I have for a long time been against wind power as it's practiced on an industrial scale, I'm for it on a micro basis like pumping water or compressing air or generating local electricity for a local use. Small local windmills doing actual work.
Rural Americans are finally rising up against this travesty.
Here is a site that identifies the problems:
Industrial-scale wind energy is widely promoted as a clean and sustainable source of energy. It brings, however, many adverse impacts of its own which are often ignored or even denied. Of most immediate concern for communities targeted for wind power facilities are their huge size, unavoidable noise, and strobe lights day and night, with the consequent loss of amenity and, in many cases, health.And another where the comment is made:
For people concerned with the environment, the negative impacts of the giant machines and their supporting infrastructure on birds, bats, beneficial insects, and other wildlife -- both directly and by degrading, fragmenting, and destroying habitat -- are a growing concern.
Considering these and other impacts, the construction of industrial wind energy facilities cannot be justified in most of the places they are proposed. They do more harm than good.
Wind turbines don't make good neighbors
- John Zimmerman, an executive of Enxco, in Robin Smith's 'Wind Towers Spark Debate", Caledonian-Record 7/1/03
IF you think you are in favor of environmental issues and believe industrial wind power as is practiced by the huge wind farms is a good thing, one of your views is out of kilter with another. Environmental schizophrenia.
1 comment:
Now here's a whiny NIMBY rant if I ever heard one. Let me start to address your inaccuracies; "...the further industrialization of wind farms. T Boone Pickens is behind it."
Um, no. T Boone Pickens is in development of one project, what would be the largest in the world, but dozens of developers have thousands more megawatts in the ground now, even when his 4,000 MW project is complete. Pickens does not.
"He is going to get rich selling wind farms to America."
And the $3.0 billion he was worth in 2007 is probably a good place to start from.
"Not generating electricity. That's insignificant."
Now that's ignorant. How in god's name is the money that is made from an energy project not because it generates electricity?
Wind projects must abide by all county, state and federal environmental protection laws and practices in the development of such projects.
Unless centralized energy production is going away, "industrial" wind projects will be here for decades to come. Talk to farmers and ranchers about how they are preserving their way of life, saving the family farm, creating hundreds of thousands of acres of set aside lands for environmental mitigation, benefitting rural communities, all in a way that makes electricity without producing carbon.
Wind is here, change is here. Learn to adapt and use "industrial" wind as a tool to benefit the environment, local and regional economies, to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, mercury, the comsumption of billions of gallons of water from rivers, lakes, streams, and aquifers, otherwise used in fossil fuel energy production.
Or maybe you'd rather see 500' stacks from a coal plant in your vista?
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