Energy Musings - November 13, 2023

Wind turbines create two problems for national security, flight safety, and marine rescue operations. The military is now concerned about one, but has worried about the other for years.

Wind Turbines Creates Military And Human Challenges

The lack of government planning surrounding problems of onshore and offshore wind turbines is coming to the fore.  The dereliction of duty by federal regulators of wind turbines may cost lives.  We doubt any government official will pay a price for such failure.  Maybe we need to mandate government officials follow the Japanese tradition of resigning after a failure. 

Wind Turbine Encroachment

The Department of Defense has raised concerns over encroaching wind turbines surrounding our intercontinental missile silo locations.  While these underground silos are barely visible – usually only identified by an antenna, a chain link fence, and a concrete blast door, they share farmland whose owners are renting space for wind turbines.  The wind turbines are growing in size and output, which has them towering several hundred feet into the air with large spinning blades sweeping up wind breezes and generating electricity. 

The problem for these missile silos, which are spread across Nebraska, Colorado, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, is when an alarm goes off.  A military helicopter, usually a UH-1 Huey, with a security team on board races low and fast to the site.  Wind turbines present both physical and air turbulence problems for helicopter operators, making them dangerous and limiting their routes. 

Staff Sgt. Chase Rose, a UH-1 Huey flight engineer at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana told the Associated Press, “When you think about a wind turbine, and even fields of wind turbines, they’ll stretch for miles.”  He went on to say, “They’re monstrous, and then you have gigantic blades spinning on them as well.  Not only is that a physical obstacle, but those turbines [sic] create the hazards like turbulence as well.  That can be really dangerous for us to fly into.  So, it’s a very complex situation, when you have to deal with those.” 

To remedy the problem, the Air Force has asked Congress to legislate a 2-nautical-mile buffer zone around each site.  Language to create a setback was included in the Senate version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act but it was not in the House of Representative version of the bill.  This means it will need to be negotiated in a conference. 

The language only applies to new wind turbines unless an existing tower owner decides to refurbish it to make it taller.  As turbines grow in capacity and size, besides numbers, this may become a serious issue.  The Air Force says that 46 out of 450 sites are already “severely” encroached upon.  That means more than half the routes to the launch site are blocked by these turbines. 

While the legislation has the support of wind energy advocates, they worry that a one-size-fits-all approach may be wrong.  Customizing restrictions will be a nightmare, however.  It will require not only assessing the existing wind turbines but also trying to anticipate where and when new, larger turbines might be built.  And they will need to negotiate plans for existing turbines that desire to be upgraded, which could become an even bigger nightmare. 

As Air Force Maj. Victoria Hight, a spokeswoman for F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming told the AP, “the encroaching turbines limit safe helicopter transit and nuclear security operations.”  This should be the highest priority rather than worrying about the DoD’s ensuring “the country’s green energy needs are met.” 

Radar Interference A Major Worry

At about the same time we saw the missile silo encroachment issue in the media, we learned of the government’s efforts to address a more serious wind turbine issue with national security implications.  Radar interference from offshore wind turbines receives no media airtime, yet it is a high risk with no known solution.  And it has been ignored for years. 

We first wrote about radar interference in covering the progress of the 130-turbine, 454-megawatt Cape Wind project destined for Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard.  The wind turbines were to be located in waters 3-11 miles off the respective coastlines.  It was the target of a huge political battle involving U.S. senators, wealthy oil families, and environmentalists.  Its saga pre-dates the current offshore wind regulatory framework, and the current climate change push, while exposing serious technical challenges.  The project, hoping to be the first U.S. offshore wind farm, battled for 11 years before its sponsors relinquished the permit as it faced insurmountable hurdles. 

