Posted on 07/07/2010 4:19:22 AM PDT by Daffynition
STRATTON, Maine (AP) — A national environmental group says eight of its members who blocked the entrance to a western Maine wind power construction site have been escorted offsite and issued warnings.
Maine Earth First! spokeswoman Emily Posner says about 50 people blocked the road to TransCanada's Kibby Mountain construction site Tuesday morning. TransCanada spokeswoman LeAnne LeBlanc says the protest was peaceful and work continues.
TransCanada is building 22 wind turbines on mountains near where it's already built 22 turbines that are producing power. Maine Earth First! says projects like TransCanada's destroy mountaintops and don't offset fossil fuel use.
Tuesday's protest was held a day after the end of Earth First's annual weeklong international summer gathering in Coplin Plantation.
As much as I hate to be on the side of Earth first, I’m going to agree with them for other reasons.
bump
OOOOO
Pretty.
Not.
IMHO, nuke power plants are MUCH quieter and do less environmental harm in the long run. The power generated per land area ratio for nukes is probably much higher, ergo much more efficient.
So, if they get enough of them up there, what is it going to do to the prevailing wind patterns on that mountain?
"The federal government has to subsidize windmill production through production tax credits of about 1.8¢ per kilowatt. Wind Farms also receive an accelerated depreciation. Wind farms are also land intensive. They produce a fraction of the energy of a traditional power plant but they require 100 times the acreage.
From the National Center for Policy Analysis: to produce a 1000 megawatt power plant a wind farm would require 192,000 acres or 300 square miles. A nuclear plant would need about 1700 acres (or 2.65 mi2), and about 3 mi2 for a coal fired power plant. The transmission lines for the wind turbines would be massive, 12,000 miles just for the array."
In some places the windmills are paid to NOT produce electricity during times of low demand.
New from Peenmen Enterprises, the bird salad shooter! Folks, have you ever had a beautiful bald eagle and said “Boy, I really need a fast way to turn this thing into julienne fries” ? Well now you can, with the new bird salad shooter, also known as a wind farm. It also has something to do with green power or something, I don’t know.
I hear ya. Kinda like the morning you wake up and find your are on the side of the ACLU on an issue.
To play devil’s advo, it has provided a few jobs to a depressed Maine economy and the towns of Eustis and Stratton have been promised a community benefits package by TransCanada totaling $1,000 per megawatt produced each year by the turbines, which could mean up to $132,000 annually.
The same people who try to claim a wind farm is beautiful think an oil field and offshore rigs are ugly. It must really suck to be a hypocritical lib.
What the wind farms in Michigan want is an exemption from the penalities imposed for down time. Not only that, but they want increased penalties imposed of coal and gas fired plants to make up for the lack of penalties imposed on wind.
Wind is completely inefficient, but GE makes a fortune off of them: http://www.brayincandy.com/id208.html
Pray for America
Agreed. But when you have a governor who is hell-bent to leaving these wind projects as a legacy ... that’s what you get.
A new wind turbine technology called the Windtamer turbine as shown here by this picture:
...When scaled up could generate just as much power as a conventional wind turbine, but it has the advantages of 1) no needing towers hundreds of feet high, 2) automatically follows wind direction and can operate in high and low wind speeds, eliminating the need for mechanically-expensive gearbox systems to control turbine speed and to turn the wind turbine to face the wind, and 3) because birds see it as a solid object it will mostly eliminate the problem of bird kills.
I want one of those in my back yard! I want to see it run my meter backwards and reduce my power bill.
That’s an awesome photo.
Consider the recent review by Trevor Butterworth of the book Power Hungry by author Robert Bryce :
“Once you’ve carpeted your tract of wilderness with turbines and gotten over any guilt you might feel about the thousands of birds you’re about to kill, prepare to be underwhelmed and underpowered. Look at Texas, Mr. Bryce says: It ranks sixth in the world in total wind-power production capacity, and it has been hailed as a model for renewable energy and green jobs by Republicans and Democrats alike. And yet, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs the state’s electricity grid, just “8.7 percent of the installed wind capability can be counted on as dependable capacity during the peak demand period.” The wind may blow in Texas, but, sadly, it doesn’t blow much when it is most needed—in summer. The net result is that just 1% of the state’s reliable energy needs comes from wind.
If using a huge amount of real estate to generate a tiny amount of energy from an intermittent energy source sounds deranged, consider, too, that we haven’t yet found the Holy Grail for storing wind-generated energy. Wind is either an instant energy snack or a famine. It must be used when it’s there or immediately replaced when it isn’t.”
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