Morning Read: Are wind farms too noisy?
The New York Times profiles a community on an island in Maine’s Penobscott Bay where some locals say “the whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable.”
They are among a small but growing number of families and homeowners across the country who say they have learned the hard way that wind power — a clean alternative to electricity from fossil fuels — is not without emissions of its own.
Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states.
In one case in DeKalb County, Ill., at least 38 families have sued to have 100 turbines removed from a wind farm there. A judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case in June.
Obviously this is a debate that’s very much alive here in the North Country.
Read the full article here. And then let us know what you think. Especially those of you who live near turbines — are they a nuisance? Or a symbol of progress on the horizon?
Tags: energy, environment
Noise is only one of the many problems with wind turbines.
Once again, NIMBY crops up. Not In My Back Yard. Not wind, not hydro, not coal, not solar, not tidal, not geo thermal, not nuclear, not gas, not oil, not biomass. So just what are we left with?
I think they’re a little of both. Progress in the sense that they’re a step in the right direction as far as utilizing renewable resources to generate our ever growing appetite for energy. But the way in which some of these wind farms were financed, sold to the public, and to the individual land owners leaves a great deal of room for improvement in my opinion.
Take for example the Maple Ridge Wind farm here in Lewis County. The developers and owners enjoy huge tax breaks, not only during the build process but also via the PILOT arrangement (which last year the local taxing entities had to sue for payment of) and Empire Zone benefits they still receive. Meanwhile some of the landowners who signed leases pay rather large tax rates on their lease payments. And now the majority of the farm is owned by a Spanish conglomerate.
I think there’s room for large wind farms but they have to be developed in ways that benefit more people and built in areas where their negative effects make the least amount of impact as possible. And perhaps the time has come to utilize more micro-wind turbines that generate money for residential and small commercial users via the feed in tariff process. In other words, provide greater incentives for smaller, less intrusive methods of capturing wind resources. Other parts of the world, and in fact our country, our already moving in that direction.
I still vote for Nuclear over wind. But whatever we do or don’t do, we really need to gain some control over world wide population growth. If not, nothing will succeed.
Yes to nuclear.
However, I believe that you would have the same elitist groups complaining about the nuke noise, the sight of the cooling tower and the bird kill.
Yup, and of course there are the “meltdown” fanatics. At this rate I don’t see much of anything actually changing.