Unfortunately, oceanfront areas seem to be the most reliable sources of wind and view-sodden high-value real estate. So it would be natural for the company to want to put them there, and have a fairly solid alibi for ginning up all that opposition.
I can also see the industry poo-pooing wind because it’s too efficient, ie: doesn’t generate enough employment or stream revenue to other industries like coal, gas, or corn alcohol.
Finally, while greens/greenies/etc. are overwhelmingly liberal, conservationists can be conservatives, and as such, are more likely to be on the side of the status quo regarding energy.
Environmentalists who would reject wind power due to the fact it kills birds remind me of those environmentalists who would reject nuclear power due to the fact it produces nuclear waste. I mean, if you really believe the hype about global warming then rejecting either would be insane to me. If the threat of global warming isn’t surpassing a level where we can accept and deal with some radioactive waste or some dead birds as a tradeoff then who cares?
While I am an aspirant greenie who favours nuclear power, ya gotta admit that nuclear waste is a little bit more of a serious issue than shredded eagles.
They have a load of giants outside Tariffa which is the Southern tip of Spain.
Near them, but not that near, there is a viewing point from which you can see Morocco very clearly (when there is no mist).
There was a sort of near sub-sonic noise that made my flesh crawl.
I’ve a suspicion that my hearing range is wider than usual, but not being able to pin down an out of range noise is probably worse than knowing what makes you want to get out of there.
As an eco-conscientious person, I buy wind energy. In Texas, in some localities, it is available. It puts the equal amount of energy I use back into the grid.
However, I have heard some things about how wind: 1)kills birds, 2)destroys horizon lines, 3)isn’t all that efficient a method of generation.
1 disturbs me less than coal/nuclear polluting the heck out the whole ecosystem, plus I have heard that planners of wind farms were (now?) taking migration patterns into account. 2)The wind farms here in TX are in West Texas where nobody expects to see anything but wind anyhow. A lot looking than billboards though too! 3)I’m really excited about passive hydro, or microhydro, or turbines. This might sound familiar to some. Turbines that can generate energy from the current in water, without needing to dam. And can even be put in fairly shallow water. The info on this seems too sparse to indicate that it’s got major financial backing yet, though the potential is enormous.
Do what you can to keep whoever is naysaying wind power in check–obviously, there are larger issues to consider than horizon.
My impression is that provided that they are not sited right in a major flyway, modern wind turbines (which have large slow-turning blades) are not believed to be a big factor in bird mortality.
I would also point out that the claim that it is environmentalists who have been pushing this concern about bird mortality is not really that true from what I can tell. For example, when I typed “wind energy kill birds” into google, the first site I got is for a green-oriented site that tries to dispel this as a myth, the 2nd is a US Today article, and the 3rd is an article uncritically supporting the idea that wind energy kills birds but it is on an anti-environmental website maintained by the industry-front-group Cooler Heads Coalition (which seems to be a project of the infamous Competitive Enterprise Institute).
We have a huge wind farm being built just north of the town where I live. I have no idea how big it’s going to get, but there are over 100 turbines already operating, and they just opened two new areas. When finished, there will be 266 turbines. The only environmental concerns have been “sight pollution” caused by the lines to carry the power away to be used. The towers themselves reign majestically over a landscape otherwise bleak and naked. They can be seen for miles around and add a fascinating new feature to the otherwise start scenery. Here’s the local newspaper’s latest take on it.
This idea intrigues me a lot. There’s very little public press on it AFAICT. But there are streams in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the Pacific Northwest, probably a bunch of other areas, where there are clear tourism, legal, or environmental issues militating against dammed hydro projects but with a good streamhead where such turbines might be beneficial. For example, whitewater rafting areas, places where fish or other fauna need unimpeded stream, tourist attractions. Tell me your area or the nearest upland to it doesn’t have Dumbname Falls or Madeup River Gorge – somewhere nobody 300 miles away has ever heard of, but which benefits local tourism a great deal, which cannot be dammed without ruining the tourist attraction but has immense potential for power.
Polycarp and urbanmari, my dad happens to have made a design for exactly such an hydraulic pump. It’s principles are high-tech, but it is designed to be self-made by poor Third World farmers who have only materials such as concrete, old car-tyres and bamboo to work with.
The hydraulic pump (“waterram” ) is laid in a stream. Even a smallish stream will do, and no dam is necessary. My dad’s design will then pump water up to 30 metres (100 ft) high, for instance to a waterreservoir on a nearby hilltop. And the sole energy used for the whole process is that of the stream itself.
Here is a link to my dad’s site. Search the site for " waterram" for a video of the working waterram and a description of how it is made.
You think there are only 170M Americans? Hah! if only it were true. We recently rolled past 300M to considerable celebratory boosterism and crowing, and nary a peep in the mainstream press regarding our carbon footprint, or water supplies in the western deserts where more and more of us live.
Just offhand, it looks like pro-development interests (the Bush administration, utilities) assert one thing, anti-development or pro-animal sites (bat/bird protection organizations, for example) assert the other, and some take a middle ground.
One argument that seems to make sense is that there’s a competition for good wind corridors – wind power will be most effective in areas of steady, sustained winds, but migrating birds seek out such winds to aid their journeys.
The argument that windowpanes kill millions more birds than wind power is fallacious on two levels. Firstly, there are untold millions more pieces of plate glass in the world than there will ever be wind turbines. A more realistic argument might look at estimated kills per square foot or something. Secondly, I could mirror the argument by saying that Iraqi insurgents kill more Americans than I ever will…so it’s okay if I kill a few, right? Wrong. Just because windowpanes kill birds doesn’t let wind power (or any other cause of kills) off the hook.
Personally I don’t know what to think, and I’ve done a fair amount of layman’s-level reading on the subject.
I don’t know that they are losing their appeal, I guess it depends which Greens you ask.
It may be that in Europe, they’re pretty well established already - there is no need for greens to do the sales job that is necessary in (for example) Ontario, where we have (I think) fewer than 10.
When doing analysis of alternative energy sources you really need to do a comparative analysis - i.e. how many birds do wind turbines kill, per unit of power generated, as compared with oil (or other potential sources). It is my totally unproven suspicion that oil kills way more (due to spills - not to mention indirect damage caused by air pollution from burning fuels) than turbines will.
To see what greenies have been up to lately, I entered “wind” as a search term at a TreeHugger.org and found these cool new kinds of turbines:
On the one hand you’ve got someone getting sentimental over a few mashed vultures. On the other you have someone who is concerned about meltdowns, radioactive leaks, poisoning of the water table, the continued production of tonnes of deadly waste, that can be co-opted for weapons of mass distruction, with a half-life of fifty thousand years plus (and thus the longevity of the infrastructure required to keep it under wraps for that long).
One is trivial sentimentality; the other is a serious concern that has a large amount of merit.
I briefly worked for a company that managed windfarms. Why do you think they are losing their appeal? If anything, there is more appeal than ever thanks to high fuel costs and technological advances in wind turbine technology.
I don’t know who the “Green Crowd” is. One group that windfarms have lost appeal with is people who live within sight of them. They can be several hundred feet high with blades like a jumbo-jets wing. They wanted to put a farm up off the coast of Nantucket and a lot of people didn’t want them blocking out the horizon.
Well, it might not quite be fair to say that concern for bird kills si trivial sentimentality - if, for example wind turbines were likely to cause the extinction of species (not sure how likely that is), it would be quite a serious concern - perhaps indeed not nearly as serious as widespread radioactive contamination of the environment, but not trivial either.
