well, I am a naysayer - not to windpower in general but to the ranting belief that it is all good and green and to the extent of it in lost opportunity cost ---------
it is not green and it is far from it.
As to the noise - I have always thought it was crap - I have spent enough time very close to them to have personal experience.
As to big birdies running into them - I have always been bemused - I cannot understand how eagles are supposedly so stupid - the mills are huge and the blades slow moving --
I have always reckoned that if an eagle prangs into a wind mill it would probably prang into a coal fired smoke stack or a cooling tower - ditto for a neuc. plant.
My argument has never been these issues - it is the incredible cost of these things - both running cost and environmental cost ------------ ditto for hydro.
I live in Tassie and hunt around hydro areas all the time - I have also watched hydro for over 40 years ------- it is far far far from a green system of making power and mostly a financial disaster decade on decade.
It came as close as to complete collapse a few years back but now thankfully is trading as well as it ever has. Environmentally however ??? take a look, scars all over the country, changed waterways, lock out areas and Tassie for years and years had one of it not the most expensive power bills in the country.
Factor all that into environmental cost and it is not pretty.
As far as I can see we aren't within a bulls roar of the ideal power ---------- perhaps if we had just powered up with neuc. and coal and looked for and spent money on research on systems that will appear in the future instead of stop gap political green motherhood systems like solar and wind -- that just are NOT green - maybe we would be far enough down the road now to have got something that is of REAL benefit.
We can fart about all we like - but we know this - as man moves into his future he uses more and more power - you can try and cut it back all you like but that is what we do - alternatives like solar and wind only do one thing --------- they slow up research into what we will really need - whatever it is.
Imagine if all the money that was spent on solar and wind all over the planet had been directed into intense research ---------- my guess is we would have the answer by now - instead we have used huge resources building large inefficient systems with only one real positive outcome - to make some of us feel better.
crazy
btw, I have an acquaintance in NZ who is an energy consultant for various things - including building solar panel factories, oil production plants using algae and grasses etc.
a couple of things I got from him was the level of stupidity of solar - but one of the most interesting things he told me - probably about 4 ish years back was that all over Germany huge amounts of people were pulling out their old heating systems and replacing them with new heaters that burnt wood pellets - the theory being that it was a renewable resource.
Now if you can get over the environmental carbon cost and the like of manufacturing new steel stoves and scrapping the old iron - that's one thing
but guess where the wood pellets at that time were coming from?
Tas bloody mania ----------------- they were bringing all the fuel from Tasmania Australia to Germany in ships -------
hows that for going green?
that's not crazy in my book - that is a crazy cake layered in stupidity.
