Who Owns the Wind?

Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy

David McDermott Hughes, David Hughes

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781839761133
• eBook ISBN: 9781839761140
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The energy transition has begun. To succeed - to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power - that process must be fair. Otherwise, mounting popular protest against wind farms will prolong carbon pollution and deepen the climate crisis. David Hughes examines that anti-industrial, anti-corporate resistance, drawing insights from a Spanish village surrounded by turbines. In the lives of these neighbours - freighted with centuries of exploitation - clean power and social justice fit together only awkwardly. Proposals for a green economy, the Green New Deal, or Europe's Green Deal require more effort. We must rethink aesthetics, livelihood, property, and, most essentially, the private nature of wind resources. Ultimately, the energy transition will be public and just, or it may not be at all

1

Wind on Land

Fossil fuels dwell out of sight, at the end of the mine shaft or beneath the skin of a West Virginia mountain. Before anyone imports oil across from Saudi Arabia, they import it up from the subterranean. Petroleum, coal, and gas are energy archived elsewhere. Wind, on the other hand, lives among us—so constant and available as to be free and forgettable. One does not drill for air or move it in Pa namax tankers. Of course, converting wind into usable energy takes some equipment: in the classical mode, sails or mechanical, grain-grinding windmills. When people speak of wind power, they often focus on these technologies. As a visual icon, the blade, rather than the breeze, represents renewable energy. Of course, artists and writers depict what they see. Wind remains invisible until it turns something, ruffles a flag, or kicks up dust. In the imagination, wind acts only when it causes something else to act. That substitution—of the blown thing for the blowing itself—obscures other powers of airflow. The breeze cools our skin and dries our clothes. Without wind, all life would perish in minutes. Birds—especially the heavier ones kept aloft by thermals—would fall from the sky. So too would plummet the “aeroplankton” of tiny insects permanently skybound at up to five thousand meters. And what about us? Humans wouldn’t flourish in still air either. We would have to keep moving, or asphyxiate in exhaled carbon dioxide. Plants would explode in the oxygen they produce. Evaporation would cease as the cushion above the ocean became saturated. No rain would fall. The atmosphere, in short, breathes so that life may do the same. We are lucky that wind is abundant and free.

That may change. The energy transition is turning air’s kinetic energy into a commodity. Wind farms buy and sell megawatt-hours of breeze. Lawyers have developed a notion of “wind rights,” supplementing water rights, forest rights, oil and mineral rights, and, above all, land rights. As impossible as it sounds, wealthy interests may soon enclose moving air. This is the terrain of politics after fossil fuels. To win in those struggles, a larger population will have to defend wind energy. Before all that, though, one has to know what a breeze is and where it is—and how it is and is not tethered to the ground.

According to Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.” That is to say, he shall be disinherited. In theory, the wind could be a valuable, tangible asset, but the saying relies upon common knowledge that it is nothing. Practically, one cannot hold or possess moving air. Wind is not a thing in conventional terms. As energy, it is a flow rather than a stock, kinetic rather than potential. Fossil fuels—and all fuels—sit in containers. The oil company knows how many barrels it possesses. And it knows that, if burned, that oil will yield a certain quantity of British thermal units or megawatt-hours. The manager of a hydropower dam, likewise, calculates the volume and height of water, a potential energy available now or later. Wind is entirely different. It rushes kinetically by, flowing over and around people who might harvest it. Once downwind, it is lost. But more will come, whisked by the fusion reaction of our star.

So moving air is a heaven-sent force, as difficult to define as it is to see. In Greek mythology, Aeolus kept the winds. His name passed into Latin and Romance languages, resulting in the English “eolian,” an adjective for windy qualities. The Spanish sometimes say “eólico,” but more often “viento” or “aire”—two words that one might expect to carry different meanings, but don’t. In the seventh century, Bis hop Isidore of Seville defined aere as “an emptiness of more open texture than other elements.” That notion—of an absence that is still marked by turbulence—captures the contradiction of moving air. Isidore’s Latin compendium describes an “earthy” wind that “is more turbulent, which takes on bodily substance with exhalations of moisture.”¹ Indeed, we feel air, as it moves past us, as it pushes against any surface. In a gale, it will push body to body, against woman or man. Thirteen hundred years after Isidore, and slightly to the south of Seville, Fed erico García Lorca wrote of wind as an erotic force. The south wind, which blew through the poet’s native Granada, is “dark, ardent / you come upon my flesh / bringing me seed / of brilliant / glances / impregnated with orange blossoms.” In another poem, “the big man-wind pursues her / with a hot sword.”² A stiff, desirous breeze advances relentlessly.

