Quotes
John Tierney
Environmentalists have been promising for more than three decades that wind energy would be competitive if there was a "level playing field," but it survives only because the field has been tilted in its favor.
John Van Dorp, President Oxford County Federation of Agriculture, Ontario Canada
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.
John Zimmerman
Wind turbines don't make good neighbors
John-Marc Bunce, Ambrian Partners
In places like the UK there was never really enough land anyway and the government was crazy thinking anyone would want to have a wind turbine next to their house.
Jon Boone
Industrial wind is almost the perfect enterprise for our era, as it
produces no meaningful product or service but is subsidized up to 80
percent by rate and tax payers. Like many "celebrities," it is famous
for being famous, not for its actual performance.
Jon Boone
Faith-based initiatives like windpower symbolize the imaginative lacuna now at the heart of our national energy policy.
Jon Boone
Throughout my experience, I could not substantiate a single claim developers made for industrial wind energy, including the one justifying its existence: that massive wind installations would meaningfully reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
Jon Boone
One can certainly concur with concerns about how our culture's fossil fuel combustion practices help accelerate the process of global warming—without uncritically agreeing that the intrusive nature of windpower technology is even a partial solution to the problem.
Jonathan Lesser
Unfortunately, proponents continue to tout wind energy as "the answer" while, in the fashion of "Jeopardy!" contestants, are unable to come up with the correct question.
Jonathan Linowes
Future technologies for new energy sources will not rely on raping our environment, ridgelines, prairies, and shorelines.
K Jayaprakash
The green tag attached to windmills exempt them from environmental clearance which leads to mindless destruction of nature with impunity.
Kathleen Hartnett White
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.
Keith Martin
Federal tax benefits pay as much as 65% of the capital cost of wind
power projects in the United States.
Keith Shank
It's unfair to assume, I think, that there's no environmental effects from wind (energy). Until we get some firm data, the problem is, people are making multimillion-dollar investments with insufficient information.
Kevin Van Koughnett
There's no getting around it, (turbines) do kill birds and they do kill bats.
Kieran Devine
Those farms did not contribute at all to our peak demand - it had to be covered by other non-wind generation. Over the long term wind is very reliable but in the short term you can never count on it being there when you need it in forward forecasting.
Kristin Calkins Rowe
It doesn't take a genius to figure out there are more cons than pros in this debate.
L. M. Schwartz
If present, politically-motivated, mandated, "renewable energy"
policies are pursued, based on the failed formulas of the past 35
years, Americans will see further distortions of the markets for
electrical power, increased costs to ratepayers and taxpayers,
decreases in base capacity and grid reliability, diversion of scarce
resources from research into promising energy production technology,
and enrichment of powerful, corporate special-interests.
L. M. Schwartz
A single 555-megawatt gas-fired power plant in California generates
more electricity in a year than do all 13,000 of the state's wind
turbines. The gas-fired plant sits atop a mere 15 acres. The
300-foot-tall windmills impact over a hundred thousand acres to
provide expensive, intermittent, insufficient energy
Larry Patton
Consider this: We could be looking at 1,000 or more wind turbines taller than the Statue of Liberty on the high ridges of the Flint Hills, and they would contribute only about one-tenth of 1 percent of our current electricity use. That simply isn't worth the destruction of our unique Tallgrass Prairie land resource.