Anti-Wind Farm Group Heavily Criticized for Distorting the Truth

So...this is an "astrosky" group?

So...this is an "astrosky" group?

The leaflets amounted to nothing more than scaremongering, creating fear based on half truths, exaggerations and lies. They were put together with the aim to cause panic in the local community.
---I've noticed that virtually all anti-wind groups do the same. Anti-wind groups are opposed to one simple thing: looks. And more specifically: the altering of their pristine views out their front windows. But these groups are fully aware that they will not be able to stop wind farm developments based on such a subjective, selfish concern.

I'm all for rooting out bad science and sham arguments, but the Advertising Standards Council is censorship, pure and simple. That kind of government interference in free speech is not permissible in civilized society and will cause Britain trouble down the road, I guarantee.

rob, I'm all for free speech, but perhaps the US would benefit from a similar agency. Freedom to voice your opinions without fear of government retribution is one thing, but spreading lies in order to control people's opinions with fear is another. All advertisers have the responsibility to report accurate and reliable information about what they are trying to sell. They can be held liable if they do not. RUNGA is no different. Though they are not selling a tangible item, they are still responsible for reporting truthful information. None of what they claim was based on facts and has the potential to do much harm, not only to Ecotricity, but to the alternatives movement in general. For that, they should be silenced.

Luc

rob, I'm all for free speech, but perhaps the US would benefit from a similar agency. Freedom to voice your opinions without fear of government retribution is one thing, but spreading lies in order to control people's opinions with fear is another. All advertisers have the responsibility to report accurate and reliable information about what they are trying to sell. They can be held liable if they do not. RUNGA is no different. Though they are not selling a tangible item, they are still responsible for reporting truthful information. None of what they claim was based on facts and has the potential to do much harm, not only to Ecotricity, but to the alternatives movement in general. For that, they should be silenced.

Luc

censorship would be deleting Robs post for short-sightedness.

While I'm not anti-wind, my parents live in southern Minnesota where they have built hundreds of those 200-300 tall wind turbines.

To keep everybody from complaining they offer to pay them $1000 (adjusted for inflation) a year for 30 years. The down side is that if you sign up they can come and cut down your trees, restrict your land development (even geothermal pond contrcution) and building, and cap you from having anything over 40ft tall on your land.

So, say you want to have a small personal wind turbine or even an old-fashion water pumping windmill? Nope.

Those apple trees you have are a potential wind block, they can come cut them down (Happened to one of the farmers down there). Sorry.

Now, you cannot hear these things spinning (if they are spinning enough to make noise the wind noise drowns it out anyways). But I do have three major complaints about them:
1. They are a massive distraction when driving. You constantly have something moving in your peripheral vision. I suppose people will learn to tolerate it, but for the occational person it is a major headache.
2. Because of their height, they need to have anti-collision lights for aircraft. At night you can no longer see a bright starry sky because of an ocean of red blinking lights.
3. The companies seem to need to be constantly working on these things, and their behavior and saftey onthe roadways and respect for the neighbors is extremely poor. - However, I will give them credit for recycling all the left over copper wire scraps and donating the money to the local community. For people affected however, is smells of pay-off.

-Lego

Legodrabonxp, those are some interesting observations from someone who actually has experience with them. It is unfortunate about the land use restrictions and the pay-offs, but in the scope of things, it doesn't really sound that bad to me. Landowners are constantly being exploited by utilities and governments through eminent domain and outright extortion. At least these people are being paid for it. And they aren't being paid to cover up some horrible pollution source or political corruption, they are merely being paid by the farms to cooperate.

As far as distractions go, I think roadside billboards are far worse than large spinning blades. And as for the lights... I'm sure city dwellers have to deal with similar disadvantages of living in a dense, civilized, urban center. But I think the advantage outweighs the slight annoyance factor. Guess star-gazers will have to go somewhere else.

Many technologies destroy beauty. Wind-farms are no exception. But it all boils down to a cost-benefit comparison. What's worse? Oil platforms in the gulf or wind farms? 300 dead birds a year from blade impacts, or 3 million from fossil fuel related pollution?

In a world where all of the earth's beauty is threatened, I think an occasional hill-side obstructing or horizon-blotting wind-farm is the best or many choices

Luc.

I hate to be cliche, but as the saying goes--you're entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.

I can't disagree with Luc more strongly: it should never all boil down to cost-benefit comparison. The beauty of nature is important in itself, and always loses out in CBA. Your point that beauty will sometimes have to be sacrificed is well taken, but being dismissive of beauty as a consideration is ill-founded. Utilitaraianism is a road that got us into the environmental mess. It won't get us out; we need to recognize that there are goods other than utility the we need to pursue.

That said, nature's beauty isn't the only thing that suffers from wind farms. They do a number on wildlife populations through habitat destruction. One wind farm near me wiped out several square kilometers of prairie grassland near a very large wildlife refuge. I'm working on the numbers now, but anecdotally it looks like several bird populations have suffered. One of my students, who works with the state Audobon society, has found similar problems.

Don't get me wrong: I'll take a wind farm over a coal plant every time. But saying one is better than the other doesn't require us to be blind to the downside. When we say that all opponents are simply "protecting their pristine views"--or their property values--we're doing no better than RUNGA.

Well, as an ultra-environmentalist myself, I sometimes look at wind-power and do not understand how it is that other environmentalists can support something so outrageous.

