Towerkill.com is a site run by ornithologists.
lets Face Facts Wind farms are really huge industrial blights on our landscape. There are trade offs to all forms of energy generation.
The Acid rain, mercury,carbon, and environmental offsets are screwing with our environment too.
But to say that America will replace coal,oil and natural gas with wind turbines is blowing smoke up the publics collective butts. Imagine every ridge line crammed with wind turbines yuk!
We should have a national debate about scrubber stacks and canning environmental offsets.
Even big Daddy Gore wants a carbon credit system. Some would argue that is his endgame . While he sits by his heated pool in his ten thousand square foot home sipping sweet tea brought by his servants. Of course thats when he isn't busy flitting about in a private jet.
Or looking the other way as Steve Jobs lines his pockets with post dated stock options.

I can't wait for this to appear on his website. I'd like to applaud his efforts and suggest that the first step to protecting birds should be a culling of the domesticated feline. =)

Wow. What ridiculosity. Of course this will lead to nothing. He's just trying to look busy in the face of the inevitable.

Wind turbine technology is relatively young - the old fashioned design hasn't changed in decades, but now that wind is more attractive as a large scale solution, a lot of energy is being spent on solving some of its problems. The next generation wind turbine will be much smaller, more efficient, smaller footprint. Horizontal spins allowing vertical stacking of turbines. There's also ongoing research to reduce bird accidents.

It's hard to convince me that any of these people in the energy business are truly concerned about nature.

There are many places in the world where there is little natural beauty and tons of wind.

Sorry, Anonymous, but your arguments are non-starters.

"lets Face Facts Wind farms are really huge industrial blights on our landscape."

First "let's face facts" is a proof-surrogate. Calling something a fact does not make it so. Second, wind farms are hardly blights compared to damn near everything else we do. How about strip mines, oil refineries, coal-burning power plants, and oil fields? For a "blight", wind farms have very little impact on the land.

"There are trade offs to all forms of energy generation."

That's a sensible observation.

"The Acid rain, mercury,carbon, and environmental offsets are screwing with our environment too."

Yes, indeed they are.

"But to say that America will replace coal,oil and natural gas with wind turbines is blowing smoke up the publics collective butts."

Who said wind is going to replace all the power generated by coal, oil, and natural gas? Here's a clue: nobody. Please, if you're going to use a straw man, at least put a little bit of effort into it.

"Imagine every ridge line crammed with wind turbines yuk!"

Yuk? Since when do aesthetics matter? Have you ever seen an oil field or strip mine? I've seen wind farms *and* oil fields in person, and an oil field is much, much worse. I also live in valley that has been blessed with the worst air pollution in the US, and I would gladly trade wind and solar generation facilities for our shitty air. That assumes of course, that people would be willing to trade in their gas-guzzlers for electric or hybrid vehicles.

"We should have a national debate about scrubber stacks and canning environmental offsets."

Yes, we should. But we should also be aware that money invested in making non-renewable energy sources (some of which may be exhausted in as little as a century) cleaner is money that could be invested in developing extremely clean renewable energy sources. How many times do we want to pay to overhaul our infrastructure?

"Even big Daddy Gore wants a carbon credit system. Some would argue that is his endgame . While he sits by his heated pool in his ten thousand square foot home sipping sweet tea brought by his servants. Of course thats when he isn't busy flitting about in a private jet. Or looking the other way as Steve Jobs lines his pockets with post dated stock options."

Comments about the lifestyles of celebrities (pulled out of your ass or not) have nothing to do with this discussion.

Most of what you're saying is just a bunch of hot air.

i believe the good book says to pull the log from ones own eye before the splinter from anothers

....

oh how this is so true from and right from a third prospective. love to call him a fool, but i think there was some about not doing that as well.

So when I put a wind turbine on my land, it's a terrible bird killer - BUT when the coal companies blow up the entire mountain, that's just their business and they have a right to a living?

In Holland we say

"wiens brood met eet wiens woord met spreekt"

(whos bread one eats, whos words one speaks)

@Anonymous

1)Windturbines add something to the landscape that can be removed later, the coal industry removes whole mountains from the landscape.

2) towerkill.com is a website about the effect on bird of communicationtowers, and has nothing to do with windturbines

3) You don't have to put windturbines on every ridgeline in order to get enough windpower.

4) Esthetics are a bit of a luxury problem compared to the very real and dangerous problems caused by fossil fuel power plants.

I dont think a few wind towers is going to hurt WV coal, last I heard most of it is being exported since the type of coal found in WV is too dirty to burn here without costly scrubbing..

The wind towers I have seen don't move nearly fast enough to kill anything. And the bigger they get the slower they move. I'm sure glass windows kill many more birds every day, and kitty cats, and pesticides.

Is there a reason why this article originally indicated that Rahall was a Republican?

I'm sure it was an innocent error. Thats ok -everybody makes them. However though I want to know why the article does not point out he is a Democrat as part of the correction.

