Wind power now considered environmentally unfriendly

[Don Corleone]

Think of all the poor birds. And think of the damage that 'might' occur to the bay. Nope, sorry, wind farms along the coast are a bad idea too, according to environmentalists.

So I'm interested. Thus far we've removed from the list of possible energy sources:

Petroleum
Coal
Natural Gas
Wood
Nuclear Fission
Wind

And I've heard a lot of environmentalists bemoan solar, because of the cadmium and other toxic metals that are left from a spent solar cell (a point I actually happen to agree with them for once).

So I'm curious. Is it just me, or are the environmentalists trying to say "We should return to the days before fire", without actually coming out and saying it.

Are there any environmentally sources of energy, or should we all just do the planet a favor and commit mass suicide as a species?

[Lemur]

It saddens me that loonbat extremists give environmentalism a bad name. Opposing wind farms is just madness. And yeah, some of the more out-there greens seem to want to return to hunter/gatherer lifestyles, but without the hunting part. It's maddening.

[rvg]

Are there any environmentally sources of energy, or should we all just do the planet a favor and commit mass suicide as a species?

You can't appease the radicals. We should stop trying to cast pearls before the swine and just start doing what makes sense from a completely pragmatic, technocratic, non-politicized perspective: that means using Nuclear power, Wind power and Solar power to the max.

[drone]

The bird thing is overstated, the newer turbines don't slice-and-dice like the earlier ones did. Altamont Pass had this problem, but those were smaller turbines with higher blade speeds than modern ones.

You don't have geothermal on your list, but I'm sure the greenies would find something to complain about. Ruining the CHUD's natural environment or something.

[Tribesman]

Wind farms can cause extensive environmental damage , but the objections by this group concerning birds are pretty much bollox , so the fact remains that an extensive environmental impact report is a neccesity (but you would have thought that such a report would be par for the course anyway) .
So is this obejection about the scope of the report and survey or just the proposed project itself ?

[Don Corleone]

Wind farms can cause extensive environmental damage , but the objections by this group concerning birds are pretty much bollox , so the fact remains that an extensive environmental impact report is a neccesity (but you would have thought that such a report would be par for the course anyway) .
So is this obejection about the scope of the report and survey or just the proposed project itself ?

From what I understand the group is suing to be included and have supervisory control of the project. It was implied in the article that the group wanted to actually use that role to block the project, or at least regulate it heavily.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

From what I understand the group is suing to be included and have supervisory control of the project.

Siggied!

[Tribesman]

Supervisory in which manner Don and at what level ?
I can think of two recent local wind farm projects where full and limited supervisory oversight was exluded with very bad results (in one case a very expensive and yet to be more expensive bad result) , both due to a lack of impact reports or failure to follow guidlines set out in the impact report .
Though there is another local one where the impact report was 90% wrong and the problems they envisioned actually turned to be benefits .

[Don Corleone]

Well, to be perfectly honest, the article doesn't make the desired supervisory level particularly clear, so I can't really say. Should ELF and every other fringe gorup have veto power over every public works project? On the other extreme, do we want to allow these government/corporate collaborations to go forward without enivormental impact studies? As with most things, the wise course remains somewhere in between.

I just hadn't heard anything about negative environmental impacts of wind farms. The only specific charge the article levels is cutting up birds which frankly, rings a little hollow with me.

[Don Corleone]

Siggied!

I'm not certain why that particular statement strikes you as signature-worthy, but okay...

[Tribesman]

I just hadn't heard anything about negative environmental impacts of wind farms.

Mainly the real ngatives concern the actual construction and the impact of that process and the maintainance of those structures on the surrounding areas , and of course the associated power lines be they at sea or on land . (though of course you get people compalining about the visual impact too of both the turbines and lines)

[Omanes Alexandrapolites]

From first hand experience, I know that noise pollution is another key issue. If certain as of yet unknown conditions are met, then the turbines produce large amounts of noise which can be problematic for self explanatory reasons. Even if these circumstances are not met, they do still emit a sound at an audible level - especially if the turbines are working at higher capacity.

Although I've heard very little about this, there have been events of collapsing wind turbines - this mainly occurs to the larger models due to more weight being placed upon their structure. An article related to this can be found here.

[HoreTore]

Stick the wind farms out in the north sea. Then everybody will be happy.

