"Clouds gathering over wind farm plan"

From today's The Australian:

In Frank and Theresa Cicero's quiet, winding street in Foster North [in South Gippsland, Victoria], local opposition to the [Dollar] wind farm -- which will see a turbine built 800m from their bush retreat -- is easy to find.

Almost every property in their street, apart from those of the farmers on whose land the turbines are being built, is for sale.

"I've watched my husband work all his life to build this home," Mrs Cicero said. "We've never had loans, we've always worked and saved. And now we find everything that we've put in here, it's all worth nothing."

The Ciceros had their home valued at $410,000 before the wind farm was taken into account. Afterwards, the estimated value dropped to $270,000. They have not received one offer for their property in two years.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines

"The Sham of Homeland Security"

"To a lucky few, the Bush administration and its corporate oligarchy among them, terror-war America has been the best of all possible worlds: Perpetual war for perpetual profits, with a war on regulation and oversight thrown in as a bonus. Today, West Virginia is ground zero in that war. Al-Qaeda is nowhere in sight. The victims are American. The perpetrators are American. The dots are all-American, and yet unconnected."

-- Pierre Tristam

Tea time

"Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics. It is an enervating force. We should resist it and embrace tea, the ancient drink of poets, philosophers and meditators."

-- Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle

Correction

from Ironic Times:

A recent article on hunger issues noted that on the same day the Department of Agriculture reported that 500,000 more Americans went hungry last year, the House Agriculture Committee addressed the crisis by passing a bill adding 300,000 Americans to the Food Stamp Program and $850,000 to the program's budget. In fact the Agriculture Committee passed a bill removing 300,000 from Food Stamp eligibility and cutting the program's budget by $850,000. We regret any confusion caused by our mistake.

Onshore wind in New York a bust

"Capacity factors of inland wind sites in New York are on the order of 30% of their rated capacity. Their effective capacities, however, are about 10%, due to both the seasonal and [the] daily patterns of the wind generation being largely 'out of phase' with the NYISO load patterns."

-- from: "The effects of integrating wind power on transmission system planning, reliability, and operations," New York State Energy Research & Development Authority, March 4, 2005, p. 7.16 (2-MB PDF)

categories:  wind power, wind energy

Vermonters of the Year

To the Editor, Vermont Guardian:

All of the currently proposed wind power projects in Vermont (up to 312 MW) would provide only 10% of our current needs. They are practically irrelevant to the unlikely loss, desired or otherwise, of Hydro Quebec and/or Vermont Yankee.

Wind power does not respond to demand. It may or may not be there when needed. The Searsburg facility, for example, generates no power at all almost 40% of the time. With widely distributed installations on a system, as in Germany, their average infeed is reached only a third of the time. Even when the wind is blowing well, the system must be ready (i.e., burning fuel in "spinning reserve") to provide power when the wind drops again at any time.

We will therefore need as much other electricity sources with wind as we would without. If we come to depend on the small amount of power the wind turbines will provide, we will, like the Danes, be using the expensive spot market even more.

It is not just unnecessary but offensive to entertain industrial-scale development of the ridgelines, with strobe lights and noise and ecological degradation that far surpasses anything now on the mountains, for such obvious nonsense.

While annual honors are being given out, Vermont Guardian, in unquestioningly presenting the sales pitch of Dave Rapaport and other developers as news, has clearly earned "dupe of the year."

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, Vermont

Whichever way the wind blows

A team from the School of Geography and Geosciences at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) surveyed residents around two sites each in Ireland and Scotland and found higher approval of existing than of proposed wind facilities. They also found that many people approving of the existing facilities had indeed changed their minds from opposing them when proposed.

Have they also changed their whole worldview? According to the BBC ("Residents air views on wind farms," Dec. 12),

The survey also found that opponents and advocates of wind farms saw the world through "different lenses".

Dr [Charles] Warren said: "We focused on people's general environmental attitudes before homing in on the wind farm issue.

"We found that people in favour of wind farms generally viewed environmental issues as global and justified their support on that basis.

"Opponents tended to view the environment as locally conceived and about protecting their local surroundings."

What this illustrates is the amazing coping ability of humans, who are able to rationalize and disregard personal misfortune or local injustice by referring it to a "greater good," however delusional. It is no wonder that people thus resign themselves to what they must now live with.

[A letter in the Dec. 28 Scotsman points out that the study was done in collaboration with the Macaulay Institute of Aberdeen, which runs a consultancy business, Macaulay Enterprises, for the renewables industry. The links on its web site are all pro-industry.]

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, anarchism, ecoanarchism