I find the argument that wind-energy is a renewable resource as one that is rather mislead to say the least. Sure, there is always going to be wind with energy that can be harvested. However, one thing that very rarely is ever taken into account is the requirements imposed by the large wind turbines that are taller than the wing-span of a 747 airplane.

My family recently acquired property in West Texas in order to get away from the highway (with no sound- or light-barriers) that is being constructed literally next-door to us here in the city as it cuts through our neighborhood. As soon as we got out to West Texas, we got information in the mail about the Florida Power & Light Company putting up wind farms on the area of land we had just purchased! It is like we are surrounded on all sides by development.

Aside from just our own problems, what began to dawn on me is that wind energy is NOT a renewable resource: what my fellow environmentalists have failed to mention is that wind-energy requires land, and land is NOT a renewable resource. There is no more land falling from the sky anywhere. Acres of land do not reproduce and make more acres of land. There is a finite surface area available for wind farms, and once an area of land has been developed for wind-farms it does not look like the nature anymore that we are all trying to protect.

Another point that some have tried to make is that the look or visual appeal of the wind-turbines is irrelevant when compared to the impending global environmental disasters. Of course we all understand the gravity of the impending disasters but the idea here is that we are making the world a more natural and sustainable place to live, and design and sustainability MUST go hand-in-hand in order for environmentalism to have the ability to spread to the masses and convert those non-believers and illiterates.

It also seems that the amount of energy required to manufacture and transport the airplane-sized machines across hundreds of miles on trucks and all of the resources and man-power that go into erecting the turbines seems rather wasteful when there are other technologies out on the market that can provide energy with much fewer resources and in much more passive manners. Did anybody ever stop to think of where all that metal is coming from to make those super-structures and whether the material is eco-friendly, painted with eco-friendly paints, and made from recycled materials at an eco-friendly factory? In the wind-energy market alone there have ben so many innovations concerning the transformation of wind-power into something aesthetically pleasing in design and bird-friendly in form, but they have received little attention because everyone thinks that the 70-year old technology funded by the government and power companies is the solution. However, my proposal is to get away from wind altogether (obviously barring some future development in wind-energy that makes it the obvious candidate for energy production) and to use things like geothermal heating and air conditioning (NOT geothermal electricity production), solar hot water heaters, and passive roof-top photovoltaics for electricity.

A final note I would like to leave with would be to ask fellow environmentalists to think about the enormity of the turbines going up everywhere and how much we have had to invest so far and how on a national and even global scale how they honestly provide one tiny percentage of global electricity production. It is obviously not a long-time solution and the resources going into the construction, manufacture, and erection of these machines would be better spent on research or development of some new source of sustainable energy that actually has a chance to supply the globe with clean energy, and not supply the globe with giant bird-blenders, that would require inconceivable amounts of man-hours and energy to remove once they are too old or broken down.

'To keep everybody from complaining they offer to pay them $1000 (adjusted for inflation) a year for 30 years.'
---When you say 'everybody' you must be referring to the owners of the land where the turbines are located. I am wondering why you chose the word 'complaining'. The way you stated it sounds extremely anti-wind. Maybe you should have said: 'To come to a land-lease agreement with the land owner, the wind farm developer agreed to pay ...' The developer didn't put a gun to their head and say, 'Sign or else.' The land-owner and the developer came to a mutual agreement. I live in Spain. This country has the second highest wind generating capacity in the world (at least last I checked), and has a fairly high population density. So we have MANY wind turbines here. Whenever I go from place to place, I can see them on mountain ridges, agricultural land or deserts. And here in Spain, the happiest farmers and land-owners are the ones that manage to get a wind farm developed in their community because it means extra income. Here communities go out of their way to attract wind developers to put wind turbines in their municipalities because of the leasing agreements and extra taxes and employment. You don't hear them 'complaining'. Just the opposite. They go over the top in their gratitude.

'The down side is that if you sign up they can come and cut down your trees, restrict your land development (even geothermal pond contrcution) and building, and cap you from having anything over 40ft tall on your land.'
---Downside? This is an agreement between landowner and developer. If the landowner thought that the downsides outweighed the upsides, he wouldn't sign on the dotted line. The developer needs certain conditions and guarantees to ensure the wind turbines work efficiently and safely, which he negotiates with the land owner in the form of cash. Using your frame of mind and twisted speech, I guess the 'downside' for the developer is that he has to pay the land owner $30,000 to get his guarantees.
---A few words to address your comments. Trees: wind turbines need to have a minimum clearance from the bottom tip of the wind blade to the highest point in the nearby surrounding land in order to eliminate air turbulence, which reduces wind energy production and increases wear and tear on the turbine. You mentioned this minimum clearance - 40 ft. So any trees that are taller than 40 ft start having a negative effect on the turbine. I personally have a small wind turbine on a 45ft tower, which I periodically climb up onto. Do you really have any idea of how high 40ft is? Only trees over 40ft would be a problem, so we are talking about extremely tall trees and extremely few trees. And it is not even necessary for the whole tree to be cut down. Just the tops. I know because that is what I do with the trees surrounding my turbine which need to be kept at 6m max. So what does it sound like to me that you are doing? Taking some rather insignificant point and exaggerating its consequences. Restricting land development: geothermal pond - obviously a large pond can not be built right next to a wind turbine because it may affect the concrete foundation that holds up the turbine. And I would hazard a guess that developers don't want any pond that may attract birds and with it complaints from those saying that turbines kill birds; only logical considering the unwarranted harassment they get on this issue. Buildings under 40ft - I mentioned why already. You would be talking about a 5 to 6 story building. What, exactly, are they going to build at that height? An apartment block? Not likely. Even grain silos don't need to be that tall. I can't think of anything that the landowner may need to build that would absolutely need to be over 40ft. Again, it sounds to me like you are going out of your way to take relatively insignificant points and exaggerate them.
'So, say you want to have a small personal wind turbine or even an old-fashion water pumping windmill? Nope.'
---I have a personal wind turbine and even considered a water pumping and a pond aerating wind turbine, so I can not in the world phathom why a land-owner would choose to try to install his own small turbine (or windmill pump or aerator) when he can tap into the MUCH MUCH MUCH more efficient and cheap energy being produced by the much larger industrial turbine already on his land. It would simply be a waste of money and of resources. Again, you take an insignificant point and exaggerate it. And by the way, you went and gave a fuss about how the developer might cut down trees, but you see no incoherence in then fussing about how the landowner could not then install a smaller turbine on a smaller tower? A small wind turbine (or windmill) needs to have a clearance of at least 9 meters for out to 100 meters. So a small turbine on a 45ft tower (like mine) needs to keep his trees at 6 meters (about 18ft) max height, rather than 40ft max height for the industrial towers. You don't see the incoherence in your complaints?