In this sense, wind acts as a thing—and not only a phallus. It hardens into infrastructure, akin to highways and bridges. It carries a plane from airport to airport. Actually, airfoils and lift do that job, but the pilot-memoirist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry remembers gases of “support … solid and full like a pillar.”³ Most evidently, wind delivers itself, or its energy. Consider the difference between a good breeze turning a mid-size turbine for an hour and its energetic equivalent: 240 kilograms of coal.⁴ A miner hacks that hydrocarbon out of solid rock, an elevator lifts it, and a truck or train brings it to the plant that burns it for electricity. Entire railroads exist to do nothing but move coal by the kiloton. Even natural gas, which is light enough to require no lifting, still demands an escort of pipelines and pumps en route to combustion. Wind, by contrast, escorts itself to the turbine.

Trade winds bridge the Atlantic between roughly 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south. Columbus actually discovered this air pattern as he rode it from the Canary Islands to the well-populated Caribbean. Every oceangoing sailor reckons on prevailing winds to facilitate or hinder the journey. They are eolian terrain. In nautical lingo, one “heads up” against the wind and “falls off” in the downwind direction. One tacks upwind as if zigging and zagging along switchbacks up a hill. In fact, the close-hauled sailor—although always at sea level—is climbing a certain kind of slope, a pressure gradient. Wind—blowing from a zone of high pressure to a zone of low pressure—descends that gradient. The sailor falls off and heads up the same incline. In a small boat, fighting pressure tires captain and crew alike. Wind blows as a topography of forces.

This landscape-like quality distinguishes renewable energy from the fuels that immediately precede it. Hydrocarbons don’t spread out and swish across the surface of the planet. They pop up from points. A hole smaller than a square meter can release enough oil or gas to power a city. After combustion, pollution from those generators will leave the surface through a similarly narrow smokestack. Between enormous deposits below and the vast sink above, oil passes through a bottleneck. Nimble as a ballerina, it leaves a small spatial footprint. Of course, pipelines, refineries, and fields of pump jacks litter the landscape. They attract attention and justifiable criticism. But they actually occupy very few square kilometers for the energy they confer. To generate the same energy as a coalfield, solar panels would need nearly four times as much space, and wind turbines seven times. Soy grown for biodiesel—the least land-efficient of all energy sources—would occupy ninety-two times the area needed for coal.⁵

Vegetation powered human history. In New England, for instance, settlers and merchants cut trees in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spruce, pine, and birch heated Boston at a much faster rate than they could regrow. Fortunately—for the forests and those who love them—coal replaced wood around 1900. Relinquished as a source of kilowatts, the Green Mountains became green again. Hikers seldom appreciate this spatial subsidy from fossil fuels. For a century underground energy has underwritten national parks, suburbs, agriculture, and ranching. The earth’s surface is as pleasant and pleasurable as it is in large part because we get our energy from elsewhere. Now, if it is to remain habitable, the earth’s surface will have to go back to its old job. It will have to serve as an energy platform. This time, we will harvest that energy not from trees but from solar panels and wind turbines. Or, to put the matter more positively, the landscape itself will harvest energy falling onto it or running across it. Agriculture functions this way, converting sunlight and water—add less, obviously, windblown carbon dioxide—into calories. Wind turbines could be the new trees. But there is no avoiding it: the energy landscape of the future will look less like a forest or farm and more like a set of machines.

This book considers the benefits, losses, compromises, and sacrifices of life in this newly technological countryside. I anticipate conflict. Energy will have to find space amid rural production and conservation. Solar photovoltaics will compete with agricultural photosynthesis, namely crops. Wind turbines will clutter the horizon. To stabilize the climate, rural people will have to adjust to whirling blades above concrete foundations. One can intersperse turbines amid wheat, sunflower, and other crops. Even more easily, one can run cattle through a windfarm. But field and range do not appear the same under rotors. The rustic, the bucolic—all these qualities we associate with countryside—will give way to machines. The world after fossil fuels simply looks different. How should we consider, appreciate, or reject the aesthetic qualities of wind energy?