[Xiahou]

It saddens me that loonbat extremists give environmentalism a bad name. Opposing wind farms is just madness. And yeah, some of the more out-there greens seem to want to return to hunter/gatherer lifestyles, but without the hunting part. It's maddening.

I've come to the conclusion that a fair portion of the enviros are more about controlling what we do than finding actual, workable solutions for environmental problems.

[rvg]

Stick the wind farms out in the north sea. Then everybody will be happy.

That's what they did in Texas: put a bunch of turbines in the Gulf of Mexico for some cheap and reliable energy. Of course, the tree-huggers felt compelled to start their usual wailing and moaning on behalf of poor birdies.

[Blodrast]

I remember having read about some issues with lots of birds getting killed by turbines... but I don't remember the context, nor numbers, however the point remains that I'd heard about it being an issue. But drone may have a point, I'll need to look into that.

Tribesman, I wasn't aware of any other environmental impact of wind farms... leaving aside the aesthetic aspect (which isn't environmental impact), what other problems are there?
How/why is agriculture affected ?
As for power lines, well, don't we have that _anyway_, for transporting electricity ? Regardless of what method to generate it we'd be using, we'd still need the lines to transport it to the consumer, so I don't quite understand the argument...

I'm thinking right now of a trip to Cali, where I've seen a few hundred of wind turbines on hills, areas which could have definitely not been used for any agricultural or real estate development - it was just arid, stony, hills. I remember thinking that was a pretty damn good way to use that land, which would otherwise have gone unused, like I said.

[Don Corleone]

Mainly the real ngatives concern the actual construction and the impact of that process and the maintainance of those structures on the surrounding areas , and of course the associated power lines be they at sea or on land . (though of course you get people compalining about the visual impact too of both the turbines and lines)

Yeah, but human activity is always going to leave a mark. All bio-activity leaves a mark for that matter. Why is a beaver dam 'natural' and Hoover damn an abomination against nature?

I don't think we want guys throwing the scraps into the ocean while they're putting the things together, yeah, we should try to limit the impact, but honestly, there's very little we do that doesn't leave a footprint of one form or another.

One of my big 'sniff-detectors' in debates is the ability to see the gray. Thus far, the environmental crowd has failed this miserably. They seem to poo-poo any form of energy generation because it will leave some mark. But there's no discussion of which is better, which is tolerable, and where is the lesser evil. They just have a theocratic all or none approach. I usually interpret that as a sign of limited cognitive ability.

[Spino]

Think of the birds?!?

WTF, have the majority of our flighty feathered friends suddenly become blind to massive, white rotating thingies that generate much wind and noise?!? Geez, why don't we simply paint giant eyes on the generators like they do to commercial aircraft engine intakes. Zomg, giant one eyed whirling thingy, fly away my brethren, fly away!

Yes, I know birds get slammed by planes but that's usually a question of which way little birdy happens to be looking before the plane hits.

Any bird that chances flying near these things and gets whacked will perish thus removing their not-so-attentive genes from the gene pool. The smarter, more observant ones will take note, avoid and survive. The really swift of mind and wing might even find a way to safely nest around these things. Natural selection FTW!!!

Screw the birds, I'd sooner worry about some sub-100 IQ dipwad pulling a John F'ing Kennedy Jr. and smashing his single engine plane into one of these things in the middle of some foggy night.

I'm a big fan of wind power, moreso than traditional solar power. Less expensive with lower manufacturing costs and other headaches. And depending where you put the generators the payoff is usually greater. Although isn't there some really efficient form of solar power that doesn't involve panels but concerns the focusing of light on oil in a glass tube? For the life of me I cannot recall what this is called but I believe there is a plant in the US based on this technology.

[ICantSpellDawg]

What about putting solar panels on the turbine blades? dual power sources. Also more fragile to bird attack.

personally i like buoy wave power.

[Papewaio]

Best choice of energy generation should be chosen for the location and the needs of the community.

If someone is looking for absolute answers then they should be building a temple instead.

[Big_John]

CSP looks promising.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_Solar_Power
http://www.greengeek.ca/2006/07/25/m...at-to-do-with/

[ICantSpellDawg]

Best choice of energy generation should be chosen for the location and the needs of the community.

If someone is looking for absolute answers then they should be building a temple instead.

Who is looking for one way?

[Spino]

CSP looks promising.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_Solar_Power
http://www.greengeek.ca/2006/07/25/m...at-to-do-with/

Bingo, CSP is the one I was talking about!