'Those apple trees you have are a potential wind block, they can come cut them down (Happened to one of the farmers down there). Sorry.'
---For your info, most apple trees don't grow anywhere near 40ft in height. As a matter of fact, most people who grow apple trees for the apples don't grow them much more than 10 ft due to harvesting and fruit quality considerations. I have a small orchard. And I wouldn't let any of my trees grow more than 12ft. I have an old almond tree some 30ft high which is basically worthless for food because most of the almonds are uncollectable. And I've never even heard of an apple tree taller than 40ft. Again, you take an insignificant point and in this case, in my opinion, you have gone beyond exaggeration.

'1. They are a massive distraction when driving. You constantly have something moving in your peripheral vision.'
---You can't be serious. What isn't a massive distraction when driving? My wife gets distracted whenever there is a beautiful vista. Or fauna moving or flying about. Or the damn billboards. Or the construction cranes. Or helicopters or small planes flying about. Or people walking around. Or the boats when we cross the lake or drive near the seashore. Etc. Etc. Etc. If you can't learn to deal with distractions, then you shouldn't be driving. The problem isn't the windmills, it's the driver. Another insignificant point exaggerated.
'2. Because of their height, they need to have anti-collision lights for aircraft. At night you can no longer see a bright starry sky because of an ocean of red blinking lights.'
---Nonsense. The red blinking lights do not cause light pollution like cities. Their light does not drown out the light of the stars. The lights are just bright enough to be seen. They don't illuminate anything; just like airplane signal lights. Standing at a good distance from the wind farm, the lights would end up looking like red stars; and unless you are standing directly in the middle of the wind farm, when you look directly up from ANY distance all you will see is the stars, ALL of the stars, and NOTHING BUT the stars. And even if you stand directly in the middle of the wind farm at night and look directly up, you can still see all of the stars and just a few red lights because of the large spacing between turbines. A half-truth exaggeration.
'3. The companies seem to need to be constantly working on these things,'
---I'm flabbergasted. First, this comment is so utterly subjective and trivial. What does 'constantly' mean to you? Do they have guys living up there 24/7? Or are they there every day? Or what? What are you getting at? And even if they have guys working on them from time to time, so what? They have many people working at coal-plants everyday all day, the same with nuke plants and other types of energy plants. So what? Why is this any kind of issue whatsoever? You don't think wind turbines need occasional maintenance, repairs, inspections, upgrades, whatever? Here is an equally stunning comment of equal import: 'Wind turbines are tall and have blades that rotate.'
'and their behavior and saftey onthe roadways and respect for the neighbors is extremely poor.'
---Again, I am flabbergasted. This comment again is totally VAGUE and SUBJECTIVE - to the point of being meaningless. Moreover, this has little to do with the wind turbines and everthing to do with the workers; in other words, the problem isn't the turbines, it's the workers. Just like you can have any business or organization that has irresponsible workers. Should we get rid of police dept.s because of bad cops? Or just the bad cops? Do we criticize the instituion of the US presidency or just its current president? This is gratuitous criticism for the sake of criticism.
' For people affected however, is smells of pay-off.'
---You have gone out of your way to pointlessly criticize, to exaggerate and to tell half-truths. So it smells to me as if you have a personal interest in slandering wind development.

'I'm not anti-wind'
---Really? Ok, I see now how you are defining things. In that case, I am not pro-wind.

