach even more effective.

Nuclear Power and Fresh Water

Nuclear technology can do something else for us, and that is to fuel desalination plants. The droughts being experienced in many parts of the United States and many other parts of the world may be with us for the long term. Meanwhile sea levels are rising due to glacier and polar cap melting. Why not get our fresh water from the sea? No way do we want to fuel our desalination plants with oil or coal or any other hydrocarbon, and we don’t have to. Nuclear technology can do the job and take care of a large part of our electricity needs at the same time.

In this time of global warming and the resulting excess of salt water and deficiency of fresh water, we need to get busy converting the former to the latter. I hope that the message that lies just below the surface of what I am saying is coming through loud and clear. When it comes to the environment, we have an enormous amount of work to do. We need to quit wasting time and get busy.

To reach the author of Mind Check, write Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft