Plans are underway in western Massachusetts to construct 34-story wind turbines and associated roads on five mountains: the Hoosac Range, in the town of Florida; Crum Hill, straddling the towns of Florida and Monroe; Brodie Mountain, in the town of Hancock; Jiminy Peak, in Hancock; and West Hill in the town of Savoy.
A wind power plant is also being considered on the border of MA and Berlin, NY. A proposal for wind turbines overlooking North Adams is dormant. A feasibility study is being conducted for a turbine at the Catamount Ski Area in South Egremont MA.
Wind turbines produce very little energy but lots of tax breaks, grants, subsidies, and price supports for the developers, at tremendous expense to taxpayers and electricity ratepayers. They are enormously destructive to the environment, requiring construction of access roads wide enough to accommodate 135' tractor-trailers, and extensive clearing for the turbine sites. Generally, they are located on remote, wild ridgelines that support diverse communities of birds, bats, and plants. For more information, click on the links listed below.
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You simply CANNOT PLEASE these people! They don't want coal plants, they don't want oil plants, they don't want Nucular plants, and when you give them clean, efficient electricity, they don't want THAT either!
More proof the environuts are just plain k00ks.
Here's a page showing GE 1.5 MW wind turbines in action in TX:
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And here's a comment from the page:
Where does the power to turn a wind generator actually come from? When we extract 735 mega watts of power using the wind what effect is this having on the global wind patterns? This is of little consequence now but is anyone investigating large scale implications?
Correct. They don't want coal, nuke, oil, or any plants beyond what exists. Should demand exceed capacity, they only want YOUR power cut.
You see, the attitude among these elitist prigs is that resources are to benefit those whose lives, in their opinion, justify the use of dwindling supplies. You are of no consequence and should be restricted. You're not important enough to drive, heat your home, for that matter BUILD your home out of lumber. You should be happy with a smaller residence, using more expensive steel framing. Since that's more expensive, make sure you build one even smaller. After all, these morons need wood to burn in their monstrously large fireplaces, sitting around discussing how the rest of the world contributes to global warming, and how continued pressure on weak-minded politicians (but I repeat myself), to further inhibit your life, will ensure the continued availability of our resources to those who really matter in this world.
I don't need to name names. You know who they are.
Where does the power to turn a wind generator actually come from? When we
Planet X. It still doesn't have an official name, to the best of my knowledge.
I hear you... Some people are concerned only with their own land values. We've got an overwhelming group of homeowners here that adamantly opposes efforts to get reasonably priced housing into the community. Not subsidized, not welfar-oriented, just reasonably priced. They jam city council meetings to oppose reasonably priced housing and they badger their council membes about it. They think reasonably priced housing units will erode the "exclusivity" of the town. They're known as Home Owners Requiring Exlusivity: HOREs.
I think you'd have to agree that the above statement goes far beyond land value concerns. This kind of ignorance, and face it - sheer stupidity, finds its way into the vast droves of junk science, increasing daily.
Apparently, they come from Western Massachusetts. Say, aren't you from Western Massachusetts?
However, their concern is a legitimate one. This is another one of those things that we just don't know much about. To use a wind turbine is to remove kinetic energy from the atmosphere and replace it with heat. Is it a big deal? Probably not but we don't know and, if we're going to do this on an industrial scale, people should ask the question and start digging for answers. We probably shouldn't worry too much about it today but we should look into it. Nature never gives you something for nothing. Never. We should have learned that by now. There's still some lingering concern over bird migrations but I think this turns out not to be as big a problem as feared (but not sure - haven't time to look that up today).
The thing that I find curious about wind turbines is that energy companies seem to like them and I would think they wouldn't. In Massachusetts, a unique hydro project, Bear Swamp, was constructed to handle peak power demands. It's a raised holding pond - during the night, cheap electricity is used to pump water up to it and during peak power demand, the water is allowed to run back down through generators to meet peak demand needs; overall it's like 66% efficient but it's cheaper than gas and diesel plants which NEPSCo would otherwise have had to build to meet demand peaks. But Bear Swamp was built in 1979 on so, when the only other power on the grid was power with predictable generation characteristics and Bear Swamp was built to meet certain peak needs, not to deal with uncertain generation.
Energy producers are very capital-intensive businesses and they desire a high degree of predictability in everything. Electric load is highly predictable (at least, if you can forecast the weather fairly well) but if you switch to wind, the generation becomes less predictable. And there's the problem.
Let's say you, the power company chief, have to decide what to build to meet
200mw of peak demand. If you have 210mw of peak capacity but 20mw is in wind, you run the risk of being 10mw short at peak because you can't rely on the wind. Consequently, you have to come up with a way of generating 200mw of predictably available power or you have to have ironclad contracts for backup supply - which you will be buying at peak rates. Or you have to have some way of banking wind power (Bear Swamp) to meet demand when the wind lets you down. If you build another 10mw of conventional capacity, so that you can meet your 200mw demand whether or not the wind is blowing without buying at peak rates, that's another 10mw worth of capital you must put up and it's redundant capital because you've already got that 10mw invested in wind production.
