I think they’re fantastic. I’d live next to one (not inside though - they shake about quite a lot - I climbed up a spiral staircase inside one once.).
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I agree. I’d like to see those big farms that run down a ridge colored like a rainbow. I think that would look very cool. (like the northern most tower/turbine = Red, then they go to orange, then yellow, … until the southern most is purple.)
I drive by them all the time. Hundreds and hundreds of them make for an eye sore. They won’t be putting them up in national parks by the hundred anytime soon.
I don’t care either way about the looks of the turbines but if I lived where someone wanted to build a farm, I’d be concerned about the low frequency noise that especially the big turbines generate.
- They kind of remind me of modern art, and while I’m not a huge fan of that, these are somewhat pleasing to look at.
I like them and sometimes call them pinwheels. I think they can and should be made more ascetic.
That said I also believe people who claim to have suffered negative health effects, presumably from a ‘buffeting’ from very low frequency variation in air pressure. So though I would like to see more of them, I would also like to see them in places far removed from homes. Even if the condition is all in the head of the suffering person, it is real to them, and placing them in areas around homes will only spread the problems as more will be effected by the power of suggestion alone.
I think you might mean aesthetic…
But unless you’re talking about painting them a different colour, there might not be much that can be done to change their appearance, without compromising efficiency.
They’re not bad. We have them all over the place in CA: Altamont pass, Delta, Morongo pass (there is a forest of them there). They are just part of the landscape.
I concur the wind farm is preferrable to a traditional power plant in many ways. As for the number of birds and bats killed - you would have to compare that to the number killed via a fossil fuel-powered plant and the activities required to provide the plant with those fuels (mining, transportation, habitat loss etc.).
When my kids were young, and we would pass by the Altamont wind farm, with hundreds of turbines moving, I would tell them that is how the world goes around.
-3. I wouldn’t want to live close to them; they terrify me. They look like the three-legged robots from War Of The Worlds, especially when there are a lot of them together. Plus, my husband and I once drove up to the base of one just for giggles. It was terrifyingly huge and terrifyingly noisy. I’d worry about low frequency sound.
I like them. They put up two of them in my hometown so I’ve been up close to those a few times. I didn’t hear anything, they were completely silent. Also, something you often can’t tell from pictures, but they’re huge. This is a picture I took of them a while back and I wasn’t very close to either one of them.
It probably depends on if your farm home used to have a nice view of the hills and mountains and now is dominated by the turbines.
I like the look of them and voted +3, but if I had to look at them EVERY SINGLE DAY …CONSTANTLY, when I used to see unfettered fields and mountains, I would most definitely vote -5.
+1
Exactly what I was thinking.
-2. Rhythmically flashing shadows annoy. The mammalian brain is wired to react to such stimuli, sometimes unpleasantly.
I spend 20 minutes each weekday driving thru an area thick with huge windmills.
I could choose to not look at the open sewer or to avoid the area altogether. The torn up top of the mountain and the scarring of the land by the access roads is not so easily avoidable.
One windmill on a prairie farm may be picturesque but dozens of them along the ridge of a mountain … I vote no.
I gave them a +4. There’s a big windfarm just up the road from my parents’ house and I think it enhances the landscape. The access roads slightly less so, unfortunately.
According to the Altamont Pass Wind Farm wiki, the older-style bird blenders (4970 turbines, 4700 kills per year, including 70 golden eagles) have been shut down and are being replaced with larger, taller, slower turbines which turn slower so the birds have a chance to get out of the way and spend most of their rotation above the strike range (the height at which the raptors cruise).
An alternative would be to mow & pave the entire pass so there was no food supply for the raptors to be cruising for, but I can’t help but think the ecological types might get a bit peeved by that, along with the property owners (who still graze cattle on the land).
The amazing thing to me still is that they were able to put up almost 5,000 of these things before somebody said “Hey, that’s a lot of dead birds…”
Oddly enough, last time I drove past (a couple weeks ago), most of the turbines were churning away, when they’re usually still.
On our last pre-kid trip to Europe, several years back, my wife and I were in the Netherlands and nearby Germany, and there were a number of wind turbines on the routes we drove. I thought they looked pretty cool, actually.
We also came across some old-fashioned windmills in the Netherlands. Kinda neat, too. I’m good with either the old kind or the new kind as a neighbor.
We’re all familiar with the big-ass power transmission lines that cut across the landscape, requiring a swath of clear-cut land underneath the power lines and the towers that support them.
I don’t see how wind turbines and the access roads to them can be any worse.