My wife and I work late shifts, getting home around 11:30 pm. We normally go to sleep around 2-4 am and wake up around 9-11 am. We really, really dislike all the noise people make from about 6 am until about 10 am and it’s been worse lately because there has been some major construction on a nearby apartment complex with a jackhammer that starts around 8 am… and the trash chute in the middle section of the building, which is about 4 meters away from our front door, is being completely replaced. Workers have spent a number of mornings ripping concrete and bricks from where they’ve spent the last 30 years and dropping them down the shaft.

As you can imagine, the noise between 8 am and 10 am at the front of the building, at the elevator, with construction going on, trash pickup, people greeting each other (always loudly) at the doors and elevator and someone knocking early on our door for a signature/package delivery/whatever can be very irritating. However, living with noise is a part of life so neither my wife nor I have ever said anything to anyone about it. They have normal sleeping hours and that’s that.

We both sleep with headphones on to block out the noise and, occasionally, lose a bit of sleep because we get woken up early. That’s just life and if you don’t like the noise, move out to 80 wooded acres like my parents have done and make damn sure your neighbors are at least a half-mile away. Otherwise you gotta put up with it because we need electricity and, increasingly, it needs to be fairly sustainable like wind energy is and not so darn dirty like coal is. The alternatives are dams, nuclear power or maybe loads of solar panels… but those all have problems, too. Change must happen, though, and dithering over it forever won’t help things.

At the other end of the spectrum are Ivanpah and other huge solar projects in the California desert. Does anyone think that deliberately lining up a huge solar project with the edge of a national monument, or putting it in the unregulated middle of a wilderness area, makes good economic sense? They have to build the roads and the power lines to both solar developments, so it’s not the case that these areas are more accessible. The developers also ignored highly degraded land near roads and power corridors in pursuit of those projects. Yes, it’s a solar example, but the point is that some power developers will deliberately try to cause damage. I honestly don’t understand why, but they will, even with green projects. In the solar cases, members of the environmental community are even doing the work of finding more benign sites for these projects, just to help get them located better.

Bottom line is the NIMBY situation gets complicated. Sometimes the NIMBYs are right, sometimes they’re wrong, and sometimes, they’re being provoked in an attempt to make them powerless (as with Ivanpah, which is going for federal support under Obama’s energy agenda). It’s always worth looking at people’s motives before categorizing them.

Then again, that variant of NIMB thinks building wind turbines in our incredibly deep Atlantic coast is a viable possibility.

There are also government tax reductions for housing estates willing to upgrade their lands with renewable energy sources, bringing along a market of residential wind generators (whose output you then sell back to the power grid).

And count me in with agreeing that they are beautiful things – when you drive into Lisbon from the north, they gently pop-up from the hills. It’s somewhat majestic, and just a bit science-fiction come true.

Living in oil country (Alberta, Canada) I see a lot of the negative effects brought on by doing things the way we’ve always done them. The tar sands, pollution, big companies making big profits and leaving a mess in our beautiful country… things need to change. And if a little noise and some visually unappealing (according to some) wind turbines will help get people thinking differently and making clean energy, then we need to go there… and sooner rather than later.

I don’t live next to a wind farm so I can’t sympathize, but maybe she could focus more on her goal of moving them 1,000 feet further away (which IS legitimate, IMO) instead of endlessly repeating that turbines are the devil (which is just childish).

I used to live right across the road from a rail line that shook the house five or six times a day. It’s the price of our energy, our food, and all our stuff. Deal with it like an adult, but don’t just say it has got to go away, because all the other alternatives are much worse.

I wouldn’t let concerns about migratory birds derail wind turbines. For one thing, there is always going to be a cost. Environmental impact should be measured vs. the equivalent coal power plant, not vs. nothing.

Second, the effect is actually usually greatly exaggerated. Newer, larger, slower-moving turbines are far less likely to kill birds, and those that are killed are basically statistically insignificant. Saying X hundred birds are killed each year might sound like a lot, but not out of a population of tens of millions, and not compared with other hazards like cars and airplanes. I get the impression that the “migratory bird defense” is basically a cynical attempt to divide (and conquer) the environmentalist movement.

Does anyone here have experience with the noise that a wind turbine (or multiples) make? I scanned through that article on her and man, does she sound obsessed. Maybe she has reason, but I’m just curious about another opinion from Boingers. The YouTubes I’ve seen haven’t impressed me much with their noisiness, but maybe they were bad vids.

