Although appealing to many, wind power is an extremely expensive, inefficient, and unreliable source of electricity, incapable of providing base load power. Wind's intermittency, variability, line loss, necessary back-up generation, transmission needs, and dispatch complexity limit the amount of electricity wind can secure. Ever larger mandates and subsidies will not make wind power more economically viable, as the European experience now demonstrates.

Protecting the Oregon Trail would require little effort if the location of the Oregon Trail were considered in the planning of the projects. But few developers care about or plan to protect the known historic sites to reduce the impact on the Oregon Trail. ...when public funds are used to destroy irreplaceable historic public treasures, perhaps we should be a little more careful and consider whether and how we should proceed.

It is like having a washing machine run constantly, or a car idling outside your window, or an aircraft overhead which stays in one position ... it is a constant drone which is quite disturbing.

The government is more interested in making symbolic gestures rather than really tackling greenhouse gas emissions. The wind farm will only produce a very small amount of clean energy, but it will have a terrible impact on the environment.

The problem is for the past year [T. Boone] Pickens has sold the Americans a bill of goods, this idea that wind power is going to save America and that it's going to reduce foreign oil imports and so on, it's just flat not true.

We're doing whatever we feel we can to stop development until such time as the medical concerns are (studied). We also have concerns with minimum distance separations-- we're aware some of the units could fail and cases where the blades turn so fast they hit the base of the tower and cause it to lose structural integrity. We've also heard about ice chunks falling off the blades in winter. We didn't initially support the (not-in-my-backyard) people, but maybe there's a valid reason why they don't want it in their backyards.

At times, it is almost unbearable. They [First Wind] never intended for us to have the peace and quiet they promised.

Beaumont Wind no longer recommends wind turbines for its residential customers because the economics don't support it. You have to go too high and spend too much money to get power. A more cost-effective turbine would have to be about 205 feet, and require a one-year wind study. We feel solar is better for residents.

Constructing wind farms in core areas, even for research purposes, prior to demonstrating it can be done with no impact to sage grouse, negates the usefulness of the core area concept as a conservation strategy and brings into question whether adequate regulatory mechanisms are in place to protect the species.

As the nation moves to some sort of carbon reduction strategy, no matter our individual perspectives on the topic, the advance of wind and solar energy generation, under the broad label of "green energy," has come to Wyoming with a "gold rush" pace - and almost more concerning - "gold rush" mentality. Seemingly every acre - sage grouse core area, private, state and federal lands, important viewsheds and otherwise - is up for grabs in the interest of "green, carbon-neutral technologies" no matter how truly "brown" the effects are on the land. Functionally, it is like taking a short cut to work through a playground full of school children and claiming "green" as a defense because you were driving a Toyota Prius.

It seems we are now subject to a campaign that uses social rejection as a force to make us accept industrial-scale wind energy stations across the UK; to call them windfarms is disingenuous. As part of this campaign, the great and the good are hectoring on the moral need to embrace wind energy.

It would be naive to think that green energy ventures were going to run perfectly. But did scientists and public officials not think this through at all?

It's a constant grinding, whining noise. You walk outside the house and it sounds like planes are in the sky all the time. You wake up at two or three in the morning, and it's impossible to get back to sleep.

The major limitation, of course, is wind's intermittency -- its lack of "dispatchability." Quite simply, you can never count on it. You can't even predict it from hour to hour with 100 percent accuracy and the windiest sites can go calm for days.

It’s all very speculative at this time, but I believe these mandates will have huge impacts on low and moderate income families, and it could very well make us non competitive in the rest of the world.

We are concerned that we are about to become collateral damage in a poorly conceived wind-farm project with questionable returns for the sake of symbolic politics.

What sort of country are we living in if we don't treasure our countryside?

The local pride in our mountains is reflected in the recent naming of the newest high school: “Mountain Ridge”. Should it now become “Wind Farm High?”

What am I going to do with a house I can’t live in?

… The intestinal tipping point came for me when a contingent of students from Middlebury College (annual tuition and fees $44,330) found both the gas money and the gall to drive to the town of Sheffield (annual per capita income $13,277) in order to lecture the provincials on their responsibility to the earth and its myriad creatures. …