Wind ownership is available.
As an unpaid intern at an energy company in England, Emilia Groupp spent two years creating wind maps for renewable energy development. Colleagues told Groupp to ignore the wind blowing across British borders, saying things like, “Oh, we don’t want French wind,” recalled Groupp, an energy anthropologist at Stanford University.
The group refers to this politicization of wind for energy development as “ventography” in a study published Sept. 18 in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
People tend to think of wind as an “elusive force that cannot be bound or mastered,” Groupp writes. And yet, she says, nations are following an old blueprint for doing so.
For decades, laws and policies around the world have allowed nations to extend their territorial claims offshore and underground to drill for oil and gas. Some nations are now turning to the same policies to turn their gaze skyward. “Oil has shaped … the idea of the nation-state as going down, underground, not just stopping at the top,” says Groupp. “Now we’re going upstairs.”
If wind can be owned, it can also be stolen. Wind theft occurs when an economic entity, usually a nation, builds a wind farm near and upwind of an existing wind farm. Those new turbines, especially when built offshore, can slow wind speeds and reduce the power output of older turbines.
Many countries are now fighting for control over wind sources by generating expensive maps that use satellite data to “medically track wind currents,” Groupp writes. Greece and Turkey have created competing wind maps; so are the many countries surrounding the South China Sea.
Lest anyone think wind ownership is unique, Groupp is also exploring the politicization of solar. But she still hasn’t invented a word to own the sun.
#term #master #wind
Image Source : www.sciencenews.org