Thoughts, Boingers?

What’s “natural”? Painting on fake woodgrain? Sticking artificial branches all over them? Making them look like giant saguaro cactus or palm trees?

I ask because that’s what’s been happening with wireless relay towers. The person who thought up that disguise must have no sense of natural form. Every time I see one, I can feel my brain momentarily scrambling to ID its branching pattern, shifting gears from “What the hell?” to “¿Araucaria?” to “…Oh. It’s a wireless relay tower.” When they’re made to look more “natural” these towers have all the subtle finesse of horsetail ferns. Here are some examples to contemplate:

Gallery sites: cellularpcs.com; Stealth Concealment Solutions, Inc.; and Larson Camouflage.

The objects in question:

wireless relay pine tree
more fake pines
a really bad fake pine in Santa Fe
fake palm tree
fake palm tree closeup
Another group of palm trees.
A fake date palm
Several real Italian cypresses, plus a fake one that looks like a Chia Pet.
another Chia Pet
Chia Pet closeup
unconvincing fake rock
another shot of the rock
a fake saguaro
two fake saguaros
a fake saguaro that wouldn’t fool a dog

This are far worse things than wind turbines that look like wind turbines.

“Many citizens would be surprised to
learn that domestic and feral cats may kill
hundreds of millions of songbirds and other
avian species each year. A recent study in
Wisconsin estimated that in that state alone,
domestic rural cats kill roughly 39
million birds annually. ”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfe_Island_Wind_Project

I never understood why people though high voltage electricity pylons were ugly. They look just like the Eiffel tower – allegedly a very romantic sight.

Mac

Doesn’t solve the problem I’m afraid.

http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html#15.

As a former House speaker once said, “All Politics is Local”. I’ve worked in siting many major projects for over the past 30 years and the best scientific data is not in polling data like the authors have studied, because it doesn’t really address the core issues of what exactly triggers “outrage” and opposition by NIMBYS. It isn’t all projects that uniformly tick people off, it’s particularly ones that present “dread risks” or are “involuntary” risks.

Involuntary means in the local zoning and permitting regime, where most projects are reviewed, people perceive that a proposal is being “crammed down” their throats and they respond accordingly. A very insightful to this approach can be gained from reading the works of sociologists Peter Sandman and Paul Slovic. See, e.g. P. Slovic, Perception of Risk, Science, Vol. 236 at 280 (1987).

The cape wind project’s problem is not NIMBY, but whether a for-profit company should be given the right to public space and waters. They enrich themselves with public subsidies and lands, and we get some high cost green power? Thanks but no thanks. A publicly owned wind generation system, like those in Denmark, is a much better idea. Otherwise it is socialism for the rich.

While those might (might) be laudable reasons for disliking the Cape Wind project, you’re kidding yourself, or kidding me, if you actually believe those are the reasons the opponents are giving.

Robert Kenedy’s Op-Ed:

Cape Wind’s proposal involves construction of 130 giant turbines whose windmill arms will reach 417 feet above the water and be visible for up to 26 miles. These turbines are less than six miles from shore and would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Hundreds of flashing lights to warn airplanes away from the turbines will steal the stars and nighttime views. The noise of the turbines will be audible onshore. …. There are those who argue that unlike our great Western national parks, Cape Cod is far from pristine, and that Cape Wind’s turbines won’t be a significant blot. I invite these critics to see the pods of humpback, minke, pilot, [lots of purple prose]. …. If Cape Wind were to place its project further offshore [then I'd have no problem with giving public space to private companies]

[1]

On a blustery, gray morning in August, William I. Koch, the billionaire energy mogul, gazes out a window in his Osterville, Mass., home down to the choppy waters of Nantucket Sound … “I go out and sail on the Sound; it’s so beautiful, why would you want to sail in a forest of windmills?” … Koch’s stout opposition, of course, is almost a cliché: rich guy, who doesn’t want his views ruined, takes a not-in-my-backyard position against a 130-turbine wind farm whose upper tips would rise 400 feet above the sea.

[2]

The Wampanoag tribes say they want the entire sound placed on the National Register of Historic Places because they say their spiritual greetings of the sun require unobstructed views;

[3]

The project has faced serious opposition from business leaders and politicians, including the late Senator Edward Kennedy. Opponents say the turbines would be an eyesore

[4]

etc. etc. etc.