First, my hat is off to the ‘Yale Student’ who objected to hearing original source material! What about Lux et Veritas?
Many at Yale may not know what is involved in this supposedly “green” industry. For instance, you might not realize that power companies are also construction companies. Therefore the more difficult or distant the project the better, really, because they get paid more to do it: the usual cost/benefit analysis stuff doesn’t apply. And these projects are HUGE, with mountaintop removal , roads and high tension powerlines into former wilderness, massive amounts of fossil fuel and cement (both big polluters) used in construction. None of this is even remotely “green”. Incidentally, how many of you realize the size of the wind towers? How many buildings are there around you that are as high: 400 feet?
After we pay the companies to build these things they get to take ownership and sell us the power, a very sweet deal indeed- and incidentally the power isn’t intended for us up here in Maine. They build them here because they figure they can get away with it: the power is intended to sell to you. Not that your power companies want to buy it, because it’s erratic and expensive. They buy it because laws were passed forcing them to. Environmentally it’s a nightmare.
Part of the environmental nightmare is the effect on wildlife. Some Yalies may have plug-in devices in their houses to repel mice using sound that the mice object to. Windmills do this too.
They also kill huge numbers of birds, and we can ill afford to lose any more given the severe pressure many populations are under from everything from domestic cats to climate change. Those Yalies who read the Journal of Wildlife Management will know that at least one study has shown bird strikes to be about sixty times higher than wind industry estimates (which were already unacceptable). Bats are also at risk, and many of our bat populations are already severely endangered. The Audubon Society asked for a three-year moratorium on industrial wind farms but this seems to have been ignored.
Green energy is one of the most critical issues of our time, and time is what we don’t have. We are in a crisis situation with our economy teetering on the oil-supply brink, and our climate in free-fall as well. We have no wiggle room for getting this wrong, and industrial wind power does not compute. Green energy is Small and Local. Those people who suggested solar panels on the roofs of Boston are dead right- and the panels would produce more energy. What they won’t produce is the hogs-at-the-public-slop-bucket profits to the big corporations, in which I fear I must include Yale. Sally McGuire

I am well aware that there are good people at Yale; I’m married to one and know a lot of others. — “Davmill’ is right: if the wind farms made economic sense, we would not be funding them with tax dollars. And we wouldn’t be passing laws trying to force power companies to buy the power, either! — But if you do think that they are a fine idea, by all means build them in your own backyard. That would save some enormous costs: actual costs to taxpayers to build them, pollution costs of mountaintop removal etc, and all the high-voltage transmission lines that will have to be built: that’s a big cost right there, in money and to the environment. — As for NIMBYism, I used to worry about that too. Then I realized that if I didn’t worry about my own backyard, how can I ask anyone else to? These are all very big, very important issues, and we all need to worry about all of them, and expecially we need to dump the ones that MOST make no sense at all, and that definitely includes making Maine’s woods into an industrial wasteland.

“Ecologist” is quite right, a lack of civility does not help– except that as one reads the earlier posts one can’t avoid realizing the passion of the people who are impacted by this insult to the places we love. But unfortunately he is quite wrong to be contrasting windpower to no power, and concluding that industrial wind “farms” in the Maine woods are better than nothing. Or that it could be worse, we could live in Tennesee! In fact there are quite a few sources of energy these days that are worse than nothing, or as near as makes no difference: the Alberta tar sands are a shining example of this sort of thing, and biofuels are a huge disaster (especially with the world food supply in various crises)- these, with building wind farms far off in the mountains of Maine, are all things that don’t produce enough energy to offset the energy cost of production, let alone the environmental costs. But there ARE sources of renewable energy that do compute: tidal energy for instance, and solar. And as I said in an earlier post, we don’t have time and certainly don’t have the money to get this wrong. And I am sure that there are plenty of good minds at Yale who could be pushing this.