The Town of Newbury may soon be joining the growing ranks of communities that are building wind turbines, and hopefully it will take to heart the lessons that are quickly being learned by its neighbors. ...Newburyport has learned many lessons from the neighborhood nuisances caused by the Mark Richey turbine. City officials are redrawing the zoning laws to take care of those problems, but perhaps they should also take a look at the turbine's power output to see if it makes any sense at all to have another turbine in the industrial park.

President Obama has repeatedly stated that his stimulus package has "saved or created" hundreds of thousands of jobs. And hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created. In Unicornland. According to the Recovery.gov website - a website that the Obama administration has spent $18 million "stimulating" - millions have been spent and hundreds of jobs have been created in heretofore unknown areas of America ...The biggest problem, amazingly enough, isn't the Obama administration's incredible creation of districts from scratch. It's the Obama administration's use of stimulus funds to pay off its political allies.

With yesterday's counting of absentee ballots that pushed Urban Hirschey ahead of five-term incumbent Thomas Rienbeck, the three towns where commercial wind-development policy became something of a local referendum have sent a loud and clear message to wind farm developers and their rabid supporters: wind politics is local. ...Hammond resident Brooke Stark assessed the town election and why the incumbent board was rejected in the Nov. 4 story in the Times: "They really have done a lot," she said. "But I think they got complacent and were not interested in educating the community about something they'd already made up their minds about. They wanted the wind law to go forward and that was that. People got fed up with that, and every time we felt that our voices were being shut down, it provided more impetus to get active."

The Tazewell County Board of Supervisors insist they aren't dragging their feet when it comes to making a decision about wind turbines. But it's starting to look like they are doing just that. The board has been studying the issue of wind turbines and the proposed ridgeline protection - or tall structure - ordinance for well over a year. The first public hearing on the original tall structure ordinance was held back in November 2008 - on the night of a significant snow storm for that matter. Now, more than a year later, the board has once again opted to delay.

I see that the Jeff-Lewis Board of Cooperative Educational Services received $163,760 to build a wind turbine of its very own. I know Indian River is drooling to get a wind turbine of its very own too. Evidently this is the new must-have for schools around the north country, regardless of how local populations keep working to zone them out of their communities. It's OK though, these are small turbines. ...At that rate, it will take 26.6 years before the turbine has saved enough money to have paid for itself.

One would not think it difficult to reconcile support of renewable energy with the love of the environment, yet this summer we found ourselves in exactly this situation. After years of living with conservation as a mantra, we could never imagine being opposed to a "green" energy project, but ironically that's what has happened. ...After months of research, we've learned that wind power is just not the "green" energy source we've all been told it is. If applied on a small residential scale, it can be very effective; however on an industrial level, there are enormous problems.

Environmental activists like to tell us that the "green" movement is a benign, good-willed group of humanitarians who want humanity to be able to live in peace and harmony with our planet, while oil and coal companies are just a bunch of greedy white men in business suits who want to get rich and wreck the planet. Really? There's no greed in the environmentalist movement? ...Think again. Think again for a long time.

Under old planning rules, big projects took years to pass through public inquiries. Now schemes will be approved or rejected in weeks. Once the IPC has made its decision, ministers will not be able to reverse it - even the courts will struggle to be heard. This system defies modern political fashion: it is centralist and commanding. It is opposed by the Conservatives, whose formal position is to scrap the commission - although in private they want to keep it in disguise, as part of the Planning Inspectorate.

Thank you to Art Kruegger for raising the question about whether big wind turbines built on Vermont's mountaintops will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That is a question Vermonters for a Clean Environment has been attempting to answer for seven months, and we are still looking for answers.

There was a very interesting forum held at the West Rutland town hall on Oct. 22. Three speakers presented information that should cause anyone to think very hard about whether an industrial wind "farm" in their community is a good thing. Or whether it's even useful to meet Vermont's renewable energy goals.

Elected town officials of Orangeville, at a special Town Board meeting Sept. 23, set aside the health, safety and welfare of the people of Orangeville, in deference to some of their own personal financial agendas in matters pertaining to zoning laws when they pushed through a proposed resolution for wind energy. ...Orangeville Supervisor Susan May, councilmen Andrew Flint, James Herman and Hans Boxler Jr. voted unanimously for 700-foot setbacks of mammoth 450-foot industrial turbines from Orangeville taxpayers' property lines (500 feet from public roads), leaving no doubt that there was little regard for the health, safety and welfare of the people who voted them into office.

Bordering councils have seen our rural Fenland landscape destroyed and cluttered with this heavy and useless industry and politely declare 'no thanks'. This 'green window dressing' is causing extensive environmental damage to the British countryside and everything within it, very soon I will expose how our local wildlife environment has been abused and disrupted by those seeking the rewards of political and financial gratification.

I just read the proposal in front of the Public Utilities Commission. Deepwater's "cheap" electricity is going to cost "the grid" 30 cents per kilowatt-hour to start and go to 56 cents. I don't know what this will translate to on a Block Island Power Company bill, but if you include BIPCo's fee, plus a transmission fee, plus the cost of the $50 million dollar cable to support the 30-megawatt power plant, I'm willing to bet none of us are going to like it.

Readers of The Journal's Oct. 21 front-page article "Environmentalists decry Black Pt. turbine plan" might be interested in hearing what these environmentalists really asked of Governor Carcieri. Our letter to the governor expressed concern about siting wind turbines and other renewable-energy projects on publicly owned lands absent a transparent public process for determining if and when it is appropriate to do so.

There's a farmer in Northumberland County, east of Oshawa, who wants to build a house for his daughter on his farm, but he can't because he's on the heavily protected Oak Ridges Moraine. But it's OK to lease his land to a company that will put up multiple wind turbines and turn his property into a wind farm. And they'll pay him five figures a year to do it. That's just one of many contradictions emerging as wind project proposals multiply like rabbits across Ontario.

Let me get this straight. Central Maine Power is requesting a $1.4 billion upgrade of the transmission system from the Maine Public Utilities Commission. This transmission system will not benefit Maine because it is to increase transmission capacity between Orrington to the New Hampshire border right out of the state. I think that is about 125 miles. That's a pretty expensive project to take full advantage of wind power.

The battles over wind farms in Ontario and New York state have had no shortage of press coverage. The battle lines are most often drawn between those who place a premium on scenic and historic preservation, property values and other quality-of-life factors, versus those who place a priority on the personal and municipal income the wind projects offer. But the processes that decide these battles are seldom fair or transparent, and are skewed in favour of the few over the many.

Most of what the public knows about wind turbines comes from the media. Without a grounding in the sciences of thermodynamics and economics, the average person, eager to be politically and environmentally correct, fixates on the concept of "free energy," and closes his mind to further discussion of how expensive "free" can be. The public believes, more than it really knows, about wind turbines, and well-meaning advocates of wind as the solution to our climate and energy woes are unknowingly on a crash course with reality.

Iberdrola is threatening to pull out because Clayton is considering very reasonable requirements that will preserve the prized qualities of the town. Iberdrola's statement is mind-boggling to me. According to the article, "Iberdrola spokeswoman Jan Johnson said the company will use Maple Ridge as the example of responsible development ...Maple Ridge is a massive, visually dominating wind project in an area that is much different in character than the St. Lawrence shore towns.

Virginia officials have long discussed placing wind turbines off the coast, but the first towers in the region are likely to appear farther south - in North Carolina's Pamlico Sound. Duke Energy and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently signed a contract to install one to three turbines in the sound west of Buxton and Avon as early as next year. The turbines would be seven to 10 miles from shore. The pilot project ...could position North Carolina as a leader in developing wind energy.