'The beauty of nature is important in itself, and always loses out in CBA. Your point that beauty will sometimes have to be sacrificed is well taken, but being dismissive of beauty as a consideration is ill-founded.'
---I am sure that you are perfectly aware that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What is attractive to one is monstrous to another. Please don't try to posit that beauty is a constant objective reality. Because the man-made can be beautiful to many and the natural can be ugly to many; and to suggest that the beauty of nature (if that is what one considers some particular nature to be) can not be complemented or improved by man-made beauty is disingenious. I live in Spain. I see man-made beauty displacing natural beauty all the time. And people fly in from all over the world to see this man-made beauty that either complements, completes or completely displaces the original 'nature'. Segovia has its aqueduct which I am sure many in its day thought was an eye-sore, but today is considered a historical treasure of great beauty; a man-made object that cut the natural vista but ended up eclipsing it in terms of beauty in the opinion of huge swathes of the population in Spain and abroad. La Manch has its antique wind-driven grain mills - you know, the ones the foolish Don Quijote thought were hideous monsters (maybe because back then Cervantes and others thought they were unsightly). They are still in Spain serving as a cultural and tourist attraction - many of them neatly lined up in long rows. They don't work any more, but they remain because people pay money to go see them and awe at their beauty. The same with Spain's castles which dot just about every other high point in the countryside; I am sure that most were not built with beauty in mind and since they were up high, they always impacted the natural vista. Yet nevertheless nowadays every town in Spain puts spotlights on their castle (or church) so that they can be admired even at night. I could go on and on. And not just with what is in Spain. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To say that wind turbines destroy the natural beauty is a completely subjective opinion. There are very many who have the opposite opinion. Beauty can not be taken seriously as a criteria for determining whether something should or should not be done because their is no objective measure of it.
'Utilitaraianism is a road that got us into the environmental mess. It won't get us out; we need to recognize that there are goods other than utility the we need to pursue.'
---Utilitarianism didn't get us into this mess. It was selfishness, greed and irresponsibility. Utilitarianism is about taking actions and measures which do the most good for the greatest numbers of people; it has been the subversion of this concept by the concept of 'me, me, me and only me' that has gotten us into the environmental mess we are in. Utilitarianism is a counter to selfishness and irresponsibility. We need more of it, not less.
'They do a number on wildlife populations through habitat destruction. One wind farm near me wiped out several square kilometers of prairie grassland near a very large wildlife refuge. I'm working on the numbers now, but anecdotally it looks like several bird populations have suffered. One of my students, who works with the state Audobon society, has found similar problems.'
---Wiped out several square kilometers of grasslands? Grasslands? How exactly did it do that? This is really 'interesting.' So interesting that I am willing to do some research on the subject myself if you give me the name of the wildlife refuge and the name of the wind development. But moving further, you imply that bird populations have suffered significantly due to the loss of several square km of grasslands near this refuge; again this is very 'interesting' that the 'destruction' of a few square kms of grasslands (not in but) near the refuge has done this. Please do give me the info so that I can check this for myself because your anecdotal opinion is really 'interesting.' I wouldn't mind checking up on the 'similar problems' seen by your Audobon friend. Please do give me the details. Because, living in Spain, with all these wind farms around, my anecdotal evidence should be similar to yours and for some 'interesting' reason it isn't. I'd like to look into it.

'Don't get me wrong: I'll take a wind farm over a coal plant every time. But saying one is better than the other doesn't require us to be blind to the downside.'
---True, we shouldn't be blind to the downside. But neither should we exaggerate downsides. Make up downsides. Distort downsides. Or otherwise mislead about downsides. Which unfortunately is way too common in those opposed to wind development.
'When we say that all opponents are simply "protecting their pristine views"--or their property values--we're doing no better than RUNGA.'
---When the overwhelming majority of opponents start off opposing wind due to aesthetics and simply latch on to whatever arguments can hold traction in public debate (and just as easily discard those that backfire) to achieve their goal of blocking local wind development, it is fair to categorize the opposition as being simply aesthetics driven. And this is EXACTLY what has been going on. It is no coincidence that anti-wind opponents form predominantly local groups to oppose local wind development, as opposed to national, regional or international anti-wind groups to oppose wind development in a larger political setting. They are opposed to wind in their backyard. And to equate what I have just stated with RUNGA tactics is to equate free speech with non-free libel. Or to put it another way: what I have said wouldn't be struck down in a court of law. And for good reason.

I'm all for rooting out bad science and sham arguments, but the Advertising Standards Council is censorship, pure and simple. That kind of government interference in free speech is not permissible in civilized society and will cause Britain trouble down the road, I guarantee.

I know what you mean bro.
They should just do like FOX did and go to court and win the right to lie to their fellow citizens.

What a bunch of tards hey?

