The answer my friend is not blowing in the wind
Windmills are ridiculous as a primary source of power for this nation. The article I quote will give you some reason why.
I will give you some others. I live near windmills and it almost caused a revolution where they are being built. They have ruined a once beautiful area and nobody want to live around them. Even in this excellent article many important points were not addressed. The killing of the birds was not addressed. Where will all the steel and copper come from to build the hundreds of thousands of windmills that would be need?
Do these people think windmills do not have environmental impact? They need to think again. They have to mine huge amount of Iron to make the steel. Where do they think the copper comes from for the generators and power lines? It has to be mined. You think copper prices are high now let them build hundreds of thousands of wind generators and see what happens. Also, does anyone think it does not take huge amounts of power to build the factories and to produce the steel to make all these windmills? Then they have to be shipped to a site by many vehicles that use energy and tare up the roads. The windmills have to be erected and anchored on a solid foundation. The trees have to be cut down meaning that these areas will no long produce lumber or be carbon negative. The windmills will have to be maintained by maintenance crews who ride major sized off road vehicles. The windmills only have a limited life span and they will have to be replaced when they fail. There will have to be major back up power for when the wind is not blowing etc etc.
So lets cut through the bull about windmills being the answer for America’s energy needs. They are not. The fat cat billionaires that proposes this stuff do not live in the real world they have no common or scientific sense. All they see is opportunities to make more billions at your expense.
At www.scitizen.com, Kurt Cobb worked the numbers. Generously, he presumed the windmills would use 5-megawatt turbines – generating three times the output of a typical 1.5-megawatt turbine. He compared that with a 500-megawatt fossil-fuel (coal) power plant needed to power a city of 300,000 people. A typical power plant, he noted, would cover 300 acres, but use only 30 of those for the actual facility.
Cobb calculated it would take 233 5-megawatt wind turbines to equal the coal plant’s output, since the wind doesn’t blow constantly. Each would need to be spaced 2,065 feet away from the others (five times the diameter of their 413-foot rotors). Adding the rotor diameters to the spacing requirement equates to a 110-mile long line of windmills, half a mile in width.
It comes to 55 square miles. That’s to provide electricity for a town of 300,000 people.
Going back to Kurt Cobb’s calculations, if we wanted to meet the electric needs of 300 million Americans rather than only 300,000, we’d need a half-mile swath of windmills, each of them hundreds of feet high, 110,000 miles long, crisscrossing the continent 40 times between New York City and Los Angeles.
That’s a lot of land to condemn. The cost would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, since each large windmill costs millions.
New York State’s largest windmill farm to date, the $400 million Maple Ridge project, features 195 medium-size (400-foot high) windmills, part of a windmill surge in upstate New York sparked by state and federal incentives. That project has generated great controversy even in its rural setting. According to area researcher Dr. Nina Pierpont, it has also created “wind turbine syndrome,” a variety of ills such as inner ear problems, headaches, difficulty sleeping, ringing in the ears, mood disorders, irritability, panic attacks and child misbehavior, all attributed to the low-frequency rumblings of the windmills.
There are practical problems, too. If the structures are put totally in the boondocks, massive new transmission lines must be built to carry the power to where the people are.
All this to generate power that is more expensive than our current power plants, even after major taxpayer subsidies are factored in.
Whether onshore or offshore, the gigantic areas involved to harness wind power will bring their own unintended consequences. The director of the Center for Global Change Science at M.I.T, Ron Prinn, warns that erecting enough windmills to replace fossil fuel power has adverse environmental impact. Prinn says those would “take significant momentum out of the atmosphere, so there’d be less penetration of wind to the ground surface.” Translation: You change the wind, and you change the weather.
Al Gore, why aren’t you speaking up about this?