Back in late winter, when a volunteer committee picked a documentary about the dark side of wind energy for Evanston’s Talking Pictures Festival, no one was expecting the issue to blow up just in time for the screening this Friday. But it has. Last week Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave his blessing to Cape Wind, a 130-turbine wind farm to be built in the ocean off Cape Cod—the first such project to win approval in the U.S.—and opponents (including the Kennedys and the Wampanoag Indians) who fear it’ll mar views and harm fishing, wildlife, and sacred areas promised a court fight.
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The documentary, Laura Israel’s Windfall, tells the story of what happened when developers offered folks in Meredith, New York, sign-up bonuses for the right to put a wind turbine on their property. Meredith’s residents are a mix of retirees and part-timers from Manhattan and struggling longtime farmers, and the money combined with the carbon-cutting benefits proved to be a powerful double-green incentive. The town board—including members with apparent conflicts of interest—ignored the recommendation of its own planning group and enacted regulations favorable to the developers. When residents started to get a sense of the turbines’ mammoth scale, strobe-like shadows, and unrelenting noise (seven-ton blades described as “thumping or ripping” the air at up to 200 miles per hour), some began to organize. The issue created rifts among the townspeople, but they unseated the board at the next election and ultimately kept the turbines out.
Evanston is a promising location for turbines, Kipnis says, because it has shallow water offshore and what the CGE folks believe to be “excellent wind.” It’s better than Chicago because there’s no big skyscraper cluster to create turbulence. Exactly how excellent Evanston’s wind is, however, is still a matter of speculation, since it’s never been tested. The closest measurement was taken at the Carter H. Harrison water intake crib, 80 feet above lake level and two miles off Oak Street Beach, where breezes average about 15 miles per hour. “Higher up and way further out, without any tall buildings in the area, it’ll be much better,” Kipnis says. The power generated by a turbine goes “to the cube of wind speed,” he adds. “Double the wind speed and you get eight times the power. We’re looking for 18 miles per hour or more. If we can hit 20, that would be great.”
Alderman Judy Fiske, whose lakefront ward stands directly west of the proposed wind farm, says information the council has received doesn’t include the possible “downside.” She read a three-page list of questions into the record before voting to go ahead with the Request for Information—among them, “Why in the lake when it’s two or three times more expensive than on land?” and “Will any revenue come back to the city?”
Fri 5/7, 7:30 PM, Talking Pictures Festival, Hinman Theater, Hotel Orrington, 1701 Orrington, Evanston, 847-371-2804, talkingpicturesfestival.org, $10, postscreening discussion with Israel and Kipnis.