'As an ultra-environmentalist myself, I sometimes look at wind-power and do not understand how it is that other environmentalists can support something so outrageous.'
---As an ultra-environmentalist myself, I sometimes look at wind-power opponents and do not understand how it is that they can consider themselves in ANYWAY WHATSOEVER an environmentalist. Simply outrageous to me that they even have the gall to say that they are environmentalists.
'I find the argument that wind-energy is a renewable resource as one that is rather mislead to say the least.'
---I find this statement to be an epitomization of 'misleading' to say the least.
'My family recently acquired property in West Texas in order to get away from the highway (with no sound- or light-barriers) that is being constructed literally next-door to us here in the city as it cuts through our neighborhood. As soon as we got out to West Texas, we got information in the mail about the Florida Power & Light Company putting up wind farms on the area of land we had just purchased! It is like we are surrounded on all sides by development.'
---Here we go. The truth. The real reason that you are opposed to wind. The same real reason that the overwhelming majority of wind opponents have. You don't want to see these things next to you. Not in your backyard. You moved because you didn't want a road in your backyard. And now you want no turbines in your backyard. You don't want to see development in your backyard. It is that simple.
'what my fellow environmentalists have failed to mention is that wind-energy requires land, and land is NOT a renewable resource...There is a finite surface area available for wind farms'
---What you have failed to mention is that the land under these turbines can still be used for agricultural or other purposes. The land doesn't disappear when a turbine gets put in place. In case you are utterly unaware of this fact: the massive blades you complain about are way ABOVE the land - not lying down on it! The actual land space taken up by wind turbines is miniscule. This is one common exaggeration (half-truth, lie...they all apply) used by wind opponents. They MASSIVELY distort the truth on this point bringing up numbers that bear no semblance to reality. The turbine tower base itself occupies almost no land. So wind opponents throw in dirt roads that lead to the turbines. Except that the countryside is littered with dirt roads anyway, the overwhelming majority leading to isolated properties and cabins. And many of these wind farms for the most part use preexisting dirt roads as much as possible, so the 'added' dirt roads are miniscule. But opponents have no problem adding in preexisting roads used by wind farms, along with new dirt roads, and anything else they wish to deceptively throw in. All the while conveniently ommitting the fact that there are huge numbers of dirt roads criss-crossing the countryside anyway - which of course they don't complain about and which dwarf into insignificance the wind farm dirt roads!
'and once an area of land has been developed for wind-farms it does not look like the nature anymore that we are all trying to protect.'
---Here we go again. The truth. You are concerned about looks. The aesthetics out of your window. And more specifically, you particular subjective interpretation of it. You are not concerned about the environment as a whole; you are not concerned about its proper functioning. You are concerned about the looks. Protecting nature is not about protecting its aesthetics. But some people are incapable of making such an overwhelmingly obvious distinction (I wonder why). Oh, and so you know, I lived in Lubbock for a few years attending Texas Tech and travelled to New Mexico and West Texas often. Most of the area west of Lubbock to New Mexico looks like vast stretches of flat nothingness - virtually no vegetation, just farmland. We are not even talking about 'nature' in most of these areas. Just subjective looks.
'...we are making the world a more natural and sustainable place to live, and design and sustainability MUST go hand-in-hand in order for environmentalism to have the ability to spread to the masses and convert those non-believers and illiterates.'
---Yes, we are trying to make the world a more natural and sustainable place to live. But that is about function - NOT aesthetics. Please stop implicitly asserting they they are one and the same - they are NOT. Wind is one of the few unsurpassed blends of design and true sustainability. And since you seem to live in complete mental isolation: wind has ALREADY spread to the masses throughout the world. Stop deluding yourself.

'It also seems that the amount of energy required to manufacture and transport the airplane-sized machines across hundreds of miles on trucks'
---Industrial sized wind turbines recuperate all of their embodied energy well within a year and then continue producing energy for 20 to 30 years. This is one of the very best ratios in the energy industry.
'and all of the resources and man-power that go into erecting the turbines seems rather wasteful when there are other technologies out on the market that can provide energy with much fewer resources and in much more passive manners.'
---All of the resources? Wind farm development, along with other renewable energy farm developments like solar, tidal, etc., are better at consuming less resources than most of the traditional forms of energy. But since you seem to think opposite, please tell me which one you think does considerably better so that I can post the relevant numbers and clear up your confusion. As for man-power, why do you think it inconvenient that renewable energy technologies may require more manpower, also commonly referred to as more jobs? Do you have a problem with good quality job creation? Or do you think our money is better spent subsidizing the lifestyles of coal barons and oil sheiks?

'Did anybody ever stop to think of where all that metal is coming from to make those super-structures and whether the material is eco-friendly, painted with eco-friendly paints, and made from recycled materials at an eco-friendly factory?'
---Did you ever stop to think that ALL energy production plants require large amounts of resources and also must face questions of eco-friendly production and materials? Why do you insist on singling out wind with this question when ALL sources of energy production must face these same questions? There must be a good reason for such convenient myopic blindness.
'In the wind-energy market alone there have ben so many innovations concerning the transformation of wind-power into something aesthetically pleasing in design and bird-friendly in form, but they have received little attention because everyone thinks that the 70-year old technology funded by the government and power companies is the solution.'
---WTF?! Current industrial wind turbines have incorporated improved design for aspect and birds. They are ALREADY bird-friendly. To state otherwise is a flat-out LIE. And aesthetic design is a highly personally subjective criteria. No design will satisfy the aesthetic demands of all individuals - especially of those who simply don't want them in their backyard period. As far as I am concerned, they are already attractive enough, and this, from what I have noticed, is the opinion shared by the VAST majority of individuals in the US and Europe. I have seen poll after poll, study after study, that shows majorities of individuals thinking that the aesthetics are fine. Lastest one I saw was at Mother Earth News. And get your facts straight about who has been funding turbine design research because for the most part it has not been govt. and power companies.

'to get away from wind altogether (obviously barring some future development in wind-energy that makes it the obvious candidate for energy production)'
---You want to get away from wind altogether (based on a bunch of bogus arguments) but are willing to accept wind in future? What developments are you talking about? Wind generators made out of straw? Wind generators that bring back to life the birds your cat and chimney stove killed? Wind generators that require no resources and no labor? I know - invisible wind generators that you don't have to look at from your front window, right?
'and to use things like geothermal heating and air conditioning (NOT geothermal electricity production), solar hot water heaters, and passive roof-top photovoltaics for electricity.'
---What about all the fuss that you made before that applies to these things? Many resources required, eco-materials and eco-production required, embodied energy from production and transport, lots of labor required, take up land (thinking like you do, if wind turbines occupy the air above land making the land below worthless, then geothermal occupies area below making the land above worthless - yes, I know, they are both silly thoughts), and so on and on. Why do I find it that your arguments are conveniently incoherent and skewed?

'A final note I would like to leave with would be to ask fellow environmentalists to think about the enormity of the turbines going up everywhere and how much we have had to invest so far and how on a national and even global scale how they honestly provide one tiny percentage of global electricity production.'
---A final note that I leave to this self-declared environmentalist: wind production provides a tiny percentage of global electricity production TODAY but TOMORROW it will end up providing a very large chunk throughout the world. Please start getting used to it TODAY rather than tomorrow. You may have escaped that road, but you can't escape all development in a world with rapacious consumption and close to 7 billion people.