[Tribesman]

Tribesman, I wasn't aware of any other environmental impact of wind farms... leaving aside the aesthetic aspect (which isn't environmental impact), what other problems are there?

One incredibly unbelivable one over here for a clean energy source involved polluting the watersource for many villages and killing all the fish in a lake and a river .

[Vladimir]

Plasma gasification.

http://www.tech-faq.com/plasma-gasification.shtml

Plus it's cool!

[Blodrast]

Tribesy, I didn't find that... it'd be nice if you had a link, but no big deal if you don't.
(I'm not saying I don't believe you, I just want to read about it).

However, I did find this.
http://www.aweo.org/ProblemWithWind.html
which may be relevant to the topic at hand, as it points out several issues, and we can make up our own minds.

Some relevant (maybe) things from the article/page, that were touched upon in the posts so far:

Some issues with them.

In high winds, ironically, the turbines must be stopped because they are easily damaged. Build-up of dead bugs has been shown to halve the maximum power generated by a wind turbine, reducing the average power generated by 25% and more. Build-up of salt on off-shore turbine blades similarly has been shown to reduce the power generated by 20%-30%.

Economic impact/cost

A German Energy Agency study released in February 2005 after some delay [click here] stated that increasing the amount of wind power would increase consumer costs 3.7 times and that the theoretical reduction of greenhouse gas emissions could be achieved much more cheaply by simply installing filters on existing fossil-fuel plants. A similar conclusion was made by the Irish grid manager in a study released in February 2004 [click here for 172-KB PDF]: "The cost of CO2 abatement arising from using large levels of wind energy penetration appears high relative to other alternatives."

In Germany, utilities are forced to buy renewable energy at sometimes more than 10 times the cost of conventional power, in France 3 times. In the U.K., the Telegraph has reported that rather than providing cheaper energy, wind power costs the electric companies £50 per megawatt-hour, compared to £15 for conventional power.

Environmental impact

Pictures from the energy companies show slim towers rising cleanly from the landscape or hovering faintly in the distant haze, their presence modulated by soft clouds behind them. But a 200- to 300-foot tower supporting a turbine housing the size of a bus and three 100- to 150-foot rotor blades sweeping over an acre of air at more than 100 mph requires, for a start, a large and solid foundation. On a GE 1.5-MW tower, the turbine housing, or nacelle, weighs over 56 tons, the blade assembly weighs over 36 tons, and the whole tower assembly totals over 163 tons. [Click here for a perspective on their size. Click here for the specs of popular models.]

As FPL (Florida Power & Light) Energy says, "a typical turbine site takes about a 42×42-foot-square graveled area." Each tower (and a site needs at least 15-20 towers to make investment worthwhile) requires a huge hole filled with steel rebar–reinforced concrete (e.g., 1,250 tons in each foundation at the facility in Lamar, Colo.). According to Country Guardian, the hole is large enough to fit three double-decker buses. At the 89-turbine Top of Iowa facility, the foundation of each 323-foot assembly is a 7-feet-deep 42-feet-diameter octagon filled with 25,713 pounds of reinforced steel and 181 cubic yards of concrete. The foundations at the Wild Horse project in Washington are 30 feet deep. At Buffalo Mountain in Tennessee, too, each foundation is at least 30 feet deep and may contain more than 3,500 cubic yards of concrete (production of which is a major source of CO2). On Cefn Croes in Wales the developer built a complete concrete factory on the site, which is not unusual, as well as opened quarries to provide rock for new roads -- neither of which activities were part of the original planning application [click here for photos of the abhorrent destruction on Cefn Croes].

...

Each tower should be at least 5-10 times the rotor diameter from neighboring towers and trees for optimal performance. For a tower with 35-meter rotors, that is 1,200-2,400 feet, a quarter to a half of a mile. A site on a forested ridge would require clearing 45-90 acres per tower to operate optimally (although only 4-6 acres of clearance per tower, the towers spaced every 500-1,000 feet, is typical, making them almost useless when the wind is not a perfect crosswind). The Danish grid operator Eltra has found that a turbine can decrease the production of another turbine 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) away. The proposed 45-square-mile facility on the Scottish island of Lewis represents 50 acres for each megawatt of rated capacity. FPL Energy says it requires 40 acres per installed megawatt, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says 60 acres is likely. Facilities worldwide generally use 30-70 acres per megawatt, i.e., about 120-280 acres for every megawatt of likely average output (25% capacity factor). [Click here for a list of the areas of some facilities.]


