An Inconvenient Turbine
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07.13.07
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"In neighborhoods across the country, there's a battle brewing: the environmentalists vs. the aesthetes." We saw it with Al Gore; it took him eight months of appeals, redesigns and inspections before he could get solar panels installed on his house. According to the Wall Street Journal, homeowners looking to add solar panels, turbines or new high efficiency windows are fighting with neighbours, zoning boards and historical societies who think they will look ugly and hurt property values.
Sometimes they are right; "The worst things you can do to a historic building, besides arson, is take out historic windows," says Concord, Mass. town planner Carol Kowalski. We might add that in terms of bang for the buck, changing windows has a really poor rate of return and there are lots of ways to restore old windows, add interior storm windows so that one does not wreck the look of the house.
Other times it is just NIMBY silliness, particularly when there are products that blend in like solar roof tiles (TreeHugger here) or the neat, nearly invisible panel on an 1899 chimney cap shown in the picture (cute idea but not much electricity will flow from that) California, New Jersey and and Arizona now all have legislation that restricts homeowners associations from blocking solar panel installations; where are the rest of the States? ::Wall Street Journal
We might add that in terms of bang for the buck, changing windows has a really poor rate of return
Can anyone point me to some information showing the relative "bang for buck" for things like changing windows, insulating rooves, etc. ?
On most of the nightmare McMansions I've seen, a windmill or solar panel would be an aesthetic improvement.
Can't you circumvent the problem by investing in a community wind or solar project? Or buy "green power"? Why does your solar panel have to be mounted on your roof, and not in a field somewhere, out of sight and mind. Your roof may not have the optimal placement, while open space allows the panels to be geometrically configured to produce the most electricity.
A much better solution for "historically sensitive" areas is to plant trees to shade your house, roof included. Smart placement can eliminate the need for summertime cooling even in hot climates (that's been demonstrated), in additition to all the other well-known advantages of trees in an urban setting, not least of all aesthetics. Best of all, it's cheap, so you'd still have money to invest in green power.
I'd like to see requirements that require the install of green technologies to offset the vast waste upon which many of these traditionalists insist. So, if you want a 4000 sq ft house, you must install panels on the roof, etc. etc. Awareness of the trade-offs helps inform the market. With so many subsidies propping up oil-related energy production, the distortions in real costs are simply too great.