The related and central question of the book—“who owns the wind?”—concerns money. Someone will get rich off newly discovered, barely claimed resources of sunlight and moving air. The current fossil fuel market is worth trillions of dollars per year. Substitute products may be more expensive or cheaper, but they will not be free. If we decarbonize in thirty years—as we must—a single generation of firms and individuals will profit handsomely. There is an alternative to this atmospheric phase of capitalism. Governments and other institutions may strike a new deal for energy, wherein the sky remains open to all. Moving air carries the energy of the future, and it is worth fighting for.

Air moves a great deal in Sereno. At first, when I spent three weeks there in the blistering-hot summer of 2015, I was slightly disappointed. Expecting gales, I found only branch-bending drafts (Figure 1.1). Then I noticed that it did not stop. “Always, there is wind. Always there is wind,” says Carolina, the owner of the village’s bed-and-breakfast. She was born in Cuba and moved to Sereno with her Moroccan-Spanish-French husband, Daniel. We discuss wind a lot—including its purifying effect on clothes and its scouring effect on the countryside. Blustery air has rendered Sereno almost treeless. When she describes the easterly Levante—named for the rising (levantar) of the sun—Carolina tends to puff her cheeks, as if blowing out birthday candles. She tells me of a 90 kilometer-per-hour levantera. It is like a hurricane, she says, drawing on Caribbean memories, but without the rain. I notice this singularity: the wind howls on cloudless, otherwise gorgeous days. Sereno’s stormy-but-stormless sky unsettles me somehow.

Credit: photo by author

Figure 1.1: How to secure your potted plant against the Levante

Literature and folklore of the region refer to wind-driven mental distress and illness. The Levante stimulates crime—so much so that a defense case occasionally cites wind as an extenuating circumstance.⁶ The realist author A lfonso Grosso writes of the town of Tarifa:

The streets are lonely. The wind dominates everything, overwhelming and disturbing. There are no pots on the balconies. The few women who walk on the sidewalks do so hastily, holding their thigh skirts with both hands. Windowpanes tremble. Trees curve as if they were to be pulled from the ground. The atmosphere is impregnated with an absorbing and leaden melancholy.⁷

Gales keep one up at night or, alternatively, stoke vivid dreams. I dream more in Sereno, or I remember the dreams more frequently. Perhaps that can be attributed to the nocturnal gusts rattling the walls and doors, keeping me in a light, hallucinogenic sleep. Raúl, who becomes my neighbor when I move into an apartment next to the bed-and-breakfast, claims to have been driven crazy by the Levante. In tourist season, he introduces himself to diners at the outdoor tables with a turn of the index finger at his temple. Then he smiles dementedly through very few teeth.

I begin truly to know the Levante in May of 2017. It blows heavily and uninterruptedly for ten days. I prop the door firmly shut against midnight vibrations. Sereneños hunker down, spending less time chatting on the street. Dust blows into their houses, seeping through the frames of the windows. My favorite restaurant, having installed a sliding door as a safety measure, closes it, lest a puff of wind flip the tables inside. The Levante blows even more fiercely at the nearby Atlantic coast. It hits me in the car, and I struggle to close the window and hold the steering wheel at the same time. People swap similar stories, in the spirit of a shared burden. “God makes them, and the Levante piles them up,” reads the waiter’s uniform at one bar.⁸ It is a common saying, expressing human fragility in the face of larger forces. The Levante is an equalizer. On the beach itself, tourists try to adapt. The local chiringuito, a bar situated directly on the sand, serves drinks in heavy wooden blocks. And still they topple over. Beach umbrellas and chairs summersault seaward. Cigarettes fly from people’s mouths. Reading a book is out of the question. Air stuffs particles into my Spanish dictionary until it splays out like a Rolodex. At water’s edge, wind erodes the wet sand around pebbles until each one is left perching on a narrow, diagonal column of sand. I study these bizarre formations as hurtling grains lacerate my legs. One can escape into the ocean, but there the Levante froths and churns the surface. After a week, Sevillanos and Mad rileños retreat home. The Levante—my neighbors explain—keeps their tranquil coast from becoming the overcrowded Costa del Sol. Those who work in hospitality would prefer it otherwise. As May turns to June, bodies, beach towels, and big wallets begin to convalesce along the placid Mediterranean. On the ocean side of Gibraltar, meanwhile, kinetic energy builds forbiddingly. Sereneños expect a devastating “levante de carajo,” the dick wind, or something like Lorca’s hot sword.

