For all the wishful thinkers out there who’re tempted to think that wind power is the new savior and the Next Big Thing, well, think again. As Andrew Walden points out in the American Thinker, we’ve been down this road before right in the good old USA.
Bankrupt Europe has a lesson for Congress about wind power.
Wiwo…wiwo…wiwo.
The sound floats on the winds of Ka Le, this southernmost tip of Hawaii’s Big Island, where Polynesian colonists first landed some 1,500 years ago.
Some say that Ka Le is haunted — and it is. But it’s haunted not by Hawaii’s legendary night marchers. The mysterious sounds are “Na leo o Kamaoa”– the disembodied voices of 37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm.
The voices of Kamaoa cry out their warning as a new batch of colonists, having looted the taxpayers of Spain, Portugal, and Greece, seeks to expand upon their multi-billion-dollar foothold half a world away on the shores of the distant Potomac River. European wind developers are fleeing the EU’s expiring wind subsidies, shuttering factories, laying off workers, and leaving billions of Euros of sovereign debt and a continent-wide financial crisis in their wake. But their game is not over. Already they are tapping a new vein of lucre from the taxpayers and ratepayers of the United States.
Read it all.
And that’s just Hawaii. Those of us who’ve traveled around California over the years have seen the giant wind farms in places like Tehachapi Pass. All those spinning turbines producing – nothing.
The reality is that there’s no wind project on earth that’s ever existed without a government subsidy, which is why people like former Maine governor Angus King are lining up to collect those subsidies through their involvement with wind projects like Independence Wind.
Funny, though, that dutifully progressive people who’ve given themselves body and soul to the god of “renewable energy” find that it’s a rather noisy, fickle god. Consider the nice progressive types on Vinalhaven, a rather large island on the Maine coast that used to be home to fishermen until the Beautiful People moved in. They went for wind power full-bore, voting with near unanimity to erect a three-turbine wind farm on the island. Now they’re all complaining about the turbine noise.
To alleviate the turbine noise, the wind farmers have proposed slowing the turbine speed, which has the unfortunate effect of making an already inefficient means of power generation even more inefficient.
The point being, we’re all being sold a bill of goods yet again while the well-connected – like Angus King – line their own pockets.
I can hardly wait to see what the Vinalhaven wind farm looks like in 20 years. Any wagers out there?
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I am a resident of Lexington Township, and neighboring Highland Plantation is the site of the next industrial wind turbine development if the commissioners at LURC approve Highland Wind LLC’s (Independence Wind’s) permit application.
I am also a founding member of the Friends of the Highland Mountains, as well as a member of its Board of Directors. The FotHM is a grassroots organization created to oppose–and STOP– this wanton and destructive development of Maine’s mountains. There are so, so many reasons why this plan is a poorly crafted one, and so few good reasons why it should be allowed to proceed.
It is not economically feasible. Without those government subsidies–your tax dollars and mine– the developers freely admit they would not go forward with their plans.
It is not environmentally sound. The developers’ own permit application states that 1.6 MILLION cubic yards of ledge and earth will have to be dynamited and excavated to build the infrastructure and level the ridgelines for the foundations for these turbines– forty-eight in number, stretched across eight miles of mountain summits, and each standing over 400 feet tall. That’s twice as tall as the tallest building in the state of Maine.
Our own US Wildlife Service and ME Dept. of IF&W concur: Our wildlife may be put in jeopardy.
Sound engineers have told us that the high and low frequency noise from these massive blades–each which sweep an area an acre in size–travels farther in our mountainous terrain than on a gentle slope or flat topography.
Environmental engineers speak of the danger to our fragile high mountain soils once the hundreds of acres of carbon-neutralizing trees and plants are removed. They’ve show us photos of the erosion that’s taken place on Kibby Mountain, and they warn of the dangers that face our vital water supplies from run-off.
Important wetlands, the permit application states, will be filled in. Filled in? I could not put a door out the back wall of my livingroom because I have a seasonal run-off behind my house, and yet a wind industry giant expects to be able to fill in and destroy a fragile ecosystem! This must not be allowed.
Wind Turbine Syndrome. The Big Wind folks certainly don’t want to talk about that, and, in fact, have scoffed at the research and findings of respected doctors. But just ask those good folks at Vinalhaven, Freedom and Mars Hill, and you will hear the truth, and not just a standard, pat answer. Those friends are suffering and their quality of life is destroyed. That is unacceptable, in my book.
With the passage of LD2283, we humble citizens of Maine cannot complain about the visual impacts of this industrial complex. But as Highland Plantation stands at the gateway to the Bigelow Preserve and the Appalachian Trail, there are bound to be many other folks who make their opinions known. That’s right before they take their tourist dollars to the mountains of North Carolina, where their Legislature voted to ban mountaintop industrial wind. They saw their section of the Appalachians for what they were: majestic ancient hills with a value beyond what Wind Industry money could buy.
We must stop this project. It is a poor vision for this state that has been tagged: ‘Maine– the way life SHOULD be’. I believe the Highland project will set a precedent for the rest of the state… for it will take over 300 miles of Maine’s peaks to supply enough wind to meet the Governor’s goals for land-based wind power. None of Maine is safe, and our citizens need to stand up and make our voices heard.
Please help stop the industrializations of Maine’s best, most beautiful and iconic natural resources… our majestic mountains.
Respectfully,
Karen Bessey Pease
http://www.highlandmts.org