It would probably depend on where they were being placed. If out in the countryside, then most folks wouldn’t have a problem. But if they were disrupting your view, I can see why some folks would get tense. Personally, I have no problem with how the things look, but here in New Mexico the wind farms are out in the middle of no-where, so it’s not really an issue for most people.
If you can demonstrate that wind farms, on their own, will make a serious and immediate impact on the climate, I’d like to see it. It is my understanding that wind farms are notoriously inefficient, with something like 30% actual return on energy.
Nothing we can do could have a serious and immediate impact on the climate. Why do you hold wind to that standard? Has anyone, anywhere ever actually proposed a single climate solution that was expected to do it, “on its own?”
Well, here in California, we have the Altamont Wind Farm, with almost 5,000 windmills.
They’re slowly replacing the shorter, faster-turning windmills with taller, slower-turning ones, which spin slowly enough that the birds have a better chance of seeing them coming & getting out of the way, and more of the spin cycle occurs above the typical cruise altitude.
I can’t speak to the politics or ROI of wind farms, but just wanted to weigh in and say that I drive by them every time I go to Palm Springs and I think they’re really cool looking. But I admit that I also think the Las Vegas strip is really cool looking, esp at night.
Regarding death of birds, I’m surprised that we can put a man on the moon, but can’t figure out how to keep birds from flying into turbines. Didn’t they take down a jet over the Hudson a few years ago?
I know a lot of right wingers and they don’t dislike wind farms, solar energy, and other alternate energy possibilities per se. What they hate is that these forms of energy are being pushed hard by left-wingers before they are economically feasible.
If the federal government, under any administration, were to give massive individual grants or tax credits for adding geo-thermal energy to existing (and new) homes, I don’t know of anyone who would complain.
I would wager that anything we could concoct to screen off the intake on a jumbo jet would, in and of itself, be rather unfortunately worse than a duck should it break loose and get ingested.
The problem with teaching them not to fly into windmills is that we have placed the windmills at precisely where evolution has trained the birds to fly in order to catch those tasty field mice and rabbits, and the older style turned so fast that the learning curve was a little too steep.
In general, birds are more than capable of avoiding the blades of wind turbines, the problem is that the majority of the time they just aren’t watching where they are going. Most migratory birds and raptors don’t look straight ahead while flying, they tend to look down at the ground either for food (raptors) or landscape features indicating the fly way. This becomes problematic when humans stick rotating blades up in the air on an 80 meter tower. In the case of Altamont, raptors use the lattice frames of the towers as a perch then they get locked onto some food and when they dive get whacked by the blades.
There are of course mitigation methods that can reduce incidental take of birds, coastal wind farms in south Texas are starting to use radar too detect when large numbers of birds and bats are approaching and shut the turbines down until the danger has passed. Other times proper environmental survey can result in placing the towers in locations that are safer for the birds.
On the whole, the effect of the wind industry on avian species is very small compared to other forms of anthropogenic impacts. Habitat loss do to fragmentation, and global warming have larger effects on avians than turbines. Hell, domestic cats kill more birds than wind turbines do.*
- I will concede the fact that you need one badass barn cat to take down a Golden or Bald Eagle.
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