'It is obviously not a long-time solution'
---Sorry to have to correct. Fossils are not a long-time solution. Wind will keep blowing till the planet's end, so wind is most definitely a long term solution.

'and the resources going into the construction, manufacture, and erection of these machines would be better spent on research or development of some new source of sustainable energy that actually has a chance to supply the globe with clean energy,'
---Wind energy is a fundamental part of that end term solution. It is clean, safe, and renewable. It creates local energy and local employment. And wind ALONE has the potential to meet ALL of the planet's energy needs, but wind won't be alone. It will be a fundamental part of a broad mix of renewables. And we need to start coming to grips wind global warming NOW, not 100 years from now when fusion may possibly get its act together. Otherwise, your suggestion of spending money on something else is like telling someone with cancer to wait for treatment until your absolutely unique and warped 'ideal' of a cancer cure comes into existence - which possibly will NEVER come into existence. We need treatment now, and we are moving forward now.

'that would require inconceivable amounts of man-hours and energy to remove once they are too old or broken down.'
---Again, you single out wind on an issue that applies to ABSOLUTELY ALL forms of energy production. You don't think fossil fuel plants require 'inconceivable amounts of manhours and energy to remove'? And nuke plants? And all other forms of plants? And even the home-scale energy systems? Again, why do I find your line of reasoning highly but very conveniently skewed and incoherent?

'and not supply the globe with giant bird-blenders'
---The mantra of the distortionist anti-wind opponents.

In reply to Houston’s extensive commentary, hopefully this clarifies things:

The $1000 a year is a contract that is tied, permanently to the property but only payable to the initial person signing it, for the next 30 years. Should you opt to sell your land, that contract goes with it, but without the payment to the next owner. When I say to keep people from complaining, this $1000 a year contract is for people living near any of the infrastructure of the wind turbine facility, but that do not have any of said facility on their property. Once you dig through all the legal language of this thing, you’ll find that you are in fact signing away your rights to your land. Here is some detail in the legal writing.:

-You may not build anything taller than 40ft on your land.
-You may not do anything other than grow crops within 400ft of a ‘wind generation unit’.
-The power company has the right to modify or remove any foliage within 1400ft of a ‘wind generating unit’
-A ‘wind generating unit’ is hereby defined as the tower, the genereator pod, the blades, any wiring connecting said structures both above and below ground, any power company structure, and any company ‘met towers’.

You said, “And I've never even heard of an apple tree taller than 40ft. Again, you take an insignificant point and in this case, in my opinion, you have gone beyond exaggeration.”

Go back and add up those four points and you’ll find that it basically allows the power company to come on to your land and remove all the trees because they have an underground buried power line 1000 feet away. This is exactly what they did to a farmer’s apple orchard down there. The trees were no where near 40’ tall, but that is not what part of the language they used to cut the trees down. The farmer has no right to complain because he signed the contract and then, afterwards, they put in the underground power line. There wasn’t even an actual wind turbine within a half a mile of these trees.

Ground interference from objects is 20 times their height. A 40ft object has a 800ft turbulence factor.

To the point of the ‘massive distraction’. Try driving your car with someone waving their hands in you peripheral vision constantly. Maybe then you’ll understand. No, it isn’t the same as a billboard folks, it is moving.

The anti-collision lights are bright, even adjusting for the fact that they are supposed to by minimally damaging to night vision, with over 300 tower blinking all over the horizon, you are losing the ability to see the night sky. The first large set that was installed at least all blinking at the same time, but now it is a constant undulating mass of red lights. Look at some old radio towers, and then imagine that kind of light in all directions.

As to the crews always working on them and driving all over. I will qualify it by saying that four out of every seven days has crews and trucks digging, covering, modifying, or removing equipment. This has been constant for the last two years. Part of this construction project has been an un-ending conveyor belt of dump trucks hauling gravel for foundations and private roadways. When I say constant, I will qualitfy that by six-days a week, 10 hours a day, 8-10 truck loads per hour. To save on the paved roads, the trucks must drive on the local gravel roads whenever possible. The has resulted in everything being covered by dust (which wouldn’t have been a problem if they had not cut down all the wind-break tress…

So, I think I’ve covered your commentary. And I will clarify my ‘I am not anti-wind’ comment. I like wind turbines. I think they are a great way to generate power. What I do not like it the way that they are being installed and the backhanded way that they use their land-contracts to destroy trees and restrict local development after they are signed.

I’ll add one more detail about the construction of these turbines. When the first ones went up they put them in the ‘ideal’ positions for wind efficiency. This was done with almost no consideration for the farm land. Sure, on paper they only take up a couple acres for the service roads and the turbines themselves, but they were laid out in such a zig-zag manner that farmers were not able to get their equipment in to the ‘corners’ that were suddenly there and they lost acreage. The farmers also lost their wind breaks (as stated earlier). The construction equipment and building materials were so heavy that the company opted to build their own gravel roads rather than pay to repair the damages they would cause to the regular roadways (turbines are heavy, with a single blade weighing in at 22 tons). These private roads cut fields and farms in half and screwed up water drainage )causing some fields to flood in high rains.

So, please build wind turbines. They are great. But please don’t destroy the land or the community to do it.

