Gov on wind: "move carefully"

I have a few odds ‘n’ ends from Governor Paterson’s town hall in Watertown that didn’t make it into the story. I’ll get to some more of them tomorrow, but I wanted to draw attention to his answer to the question of Mary Hamilton, Hammond, regarding her concerns about a proposed wind farm in this town on the St. Lawrence River.

First of all, Paterson spoke specifically to those projects along the River (there are also proposals in Cape Vincent and Clayton). He said we have to be “more careful about siting”, given the “cultural and historic value”, and the tourism value, of the river region.

More generally, he delivered a rambling, and often confusing, passage about renewable power sources and their “efficiency”. I did an in-depth story on this in 2008. I’m not sure what to make of Paterson’s words. I’m in the process of reaching out to some experts to read the tea leaves. But I wanted to put it out there, so here it is transcribed in its entirety.

“One of the misnomers on wind power and solar power and even hydropower is that…um…it is very hard to transmit power through these…um…clean renewable sources. They are clean and renewable, but they’re very inefficient. [applause] And the piping of the resources is not the same as piping oil. 3% of the product escapes the pipe everyday, and um, 3.4% is the best we’ve ever done, as a result of a study done at the University of California Berkeley. Um… Solar and wind power really come from the ability to heat nitrogen to a boiling point, where it cracks, and then becomes an energy source. Nitrogen is not an energy source. It is a conductor. So one of the reasons why we will have to have wind turbines is not because it’s being piped to Downstate, but because the way we are going to win the battle over clean and renewable energy and replace the traditional, many of them carbon emissions, forms of energy is to localize our product, so, in the end, the wind turbines that exist will actually go to generate power here [I take this to mean, in northern New York]. Only in the distant future with a lot of research will we be able to transmit that power the way we do with other forms of energy.” – Gov. Paterson, Watertown, 1/11/08