wind turbines - graceful or grating?

Question

I find a hillside of wind turbines one of the most graceful, inspiring things I've ever seen. I think they're overwhelmingly beautiful not just because of their size and grace but because along with those qualities, they may help us save our world (not to be trite, but every little bit helps!)

My parents, on the other hand, who I always thought were environmentally concious and not hypocrites, have a "not in our area" view about them. They've just retired to a nearly-100 acre farm nestled in a valley surrounded by wooded mountains. Yes, it is idyllic, but it would also be a perfect place for wind harvesting. It's so windy there that they have to tie their porch furniture down! BUT they're ready to fight tooth and nail if someone tries to put a turbine anywhere NEAR their property. Even if it's not in their view! They claim it makes a lot of noise, kills birds, and will lower their property value.

I'm upset they feel this way. How much of this is true? What are your thoughts?

Answer 1

I think they are very beautiful, and functional. Plus it says something about one's personal commitments. I'm even thinking of placing a personal wind turbine on my own home (no zoning restrictions where I live).
Your parents are examples of the majority (or the very very vocal minority though). A lot of people think that way. The truth is that:
1) they could make quite a bit of money selling that energy back to the grid - producing income never devalues a property - trust me, I live in Texas, and ugly gas wells do not devalue a property when they bring in $10,000 per month
2) the units aren't that noisy
3) they have a questionable impact on wildlife (definatly a better impact than roads and houses and subdivisions)
4) The eye-sore piece is all in the eye of the beholder. Not everyone likes a Picasso. I think they are elegant. You seem to like them. My brother inlaw thinks they are ugly. A bunch of people in Martha's vinyard hate em.
5) Eventually there will be a lot more wind turbines around, so early adoption is a way of expressing your right to choose.

I don't envy your situation, but I like your thinking. I'd suggest you research how much power a single wind turbine would generate in your area, and how much your grid pays to buy back power, and go that route.
Good luck.

Answer 2

I agree with you and I think it is just NIMBY. Would they prefer a wind farm or a coal fired station?

That said, nothing is perfect and wind turbines could be considered unsightly on a pristine landscape but I think most people would agree they are better than smokestacks.

Some of the larger ones do apparently make a low frequency whup sound if you live quite close. I don't know but it seems that most of the wind farms use medium sized ones with more blades. I don't know what the sound on these would be like.

They have been known to kill birds but so do radio and tv towers and large buildings. I don't think this is anything new and certainly windmills are not giant poultry grinders massacreing thousands of birds. Again if you put it in context of existing structures and compare it against the environmental damage of other generating plants windmills still come out ahead.

Answer 3

Probably in the years to come we'll view them with the same fond affection we reserve for windmills, lighthouses and castles. No doubt people were hottified at the prospect of having a windmill built within sight of their property.

They do make noise but very little, the faster they're turning the more noise they make. In order for them to turn the wind has to be blowing and the noise of the wind is likely to drown out the noise of the turbines.

I read a reply on here not so long back from someone who clearly knew what they were talking about and they answered the question about the killing of birds and provided references to back up their response. I beleive the figure was 0.03 or 0.003% of bird fatalities are caused by turbines. Hunting, motor vehicles, discarded plastic, fencing, fishing lines etc were all a much bigger problem.

As for the aesthetics, that's very much down to the individual. Some people like them and some don't. From where I live I can see two wind farms and both attract many visitors.

The alternative to having wind farms is to have a nuclear power station or conventional power station complete with cooling towers etc nearby - I know which one I'd choose to have.

Answer 4

I can see one right now about a mile away at the nuke plant I used to work at. It really doesn't make a lot of noise at all, and I think it has about a 120' diameter blades ... so it is quite big. It also doesn't take away from the view and does give me a good feeling to know it is generating clean power.

As for killing birds ... I do not know, it went up after I left, but I doubt flocks are being destroyed, it doesn't spin that fast.

I think your parents may differ with you regarding the appearance of a wind farm near their recreation area. I get the feeling of desolation when I see those huge wind farms in the California desert. But one or two ... heck ... I think your parents would agree with the statement: "Put em up like TV antennae on every house ... just leave nature alone!"

Answer 5

Their arguments do not hold.

Noise - go listen.
There is an infamous video interview of an opponent being interviewed in front of running windmills. Every time a car passes by he has to pause. There is no noise from the windmills.