-Lego

Jajohnson, I certainly wasn't' being 'dismissive' of beauty. It is a terrible shame that human development often destroys the beauties of the world. What I am saying is that we can destroy beauty by building dirty, polluting coal plants or petroleum refineries, or we can do it by building wind turbines or solar farms which will provide clean, renewable power for years to come.

When you really look at it, wind farms aren't THAT bad. In fact, I think they are kind of interesting looking. Urban sprawl kills beauty. Power transmission lines kill beauty. Cell phone towers kill beauty. I think wind farms are wrongly implicated in this. The only disadvantage they really have is that they are relatively new so people aren't used to them. And the impacts that they have are almost purely aesthetic (contrary to Victor's comments above).

As far as Victor's comment:

"The amount of energy required to manufacture and transport the airplane-sized machines across hundreds of miles on trucks and all of the resources and man-power that go into erecting the turbines seems rather wasteful when there are other technologies out on the market that can provide energy with much fewer resources and in much more passive manners."

What technologies? Treehugger published a post recently that says that a wind turbine will pay back the power used in its manufacture and construction in 6.3 months. MONTHS! The power generating capacity of wind-turbines is IMMENSE. Sustainable practices and solar rooftops will help, but you must understand the MASSIVE amounts of power that the industrial and transportation sectors use. There is no "silver bullet" and we must adopt an array of purpose-built technologies to get us out of the predicament we are in. Land is not a renewable resource, but at some point, wind development will cease. The total suitable land for wind development is relatively small compared to total land mass. Take this quite from Wikipedia as perspective:

"Wind power available in the atmosphere is much greater than current world energy consumption. The most comprehensive study to date[48] found the potential of wind power on land and near-shore to be 72 TW, equivalent to 54,000 MToE (million tons of oil equivalent) per year, or over five times the world's current energy use in all forms." - Wikipedia, 'wind power'

That's huge. Simply huge. Other nations have embraced wind power while the smear campaigns and nay-sayers in the states continue to make it a perceived negative. Almost ALL of the arguments against wind are false. And a peeve of mine is when people start talking about bird kills. That is total BS. Birds are just as likely to fly into the side of a sky-scraper or a radio tower than they are to fly into a turbine. Wind turbines aren't spinning like blenders. They rotate relatively slowly with high torque which is geared up to high RPM for the generators. Turbines would be an obstacle like any other high structure. It's not like there is a fine mist of bird blood spraying across the prairie 24 hours a day. Did you know that cats and cars have been estimated to kill in the billions of birds per year? Turbines kill in the hundreds.

In any case, I'm tired of arguing this point. I pitty the people who fail to "see the forest for the trees" as quoted from a recent Treehugger post. The benefits of wind power FAR outweigh these relatively petty arguments about aesthetics and land development.

Luc

Jajohnson, I certainly wasn't' being 'dismissive' of beauty. It is a terrible shame that human development often destroys the beauties of the world. What I am saying is that we can destroy beauty by building dirty, polluting coal plants or petroleum refineries, or we can do it by building wind turbines or solar farms which will provide clean, renewable power for years to come.

When you really look at it, wind farms aren't THAT bad. In fact, I think they are kind of interesting looking. Urban sprawl kills beauty. Power transmission lines kill beauty. Cell phone towers kill beauty. I think wind farms are wrongly implicated in this. The only disadvantage they really have is that they are relatively new so people aren't used to them. And the impacts that they have are almost purely aesthetic (contrary to Victor's comments above).

As far as Victor's comment:

"The amount of energy required to manufacture and transport the airplane-sized machines across hundreds of miles on trucks and all of the resources and man-power that go into erecting the turbines seems rather wasteful when there are other technologies out on the market that can provide energy with much fewer resources and in much more passive manners."

What technologies? Treehugger published a post recently that says that a wind turbine will pay back the power used in its manufacture and construction in 6.3 months. MONTHS! The power generating capacity of wind-turbines is IMMENSE. Sustainable practices and solar rooftops will help, but you must understand the MASSIVE amounts of power that the industrial and transportation sectors use. There is no "silver bullet" and we must adopt an array of purpose-built technologies to get us out of the predicament we are in. Land is not a renewable resource, but at some point, wind development will cease. The total suitable land for wind development is relatively small compared to total land mass. Take this quite from Wikipedia as perspective:

"Wind power available in the atmosphere is much greater than current world energy consumption. The most comprehensive study to date[48] found the potential of wind power on land and near-shore to be 72 TW, equivalent to 54,000 MToE (million tons of oil equivalent) per year, or over five times the world's current energy use in all forms." - Wikipedia, 'wind power'

That's huge. Simply huge. Other nations have embraced wind power while the smear campaigns and nay-sayers in the states continue to make it a perceived negative. Almost ALL of the arguments against wind are false. And a peeve of mine is when people start talking about bird kills. That is total BS. Birds are just as likely to fly into the side of a sky-scraper or a radio tower than they are to fly into a turbine. Wind turbines aren't spinning like blenders. They rotate relatively slowly with high torque which is geared up to high RPM for the generators. Turbines would be an obstacle like any other high structure. It's not like there is a fine mist of bird blood spraying across the prairie 24 hours a day. Did you know that cats and cars have been estimated to kill in the billions of birds per year? Turbines kill in the hundreds.

In any case, I'm tired of arguing this point. I pitty the people who fail to "see the forest for the trees" as quoted from a recent Treehugger post. The benefits of wind power FAR outweigh these relatively petty arguments about aesthetics and land development.