Still, the electric companies do seem to like wind well enough. Here, as in other places, you can contract for green energy (which, ultimately, brings more green energy on-line) and what's mostly provided is wind but without a cheap way to store peak energy (Bear Swamp is a big capital investment and I don't think it's easily expanded), a power company runs the risk of being unable to meet peak demand, which will make customers angry and spark investigations from the legislature (nobody wants that).
Of course, another aspect of this is load management. A friend runs a business that requires a LOT of electricity (almost as much as Al Gore's house!!!) and his contract with Excel allows them to basically shut him down when they can't afford to supply electricity to him. He saves a bundle on electricity but runs the risk of having to pay people to sit on their hands (the savings do make this a win although they shut him off a few times last year). There's lots of variations on this theme (off-peak electric heating storage schemes, etc), so the power companies are actively working both sides of the issue. Maybe they're having enough success with load management that they can affort to have a potential shortfall in wind production and still keep operations normal.
And, it's also possible that if you consider a large enough area with enough good wind sites, you are extremely unlikely to run into a situation where all your turbines are becalmed.
Personally, I don't see any problem with expanding wind production. For the MW involved, it's cheaper than solar photovoltaic but it's going to make far more sense if we can, someday, build a cheap way of storing electricity generated when we don't need it and kept for later use. I believe Bear Swamp is one of the cheapest ways to do that but it's also a huge capital investment and it's hard to find suitable sites to build a project like that.
Also, one of the attractions of shoreline wind power is that the onshore and offshore daily wind cycles are, as far as I know, very predictable. However, Hachi has pointed this out as yet another COVE issue in the past. On the one hand, it's understandable that people investing a lot of money in a vacation home are going to be sensitive to the property values but, on the other hand, maybe that's just TFB (Too Bad) for them. It's clean (as far as we know), reasonably priced and, at the shore, the dependability is probably enhanced. Build some of it and see how it goes.
By the way, you should not characterize all of these people as k00ks. It's likely that some of those involved in this very much walk the walk of conservation. I know people who get by with very small amounts of energy. They use clotheslines, drive very little, live in small, easily heated houses, don't have or don't use air-conditioning, compost, recycle everything, grown some of their own food and have a small carbon footprint. That's not k00kery, that's commitment. And every erg of energy use they avoid drives down the price for you (or helps to keep it lower than it otherwise would be).
Reminds me of the eco-nuts who tried to obstruct the building of a new observatory on Mt. Graham in Arizona. It seems that some variety of squirrel inhabited the area. The footprint of the observatory was a few acres among tens of thousands. Like squirrels, who breed like fleas, are going to be affected by this.
Likewise with any squirrel hanging around construction equipment.
Didja hear the one about the farmer in New Mex or Ariz that got arrested by the Feds for running over a Kangaroo Rat with his tractor? This was about 1-0 years ago or so.
I remember that, but I think it was in California. Here are the facts, as verified:
State and federal authorities gave Mr. Ming-Lin two warnings before he was prosecuted for destroying habitat and killing several endangered or threatened species on his property including the San Joaquin kit fox, the Tipton kangaroo rat, and other species. The first warning was a letter from the Fish and Wildlife Service sent two years before Ming-Lin's prosecution informing him that "the Department has identified [the] area as native threatened and endangered species habitat that now contains significant populations of both state and federally listed threatened and endangered species." The letter further informed Mr. Ming-Lin that he could farm on his land if he obtained a permit to do so under the ESA, and the FWS office offered assistance in obtaining one. Mr. Ming-Lin ignored the letter and never applied for a permit. Two years later, "state agents informed him that he was tilling endangered species habitat." The authorities acted only after Mr. Ming-Lin ignored this second warning and continued to threaten listed species without the proper permits allowing some destruction of habitat and harm to endangered animals. FWS eventually dropped all charges after Ming-Lin agreed to obtain a permit and to contribute $5,000 toward a preserve for endangered wildlife in Kern County.
So the guy has to pull a permit to farm his own land, and gets legally blackmailed for five grand.
Like I said, I sold what should have been a $125,000 riverfront parcel for $25,000, thanks to the EPA and the Envirok00ks...
If you want to build, some wildlife protection council has to review the property for endangered species. Since the Marble Salamander lives there, there probably wouldn't be a go-ahead to build.
All I wanted was 2500 Sq Ft. Add a driveway, and that leaves only 22,000 sq ft for the marbled salamander.
I would have shared the property with them...
Guess they wouldn't share it with me... (there's only another 25 or so acres for them to live on there...)
How does all this weepy old injustice stack up against the recent ruling by the Supremes that local governments may force property owners to sell out and make way for private economic development when officials decide it would benefit the public, even if the property is not blighted and the new project's success is not guaranteed?
Awhile back I read an article about floating wind turbines that use part of the energy it makes to stay up 100's of feet in the air. Supposedly these turbines would be more efficient than ones on the ground because the wind blows almost constantly.
As far as disrupting air patterns, that's a joke. Wind is nothing more than high pressure drawn to low pressure. Wind is equilibrium.
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