Sorry, but this issue does keep coming up. The problems that accompany industrial wind farm installations won’t go away quietly, and more areas are regretting ever letting big wind into their midst. The problems aren’t trivial. They range from a completely changed landscape to noise that keeps people awake a mile away when the generating turbines are operating.
As always, the problems are not simple, and a great deal of them stem from very poor public relations, very sketchy and sometimes inaccurate noise and environmental impact studies, and a lingering sense on the part of the inhabitants nearby the installations that they have been steamrollered yet one more time by big money interests. The encroachment happens quickly before people can properly react, and then the residents feel stonewalled by the distant managers of the wind companies. (Sorry about all the cliches; they’re just so descriptive.)
The sense is that the rural areas of the country are being mined and forever altered, much like has happened in large portions of coal country in Kentucky and West Virginia. The means of production and the product are not taxed, no ‘severance payments’ are made for the power generated in the hills and used in the cities far away from the unsightly installations and their noise. The ‘rated’ noise output of some of these turbines exceeds 106 decibels (think one rock concert per turbine).
Here’s a video by a UK group, produced in Great Britain; but the pictures go a long way to showing some of the realities of industrial wind production in the countryside in the US as well.
Is there an answer to this fast-growing issue? Perhaps. More to follow.
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