Cape Wind received its first permit in 2001 under Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  The Army Corps presented a draft Environmental Impact Statement, which was deemed deficient by many federal agencies, local governments, and community groups.  With the passage of the 2005 Energy Bill, the regulatory authority for offshore energy projects shifted from the Army Corps to the Minerals Management Service within the Department of the Interior.  This transfer of regulatory authority significantly slowed down the approval process, which would have been easier under the auspices of the Army Corps.  Following the reorganization of the MMS in 2010, the Bureau of Energy Management (BOEM) was created and charged with regulating offshore energy projects along with all offshore oil and gas activities. 

In 2010, the Federal Aviation Administration raised a concern about possible interference by wind turbine structures with radar systems at nearby Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts.  Cape Wind agreed to fix the base’s radar system to ensure it would not be affected by the wind farm.  A federal court ruled the FAA’s “no hazard” determination was wrong and referred the matter back to the FAA for further study in 2011.  The following year, the FAA determined that the wind farm would cause no danger to aircraft operations.  The reality was no one knew the extent to which this might be a problem, but importantly, that there were no solutions. 

A 2016 U.S. Department of Energy report, Federal Interagency Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation Strategy, outlined the problem and developed a strategy for dealing with the problem.  The opening paragraph of the report acknowledged the problem and its scope. 

Wind turbines have significant electromagnetic reflectivity as large structures and blades cause large and numerous Doppler returns because of their motion relative to the affected radars.  In May 2011, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy completed an internal decision-making study at the request of the National Security Staff that found that wind turbines were interfering with government radars used for national defense, national security, aviation safety, and weather forecasting “by creating clutter, reducing detection sensitivity, obscuring potential targets, and scattering target returns.  These effects on radar systems tend to inhibit target detection, generate false targets, interfere with target tracking, and impede critical weather forecasts” (Biddle et al. 2014). (Emphasis added.) 

The key point of the report was the creation of a multi-agency group to investigate and develop a solution to the radar interference problem.  It stated:

The strategic objectives of the WTRIM WG [Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation Working Group] are to, by 2025, fully address wind turbine radar interference as an impact to critical radar missions, ensure the long-term resilience of radar operations in the presence of wind turbines, and remove radar interference as an impediment to future wind energy development.

Routinely, offshore wind project regulators and federal agencies such as the Coast Guard ignore and deflect the issue in their approvals of new wind farms.  Thus, we were very surprised when we saw the following screenshot of an item listed in the November 10, 2023, issue of TETHYS Blast.  This organization describes itself and its mission on its website.  

Tethys, named after the Greek titaness of the sea, was developed in 2009 by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to support the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Energy Technologies Office and Water Power Technologies Office.  The primary functions of Tethys are twofold:

·        To facilitate the exchange of information and data on the environmental effects of marine and wind energy technologies; and

·        To serve as a commons for marine and wind energy practitioners and therefore enhance the connectedness of the renewable energy community as a whole.

The screenshot references a request for information about radar interference. 

Better late than never seems to be the government’s handling of wind turbine interference with radar systems.

Let’s see.  The 2016 WTRIM WG report says the government will develop a mitigation strategy by 2025.  It appears the government must be getting serious about the issue from the above request.  But they are only looking for “input on challenges and opportunities relating to the co-existence of wind energy and radar.”  Moreover, the response is due in early 2024.  By the time the Department of Energy reads the submissions and makes any decisions, we may have two offshore wind farms nearing completion!   

What has the WTRIM WG been doing for eight years?  There is no way they will develop an analysis and find a solution before 2025.  If it were that easy, it would have been done by now, and likely by commercial radar developers interested in selling new hardware and software.  Moreover, given government agency work schedules, it likely will be 2025 before there is even a report.  Will it have a solution or only a plan to seek a solution by then? 

From all the evidence of radar interference issues, we know lives may be lost because the government failed to address this national security, flight safety, and marine rescue problem.  Those issues arose when offshore wind turbines were only several hundred feet tall, and the issue was dismissed.  Today’s wind turbine towers are 800-1,000 feet tall providing greater interference, yet still the issue has been ignored.  Maybe someone has realized the potential for a significant human disaster.