Virginia local governments would lose zoning and land-use authority over designated sites for wind farms under a proposal being studied by a legislative panel.

General Virginia

Uncertainty rules in windfarm politics. What is clear is that opponents come from the left and from the right -- and that neither side knows the true effects of 400-foot turbines built on 4,000-foot Appalachian ridges.

General Virginia

No matter how much tax revenue the utility might add to county coffers, money cannot replace the hard-to-quantify scenic landscapes and cumulative effects of such projects in the Appalachian highlands.

General Virginia

Two of the three Highland County supervisors seem to have dismissed one of life's cardinal rules: There's no free lunch.

General Virginia

It raises a question Virginia and the nation must face: Should the wind industry continue to enjoy generous subsidies?

General Virginia

This sounds good, but he falls far short of meeting this standard when he assigns the NIMBY label to those who are raising questions about environmental harm. Apparently he feels there is no need to deal with specific issues when a sweeping ad hominem dismissal will suffice.

General Virginia

..modern commercial wind projects present their own set of environmental problems due to the massive scale and numbers of the turbines, the high wind-energy potential of our ecologically sensitive mountain ridges and coastal waters, and the absence of any reliable pre-development assessment process.

General Virginia