Luc

Lego, thank you for the considered response. I found it more informative and useful. Here are some points that I still wish to make:
'Once you dig through all the legal language of this thing, you’ll find that you are in fact signing away your rights to your land.'
---As I already mentioned, this is a contract between two legal individuals. The land owner has free will in saying yes or no to the conditions and the money. If the wind developer is intentionally trying to find ways to deceive the land owner, than I think this is unconscionable - but this applies to all business dealings in all economic spheres. In which case what we are discussing is unscrupulous businessmen, and I assure you that you can find such individuals everywhere. And they should be outed and confronted everywhere. But let us not generalize that all wind developers have no morals and all farmers are idiots. Moving further, the land owner is not signing away all the rights to his land - he is signing away some for a limited time frame. And you specifically mentioned some of them. The land owner decides for himself whether the money offered is worth the rights signed over.

'basically allows the power company to come on to your land and remove all the trees because they have an underground buried power line 1000 feet away. This is exactly what they did to a farmer’s apple orchard down there... The farmer has no right to complain because he signed the contract and then, afterwards, they put in the underground power line.'
---Yes, I see the point. However, the way you stated it before, and even now to some extent, you make it seem as if the land owner (owner of the apple trees) was unaware and opposed to the removal of his trees. From what you have stated, it sounds to me as if the wind developer removed the apple orchard in order to be able to install the underground cabling - the trees obviously were not removed after the installation of the cabling. So I am left with the suspicion that the wind developer and land owner had discussed where the cabling (and towers) would go before the contract was signed. At least if it was my land I would have discussed it first before signing, and I am assuming other landowners would be of equal diligence and intelligence. It is difficult to believe that the wind developer would not have known and would not have informed the farmer before the contract was signed of where the turbines and cables would go and what would be required (tree removal). So I would hazard to say that this tree removal was known by the farmer and agreed to before the signing of the contract; rather than forced upon the farmer after the fact. And I see nothing sinister in this.

'Try driving your car with someone waving their hands in you peripheral vision constantly. Maybe then you’ll understand....The anti-collision lights are bright, even adjusting for the fact that they are supposed to by minimally damaging to night vision, with over 300 tower blinking all over the horizon, you are losing the ability to see the night sky.'
---As I have mentioned before, I live in Spain (large concentration of wind turbines and farms) and occassionally drive past wind farms. I have seen them moving in my peripheral vision as has my wife. No problems. And as I have mentioned, the signal lights do not drown out the light of the stars in any way that I have noticed. Maybe lights used there are brighter, but I would find that surprising.

'To save on the paved roads, the trucks must drive on the local gravel roads whenever possible. The has resulted in everything being covered by dust (which wouldn’t have been a problem if they had not cut down all the wind-break tress…'
---I have gravel roads near my finca and a small stretch on my finca. I can understand trucks moving fast will kick up dust. But as far as I have noticed gravel roads only kick up dust for a few months after being laid. After which the wind, rain, and compaction eliminate any dust that can be kicked up. And from my experience only relatively fast moving vehicles kick up dust, and more pointedly the dust travels little with most of it remaining on the road. Of course wind will play an important part in how far the dust travels. And some people sometimes add additional layers of gravel to the paths. But I can not see how dust can be a major prolonged issue.

'When the first ones went up they put them in the ‘ideal’ positions for wind efficiency. This was done with almost no consideration for the farm land. Sure, on paper they only take up a couple acres for the service roads and the turbines themselves, but they were laid out in such a zig-zag manner that farmers were not able to get their equipment in to the ‘corners’ that were suddenly there and they lost acreage...The construction equipment and building materials were so heavy that the company opted to build their own gravel roads rather than pay to repair the damages they would cause to the regular roadways. These private roads cut fields and farms in half and screwed up water drainage )causing some fields to flood in high rains.'
---Again, I would find it hard to believe that the farmers were unaware before signing (if that is what you are implying) the contract of where the turbines would be put, where the gravel roads located, and what that would imply for their farming. But I have to concede that the gravel roads should be built in such a way as to allow full utilization of the farmland and cause minimal drainage problems and that if this truly wasn't the case, they need to start finding appropriate solutions.

Victor's aruments are bordering on the irrational, and certainly fail my logic class.

The fallacy of equivocation is apparent in your point about the renewability. Your point there is only true if we adopt a definition of "renewable" that is very different from any other use of the term. Most commonly we consider "renewable" to mean that the resource is not consumed in the process and needs to be replenished from some other source, e.g., fossil fuels. But your point would require renewable to mean that we can produce more of the resource from nothing.

If land is not renewable, then nothing is: any time we do something to create a resource it uses land that cannot, while being used for the purpose, be used for anything else. That would, of course, apply to anything that takes up space anywhere. Solar? Room on your roof isn't infinite.Geothermal? I can't drill a hole where you have already. If these things that you mention are renewable, then wind is, too. If the use of land makes something unrenewable, then that bars your examples as well.

Arguing about where this is a good use of limited space is certainly a reasonable point. Arguing that it isn't renewable is changing the meaning of a commonly used term. That's just bad reasoning.

As for, "design and sustainability MUST go hand-in-hand in order for environmentalism to have the ability to spread to the masses and convert those non-believers and illiterates." Ad hominem attacks--fallacies in themselves--really aren't going to do much on that front, either, are they. As long as we take the attitude that people who disagree with us aren't capable of reason, then we might as well either accept that the majority will always think differently from us or start shooting them. Neither of those options sound good to me. I'd prefer to assume that s