Margolis: Does it or doesn’t it?

Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.

For the moment, forget all the other questions about wind power: Do the blades kill birds and bats? Is it too noisy? Too tax-subsidized? Too expensive? Too ugly?

Just stick to the basic question: Does generating electricity from wind towers mean less energy has to be produced by burning fossil fuels, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thereby fighting the scourge of global warming?

Well, why not? A kilowatt is a kilowatt is a kilowatt. Every one generated by the wind does not have to be generated by an ounce of coal. No less an authority than writer/activist Bill McKibben told the Vermont Legislature in January that “every spin of that windmill blade reduces the need, somewhere, for burning coal or gas or oil.”

The trouble is that there hasn’t been much, if any, evidence – like say a peer-reviewed, academic study by unbiased experts – offering conclusive or even convincing evidence that this is what actually happens.

Into this vacuum comes a study – not peer reviewed but by apparently unbiased scholars with impressive credentials from an organization called the Rhodium Group – declaring that wind power accounts for 27 percent of the reduction in the “carbon intensity of US energy supply” since 2005.

Case closed? Not quite, because from equally credentialed scholars from the Breakthrough Institute comes a document titled “Debunking Rhodium,” and claiming that “natural gas, not renewables, drives historic emissions declines.”

To which, not surprisingly, Rhodium has issued a rebuttal. So the debate continues. But there is one state where the debate may not apply.

That state is Vermont, apparently the only one where utility companies may both sell their renewable energy credits (REC) and count them toward their state-required renewable energy quotas.

According to some authorities, that means that Vermont’s renewable energy projects aren’t renewable. And it seems significant that in this contentious, emotional debate in which neutral observers are almost impossible to find, one of those authorities is an agency of the federal government.

“If a marketer generates renewable electricity but sells renewable energy certificates for all of that electricity, it would be deceptive for the marketer to represent, directly or by implication, that it uses renewable energy,” said the Federal Trade Commission in a report cited by Vermont’s Public Service Board.

That citation may also be significant. The PSB is the same agency which has approved almost every wind project proposed in the state, granting them certificates of public good in part because they create renewable energy.

Now, in a report issued in January, it endorses the FTC’s contention that what Vermont wind power projects create should not be called renewable energy. Vermont law, the PSB said, “may be incompatible with (FTC) guidelines for the use of environmental marketing claims.”

Dorothy Schnure, the spokesperson for Green Mountain Power, which owns Vermont’s largest wind project on Lowell Mountain, said the company does not sell all its RECs. At a customer’s request, and for an additional 3-cents per kilowatt hour, GMP will “retain” a certain percentage of its RECs, she said.

But she acknowledged that the “bulk” of the RECs are sold to utilities elsewhere in New England, who are then allowed to produce more power from coal and natural gas. To that extent, she agreed, most of the energy generated by the Lowell wind project is not really renewable.

“We are generating renewable energy,” she said. “Despite the sale of the RECs, when you put more wind power into the system,” greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

But Kevin Jones, an economist who is deputy director of the energy institute at Vermont Law School, and who favors wind power, said Vermont’s is the “most fundamentally flawed renewable energy program in the country. … What the utilities are doing is buying fossil fuel and nuclear energy for their customers.” Any claim to the contrary, he said, is “a sham.”

That seems to be what the FTC thinks, at least if utilities use the term “renewable” in marketing their products or themselves. The FTC is not an energy or environmental regulator. It is responsible for consumer protection and commercial transparency.

That could explain why Schnure was careful not to claim that most of the energy generated at Lowell could be considered renewable, and why Vermont’s utilities apparently rarely use that term in their official financial filings to investors and regulators.

But political champions of wind development use it constantly. When the state Senate watered down a proposal to give localities more power to determine where wind projects would be built, Paul Burns of Vermont Public Interest Research Group told the Burlington Free Press the vote was “pretty clearly a victory for renewable energy,” though it’s not certain that the energy is in fact renewable.

Measuring how much greenhouse gas emissions are saved by wind power has been difficult in part becaus e researchers don’t always even agree on what to measure. The Rhodium study by economist Trevor Houser and engineer Shashank Mohan measured the total decline in emissions since 2005 and tried to estimate how much had been caused by the recession, how much by replacing coal with cleaner natural gas, and how much by the use of renewables, mostly wind.

“Increased natural gas consumption accounts for 38 percent of the decline in emissions attributable to cleaner energy, or 17.5 percent of the overall drop in emissions relative to business-as-usual,” they write. They found that in 2005, renewables accounted for 7.9 percent of U.S. power generation. During the first 10 months of 2012, they accounted for 11.4 percent.

But Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Alex Trembath and Max Luke of the environmentalist but contrarian Breakthrough Institute argue that the Rhodium study measured the impact of the recession incorrectly and overestimated “the emissions reductions from biofuels,” such as ethanol, which threw off their calculation of the impact of renewables in general.

Both studies measured only emissions, fuel use, and other conventional economic factors. In a study for the Wilderness Society (pro-wind, but perhaps not pro-wind everywhere) economist Ann Ingerson, a Vermonter, also took into account the ways in which wind towers make global warming worse: building and installing the towers creates carbon emissions, and chopping down all those trees reduces the “carbon sink” which stores carbon instead of releasing it into the atmosphere.

Ingerson still found that wind power reduced greenhouse gas emissions, “but not as much as wind developers will claim.” And most of the benefit from wind power would come from larger projects where the wind is steadiest, primarily offshore.

Because of the “double-counting” of the RECs, Ingerson said, “we (in Vermont) really don’t have the right to say our power is renewable.”

Utilities in other states can also sell RECs. But then they can’t also count them as helping to meet their requirements to end up with a certain percentage of renewable energy. Instead, they would have to take other steps to reduce emissions. In that case, emissions would really be reduced region-wide. Under Vermont’s law – and the utilities, as Schnure said, are acting just as the Legislature intended – the utilities are not reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as they are exporting them across state lines. The air, which does not recognize political boundaries, would appear to be no cleaner as a result.

Selling the RECs does allow Vermont utilities to charge less. The millions they receive for the credits are passed through to consumers as lower rates. On the other hand, the rates would be even lower were there no wind projects at all. Wind power is substantially more expensive than electricity generated by coal, natural gas or nuclear power.

So does it or doesn’t it? The experts obviously do not agree. Though there is no unanimity (or much harmony), there does seem to be something approaching a consensus that it does. Just not by much. And maybe not in Vermont.

CLARIFICATION:  The quote from the Public Service Board that wind power in Vermont “may be incompatible with (FTC) guidelines for the use of environmental marketing claims” was in a draft of its report to the Legislature, but not in the final version issued in January. That final version did agree with the FTC’ that what Vermont wind power projects create should not be called renewable energy, but used different wording.