Birds - this is taken out of context. Some twenty years ago a wind farm was placed at a particularily bad spot, and the windmills had just the right height to kill the birds that live there.
Nowadays birds are taken into account big time.
As for hard statistics. In my country, powerlines kill 3.000.000 birds a year (because they fly in to them).
Domestic cats also kill 3 million birds a year.
Windmills don't kill 30.000 a year - not half a percent of cats & powerlines together.

Property value... how often do you want to sell it?

These initiatives are always NIMBY. I'm very sad to hear it. I think your parents want electricity and prefer a large smoking coal powered plant, as long as it is built in somebody else's backyard.

Answer 6

I am of two minds on this topic. Yes, they are graceful. But they are still a manmade installation, like a powerline pylon. When I was a kid, I looked at the wide swath of trees that had long ago been cleared from a rolling forest hill to install a line of stories-high steel power pylons that stretched for miles. I actually found it awe-inspiring. It set my imagination to buzzing. They were marching robots. They were aliens. I am sure some people thought that was nuts, and that it represented a violation of nature by Man, and nothing more. I am sort of the same way with these turbines. As abstract installation art, they are cool. I can imagine them pumping air into an underground city. Neat stuff. But, as an adult, looking at these things, I realize they really kind of don't belong there, in the harshest analysis.

Answer 7

I work in the wind industry. I'm sorry your parents feel that way, but you don't really know that their area is good for wind turbines. Developers usually need to measure the wind for at least a year in order to get financing. NIMBYism is rampant, so much so that a new category has been defined: BANANA, or Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. The landowners who oppose wind turbines are usually those who have retired to a piece of land and don't want anything interfering with their views (or their property values). Talk to a landowner who makes his living off the land, such as a rancher, and they love having wind turbines because they get paid for them.

It's actually kind of ironic: with nuclear or coal plants, facilities can be located anywhere, so they usually get placed in the backyards of the poorest neighborhoods, leaving them to deal with the very real negative effects of mercury, radiation and carcinogens in their air and water. Wind turbines, however, have to be located in areas of strong wind, which often means the countryside. Now, rich landowners, who don't make a living off of their land, fight against the negligible effects of noise and dead birds, both of which are vastly overstated in the context of modern wind turbines. What they are REALLY worried about is their property values.

A lawsuit in Texas over turbine noise was just recently decided in favor of the wind industry. Landowners claimed that wind turbines as close as a third of a mile from their property lines made so much noise that it was impossible to sleep at night. An independent company was brought in and did 700 hours worth of sound recording. They found that even under the strongest wind conditions, the wind itself made more noise then the turbines.

Early turbines were noisy, unreliable and unsightly. Newer turbines are much, much better. The reason for this is that California, where most of the older turbines are located, instituted something called a construction tax credit in the early days of the wind industry. This was meant to give investors an incentive to build wind turbines, but like many economic incentives it had a perverse outcome. Developers got their tax credits just for BUILDING the turbines, they didn't actually have to work. So California got a bunch of rusting, noisy, non-producing hulks littering the landscape and wind got a bad rep.

Now there is a federal Production Tax Credit, which means the tax benefit comes over the life of the project as it produces electricity.

Answer 8

A criticism of people, like me, who believe in the environment and want to work to stop the destruction of it is that we are really just people who oppose everything for the sake of being an anti type person. I confess that I have seen that in many of the projects that I have volunteered in. Wind power is not a fossil fuel. It is a viable alternative to smoke stack electricity production. It is sucessful, it is economical and it is a proven alternative energy. Why then do environmentalists oppose it? I know that argument that it is not beautiful but no human construction is beautiful. I know the argument that birds will fly into them but I don't think it means the extinction of birds. I think opposition to wind driven energy is a pro global warming position no matter if you are wearing tie died T shirts or not. I have come to learn that many people in the eco movement are really just as self serving and self interested as some cigar smoking factory owner. How about that?

Answer 9

I don't know about the birds and the noise, but I do know that a coal-fired power station is much, much worse.

I too believe that wind turbines are graceful.

Answer 10

I don't think it makes a lot of noise, but yes, it does kill birds. Why would it lower their property value anyways? Maybe it can make electricity for their farm. Personally, I like anything that's a renewable resource.