Controversy blowin’ in the wind

Wind farms whip up a backlash of complaints

By FRITZ MAYER

UNITED STATES — Beauty is in the eye of beholder, and to some eyes, soaring windmills are magnificent things of grace and beauty, quietly whooshing away the hours atop remote hills, gently spinning wind into electricity and selflessly helping to solve the problems of pollution and global warming. To others, the machines are an invading army of metal marauders, growling menacingly when the wind picks up, killing birds with impunity and fouling the views of mountains and plains.

Landowners who sell or lease their property to wind farm operators often realize windfall profits. But their neighbors are the ones who must live with the machines.

The windmill farm in Waymart, PA, powered up in October of 2003. According to the Scranton Times Tribune, landowners Gregory and Donna Salko entered into an agreement with the company that originally installed the wind farm and got a payment of $225,000. Landowners with smaller stakes received $3,000 per year for individual windmills installed on their properties.

But critics still complain that marring the area’s beauty is too high a price to pay for citizens who aren’t getting direct payments for the windmills.

Anti-windmill sentiments have spread to other locals in the region.

When Citizens Energy Corporation (CEC) hosted a public meeting in October 2005 to discuss the proposed Liberty wind farm project, in Liberty, NY, the reaction by some residents was surprisingly negative. The familiar not-in-my-back-yard concerns were those of noise, altered views, bird deaths and decreased property values near the proposed site on Ravonah Hill Road.

Since then, however, the company has made progress in persuading some residents of the value of the project. Brian O’Connor of CEC said the company has provided landowners with a more detailed map, showing the wind farm would not be as close to homes as some residents had feared. He said the company has been able to sign land agreements with more landowners, but the battle is by no means won.

In Delaware County, NY, towns are moving to adopt wind-farm moratoriums.

The Andes Planning Board is considering the adoption of a renewable six-month moratorium. The Masonville Town Board is considering a 12-month moratorium, as is the Hancock Town Board.

According to the Daily Star newspaper, moratoriums are also being considered in the towns of Tompkins, Deposit, Dehli and Bovina.

A Delaware County activist group opposes corporate wind farms with mill blades that might soar up to 350 feet in the air only to produce profits that would be blown out of the community. The group’s alternative plan would be to keep control of the land and the profits and “do this ourselves with a community wind project using much smaller windmills.” Visit www.delcowind.org for more information.

Bats in the blades

Wind energy was the darling of just about everyone in the environmental movement just a few years ago. But there was an incident documented by scientists in May 2002, in which hundreds of bats were killed at a West Virginia wind farm. It soon became apparent that many thousands of bats were being killed annually at various wind facilities around the country.

It had long been known that modern windmills kill tens of thousands of birds every year. But according to the American Wind Energy Association, that’s a mere pittance compared to the nearly one billion birds that are killed each year by flying into cars, buildings or power lines. The clean energy created by windmills seemed worth the bird-fatality trade-off.

But bats are a different matter entirely. Some experts are concerned that the bat population may suffer a serious decline because of the windmills, because bats are mammals that are slow to reproduce, producing only one pup per year. Bats are important to the environment, both in terms of spreading seeds and keeping down the insect population.

Bats normally use their radar ability to maneuver around both stationary and moving obstacles. So it’s not clear why the bats are crashing into the windmill blades, though scientists speculate that they may be investigating the blades as possible nesting sites.

Concern about bats is so great that the Government Accountability Office in Washington, D.C. is conducting a bat-and-windmill study to figure out why bats fly into windmills.

In the meantime, many mainstream environmental organizations are still generally in favor of wind projects. The Sierra Club, for example, supports projects where developers have considered three-year avian migrations studies of proposed wind-project sites.

The incredible shrinking windmill

NORTHERN HEMISPHERE — Rural dwellers are putting up roadblocks to the installation of wind farms across the country. They argue that huge rotating blades are noisy, unsightly and bring down the values of property in the neighborhood.

But all those complaints get blown away when the windmill under discussion is a high-performance, non-polluting rooftop micro-turbine.

These little spinners are catching on in Europe and, according to an article in Newsweek, one of the leading manufacturers of the mini-mills, Renewable Devices, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, is growing by 300 percent per year, and is having trouble keeping up with demand.

The windmills are typically priced between $1,000 and $8,000, and the manufacturers claimed they could pay for themselves in about five years in areas where wind conditions are favorable. Favorable areas include many parts of the United States, Europe and Japan.

The producers of a product called the Swift Rooftop Energy Wind System said it can be easily connected to the electrical grid, enabling homeowners to sell electricity back to their power company during times of excess production.

Promoters also point to the product’s environmental benefits. Each unit of electricity produced by the rooftop system replaces one that would have been produced from the burning of fossil fuels, which is creating a myriad of environmental concerns around the world.

Another benefit, according to the manufacturers, is that the energy is primarily consumed on-site. This is a more efficient way to use electricity because it eliminates the “line loss” that occurs when electricity is transmitted long distances over power lines.