Airflow in the Strait of Gibraltar attracts widespread attention. High winds can suspend ferry service, stranding Spanish tourists in Morocco. A levantera earlier in 2017 actually capsized a retired ferry in port, making national news.⁹ For shippers transiting the Strait, the Levante functions something like a liquid jet s tream. It ejects vessels forcefully from the Mediterranean and brakes their entry. Sailing ships used to ride the Levante far out to sea, then veer to starboard and reach to Cádiz.¹⁰ Turning in the Levante endangers containers and crew alike. Clandestine shippers watch the wind too. African migrants and refugees cross the Strait regularly, looking to escape failed agricultural policies, corrupt states, drought, and other effects of climate change.¹¹ After harrowing overland treks, migrants make for Spain on Jet Skis, launches, and—increasingly—on unmotorized rafts. A gale will swamp these craft or—if it is a Levante—push them far out to the Atlantic. Breezes kill, and the International Organization for Migration reports that 223 died in the Strait in 2017.¹² Only narcotraficantes, drug dealers, welcome high winds. Cannabis grows in Morocco’s Rif Mo untains, whose peaks often mark the horizon off my beach. Cartels purify the leaves as hashish and load it onto cigarette boats—which, in high wind, outrun the coast guard. A levantera takes from the refugee and gives to the smuggler.

In the summer of 2017—while I was between trips—every week or so the high wind fell to low speed for a day or two. It has to stop, of course, to reverse direction. On August 16, 2017, the air simply paused. Over six days, easterly wind speeds fell from 63 kilometers per hour to 2 kph and then rose again to 60 kph. Amid the unexpected calm, migrants made a run for it. The coast guard intercepted—“rescued,” as they like to say—fifteen vessels carrying a total of six hundred people.¹³ Authorities typically send adults back to Morocco and hold minors only long enough to determine their countries of origin. These failed journeys on August 16 set a single-day record. The larger number of successful crossings surely did as well. At Tarifa, then, wind rises and falls like a curtain—or a border gate.

In this way, too, air currents function as hard, thing-like infrastructure. The Strait spans 12 kilometers of ocean and atmosphere. It is one of the natural battlements of what migrants from as far as Afghanistan encounter as “fortress Europe.” Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain as a dictator from 1936 to 1975, attempted to breach the wall—for legal crossers. He planned to blast a tunnel from Tarifa, at the very southern tip of mainland Europe, to the African port of Tangier. He never even broke ground. Now, occasionally, visionaries propose installing a bridge. The latest design—a series of islands, floating bridges, and submerged bridges—would generate electricity from wind as well as waves.¹⁴ That idea has not gone far. Floating bridges would not withstand a dick wind like the 108 kph gale that ripped through in April 2017. Atmosphere—more so than ocean—divides Europe from Africa. The only tunnel in operation is a wind tunnel that separates, rather than connects, the two continents.

I am back in Sereno for the entire fall of 2017. As in May, the breeze blows mostly Levante. Before reaching me, it has gathered heat from across southern Andalusia. When will temperatures fall, people ask each other, fanning th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dramatis Personae
• Introduction: Hope and Uncertain Hope
• 1. Wind on Land
• 2. How Not to Fight a Wind Farm
• 3. The Eden Problem
• 4. Energy without Stories
• 5. Turbine Sublime
• 6. Landscapes of Wheat and War
• 7. Vigilance, the New Mood of Energy
• 8. Latifundios of Air
• 9. Just Sacrifice, an Experiment
• Conclusion: Wind, Justice, and Compromise
• Notes
• Index