GE boasts that the span of their rotor blades is larger than the wingspan of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. The typical 1.5-MW assembly is two stories higher than the Statue of Liberty, including its base and pedestal.

The birds and stuff.

A 2002 study in Spain estimated that 11,200 birds of prey (many of them already endangered), 350,000 bats, and 3,000,000 small birds are killed each year by wind turbines and their power lines. Another analysis [click here -- the article is in Spanish] found that it is officially recognized (and obscured, generally by implying monthly figures as annual) that on average a single turbine tower kills 20-40 birds each year. The U.S. FWS noted that European wind power may kill up to 37 birds per turbine each year. The wind industry, in contrast, cites the absurdly low results of a single very spotty study at one site as gospel.

Windpower Monthly reported in October 2003 that the shocking number of bats being killed by wind towers in the U.K. is causing trouble for developers. The president of Bat Conservation International, Merlin Tuttle, has said, "We're finding kills even in the most remote turbines out in the middle of prairies, where bats don't feed." At least 2,000 bats were killed on Backbone Mountain in West Virginia in just 2 months during their 2003 fall migration. Continuing research has found that rate to be typical all year, or even low, for wind turbines on forested ridges [click here].

Noise

The European Union (E.U.) published the results of a 5-year investigation into wind power, finding noise complaints to be valid and that noise levels could not be predicted before developing a site. The AWEA acknowledges that a turbine is quite audible 800 feet away. The National (U.S.) Wind Coordinating Committee (NWCC) states, "wind turbines are highly visible structures that often are located in conspicuous settings ... they also generate noise that can be disturbing to nearby residents." The NWCC recommends that wind turbines be installed no closer than half a mile from any dwelling. German marketer Retexo-RISP specifies that turbines not be placed within 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) of any dwelling.

Communities in Germany, Wales, and Ireland claim that even 3,000 feet away the noise is significant. Individuals around the world say they have to close their windows and turn on the air conditioner when the wind turbines are active. The noise of a wind plant in Ireland was measured in 2002 at 60 dB 1 km (3,280 ft) upwind. The subaural low-frequency noise was above 70 dB (which is 10 times as loud on the logarithmic decibel scale). A German study in 2003 found significant noise levels 1 mile away from a 2-year-old wind farm of 17 1.8-MW turbines, especially at night. In mountainous areas the sound echos over larger distances. A neighbor of the 20-turbine Meyersdale facility in southwest Pennsylvania found the noise level at his house, about a half mile away, to average 75 dB(A) over a 48-hour period, well above the level that the EPA says prevents sleep. In Vermont, the director of Energy Efficiency for the Department of Public Service, Rob Ide, has said that the noise from the 11 550-KW Searsburg turbines is significant a mile away. Residents 1.5 and even 3 miles downwind in otherwise quiet rural areas suffer significant noise pollution.

Well, there's a lot more, but read for yourselves. I think it's interesting stuff, I wasn't aware of much of it.

(And I don't care if it's a "biased" site. I provided the link as a source of information, whoever doesn't like it is free to post information from sources of their preference. )

[Husar]

And yeah, some of the more out-there greens seem to want to return to hunter/gatherer lifestyles, but without the hunting part. It's maddening.

Reminds me of kindergarten where some girls used to say that plants live: "Do you really want to gather those berries and hurt the poor bush?"

Concerning windmills: Too bad we plastered half of Germany with them and have plans to build even more.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Reminds me of kindergarten where some girls used to say that plants live: "Do you really want to gather those berries and hurt the poor bush?"

Fruit WANTS to be eaten. That's why it tastes so good and has such vivid colours. When you eat fruit you are really having sex with a plant. It procreates through you.

Vegans drive plants to extinction.

Concerning windmills: Too bad we plastered half of Germany with them and have plans to build even more.

Build them at the border, silly. Like we do with nuclear power plants. That way you have all the benefits and all the drawbacks are shared.

Sheesh, the rest of the world are such girlie wimps.

[Don Corleone]

Actually, for all the talk about socialist, leftie-weenies... I envy France their ability tomaintain an intelligent energy policy that includes nuclear among other sources. Would that we weren't so driven by sound-bytes and buzzwords like "China Syndrome".

[Adrian II]

Birds are overrated.