LA: I wrote the article and never said he was a Republican. Party is irrellevant here, both are saying stupid things about coal.

wind energy isn't ready for prime time yet.it's a waste of money and because the wind does not always generate a consistent amount of "ENERGY",it's nothing more than a burden to utility companies.the money used for wind energy installations can generate more pollution free energy if it's used to generate solar,biodiesel and help with energy conservation.coal is not very good,but wind energy, as it's being developped now is nothing more than a waste.that's why the big conglamorates are behind it.click on google and type wind energy negative environment and read some of the links before you discount my opinion and reply to me.

I live in RIchmond Virginia where the trains from West Virginia laden with coal rumble past day and night on the way to Norfolk, VA to be exported. America is not benefiting from the coal mining. I have seen turbines on West Virginia mountains, Maryland mountains and Pennsylvania mountains. Wind turbines are far more beautiful and LESS damaging than the millions of tons of waste that coal mining produces. I would rather live next to a wind farm that a coal mine any day. My cat kills 10 to 20 birds a year (that I know of.) The whole bird/bat discussion is rather thin, don't you think? How many SPECIES of birds will be extinct because of the effects of carbon dioxide? Any guesses there?

Gee...thanks for clearing that up Alex. Punctuation isn't ready for prime time either, eh?

Solution for both parties - use vertical axis wind turbines. see link. They aaare beautiful and safe for birds. This one is for home use but I've seen other huge ones that put out 30% more power than equivilent sized prop turbines. These look like works of art and they have mass, so bird don't fly into them. For any new tech involving energy...you have to look overseas. Amercian corps don't want anythng new. Its bad for biz. Also look for the huge barrels than Norway just dropped in the North Sea. It works similar to those flashlights that you shake to energize...but the waves are doing the shaking..It lights up to 100 homes.

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sbe/research/projects/tour/eh/eh_04.html

"There are many places in the world where there is little natural beauty and tons of wind."

Like Congress...

I am native of WV, and this is embarrassing. If it was any less obvious that this guy is for sale, you could see the tag.

I've been interested and optimistic about the potential of wind power for a long time, but the deeper that I look into the numerous problems associated with wind power the more the problems seem insurmountable. Wind Energy has been a practical failure in every country that it has been tried, when attached to an electrical grid with the intention of generating eletricity.

Denmark sells most of its wind energy to Sweden, which uses that electricity not to attach to its grid, but rather to power pumps which replenish reseviors. Sweden is all hydro and nuclear, and they end up selling more high quality electricity to Denmark, than the low quality irregular electricity that they buy from wind power.

Germany is buying more electricity from France now than they were before they put up all these Wind Farms. That and they are having to build thousands of mile of new highwire lines to accomadate all of this extra variable load from wind farms. In the mean time neither country has reduced their carbon production, and both countries have the highest electricity rates in Europe.

I certainly wish that things were different, but it appears that wind plants offer nearly zero benefit for their cost, and those costs tend to drastically increase as more wind power is added into the system. They do decrease demand from central power stations, which generate electricity most cost efficiently, while increasing demand from ancillary stations. The net effect is that costs goes up, but carbon production does not go down and the incentive to build better central generation stations is deminished.

It's a little late to be posting to this thread but there is a lot of misinformation and confusion in the posts before mine. As a bat biologist I was curious as to what was posted regarding bats and turbines on what is touted as a top green blog. I found this post from June 2007 in my search.

I know little about the impacts to birds in the eastern U.S. but wind turbines are having a tremendous impact on bats here, incl. in WV. Yes, pollution from coal fired plants, plus loss of habitat with mountaintop removal, are also significant factors that probably have resulted in the decline of bat populations. Bats are incredibly difficult to study so we don't really know what those impacts are (we don't have any idea as to the total population size for most bat species). But,wind turbines are killing a lot of bats and we have been able to measure their impact to some degree through carcass surveys at participating wind farms, including some in WV. We may be losing as many as 100,000 bats per year in the mid Atlantic states due to turbine kills.

Someone commented that turbines are slow and therefore aren't dangerous...someone commented that the data regarding bats and birds is pretty thin. Neither of these comments is accurate. A recent summary paper on this topic determined that bats are actually most likely to be killed when the turbines are feathering - i.e. moving in light wind and not actually generating power. Bats may be attracted to the turbine tips because they are curious or they may be attracted to the turbine structure because it appears to be a rather tall tree on the landscape (a hypothesis recently proposed by a bat biologist from CO). The summary paper consolidates information from wind farm studies in multiple states and Canada, and showed that the kill patterns in N America are similar to what is seen in other parts of the world (Australia, Europe).

Wind energy is not going to replace coal anytime soon. Rather, wind energy will help to cover the increasing energy demand driven by an increasingly larger populace. Please think twice about any type of energy you use, because all are likely to have some negative impact on the environment (whether in production of the technology or in the generation process itself). The best way to reduce your impact is to conserve energy and tell your friends to do the same!!!