Monday, October 21, 2013

"The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind"

"Dozens of residents of a small community in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, have filed lawsuits claiming that a trio of large wind turbines located near their homes have been harming their health."
In the summer of 2010, the town of Falmouth and a private company called Notus Clean Energy erected three 400-feet-tall, 1.63 megawatt wind turbines.
Just months later, Sue Hobart, a 57-year-old wedding florist, began experiencing spells
of dizziness, bouts of insomnia, ringing in her ears and severe headaches.

‘Sometimes at night, especially in the winter, I wake up with a fluttering in the chest and think, “What the hell is that,”’ and the only place it happens is at my house,’ she told
ABC News.
'Many people living within 2 km (1.25 miles) of these spinning giants get sick. So sick that they often abandon (as in, lock the door and leave) their homes,’ according to the book’s description. ‘Nobody wants to buy their acoustically toxic homes.'
Mr Anderson, however, [an earlier enthusiastic supporter] insisted that his symptoms were purely physical and not the products of an overactive imagination.
‘Just come in to my house and feel the walls shaking,’ he said
Mail on Line

24 comments:

Shouting Thomas said...

Even more amusing...

Small, extremely liberal towns all around my hometown of Woodstock, NY are banning windfarm development. Because...

o Noise pollution
o Vibration pollution
o Strobe lighting effects that cause:
- Headaches
- Depression
- Traffic accidents
o Absentee owners who abandon projects after they've reaped the tax write-offs

And most importantly, they are a blight on the landscape for a region that depends on tourism.

Shouting Thomas said...

Excuse the consecutive comments...

I've been telling the green fanatics here in Woodstock for some time that I doubt that their green stuff is really all that green.

The technologies they favor have not been in use on a large enough scale for a long enough period of time for the negatives to be fully understood.

I have no doubt that those negatives will manifest. For instance, massive solar panel manufacturing produces a lot of heavy metal pollution.

I suspect that there is a price to pay for the production of energy on a level sufficient to drive an industrial, technological society, no matter what technology is used.

Revenant said...

This really ought to be a no-brainer, but for some reason it doesn't occur to most people:

If there was a form of energy production that had no downsides, it wouldn't be "alternative". It would be "what everyone uses".

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Excuse the consecutive comments...

I don't mind... and I don't believe anybody else does.

chickelit said...

I have no doubt that those negatives will manifest. For instance, massive solar panel manufacturing produces a lot of heavy metal pollution.

According to some Stanford researchers, solar panels may have finally reached a break even point: link

Many people don't understand how much energy it takes to get silicon pure.

bagoh20 said...

Heathens!

In the Big Holy Book of Truthology, in Renewables 9:17 it says that "Thou's soul shall be free of guilt only if thou dost suffer for the righteousness of the carbonless power source. The holy men do fly above the earth on their silver seed to holy places with fine hotels and the good lord's limo service to carry them to converse with one another enveloped in the sacred air conditioning until the holy word is handed down to them through fine wine and gourmet food. Once they have meditated and suffered to bring the word, it must be obeyed. Shut up and lower your head you gas guzzling heretics. There is no place in heaven for your soul - a black oily chunk of coal?

Methadras said...

Envirokook morons and they know who they are do not care about 1st order developments to bring their 'green' environutjob crap to the masses. They do not realize what it takes to get a 'green' product to market and all of the environmental damage that is done to get the end result. Batteries in electric cars for example are a perfect example of that sentiment. They neglect all of the mining and metal refinement to get those batteries. They neglect the oil production to extract the materials to make the plastic out of the housing that will hold the chemistries in those batteries and they neglect everything in between, all of those processes to get that end product so they can feel good about themselves as they proclaim how green they really are, when in reality they have done more damage with their fantasies than they could imagine.

john said...

Many people don't understand how much energy it takes to get silicon pure.

I'll bet Jenna Jamison could supply the world's need for pure silicon for a while.

chickelit said...

John, she's from Silicone Valley, not Silicon Valley.

chickelit said...

Al Gore preaching to his faithful:
No Butter In Hell!

Aridog said...

There will be no wind turbine abominations near my home. I guarantee it. I am serious. A heart attack is child's play to how serious I am. It. Will. Not. Happen.

Shouting Thomas said...

In a word, green energy is Lysenkoism.

john said...

Silicone. Silicon. I was never too good at the chemistries. I passed with a C.

Chip Ahoy said...

I cringe at the phrasing enviroweenie because I just may be one. I love all the things hippy-types do, alternate living types, and conservation types, and environmentalist-minded types, and just plain savers, if not the political types for all the various things they do around here so conscientiously. It's fun. My own dad has a whacked out solar thing he put together himself, a total eyesore, a blister upon his lovely home but we all like it. It works. Then, conversely, just to make sure it's all for naught the temperature is turned down on the water heater because everyone who reads Mother Earth, or whatever that magazine is, knows that prolongs the working life of the unit by a decade, the downside being the dishwasher become mere fixture. They're strange households.

They were crushing cans before it was fashionable. They have a can crusher. Composter. Swamp cooler. Closed off the fireplace for energy conservation. Replaced all windows with double pane. Reinsulated. Water conservation. Xeriscaping. Low flow toilets. Timers on things.

Once I drove around looking for photo opportunitahs and chanced upon an abandoned farm. It had everything, all wooden and broken down and eroding and fairly dangerous deterioration. All the various farm buildings. Even saw a barn owl. Snooped all around. My German Shepherd was running all around and keeping track of me. And I always did want to climb up one of those windmills that pumps water for a farm and that day I did. Woot!

So I'm for them. Except as whirligigs.

But I never imagined they'd be so huge. And spread so vastly. I was wondering what is the problem with those birds flying right into them until I saw a wide angle shot of a vast wind farm and saw that any bird that chanced upon the area that ran for miles hasn't a chance of surviving the gauntlet. The question becomes how can that even build that without considering birds flying through.

Calypso Facto said...

Lysenkoism: thanks, ST! I now have the perfect word for the Global Warmists.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Maybe I don't really have tinnitus.
Perhaps it's the windmills... or the government.

Michael Haz said...

A huge array of windmills has been developed in east central Wisconsin. The damn things dot the landscape on a high ridge that traverses three counties. There are hundreds of them. I drive past them several times monthly on my way to the northern part of the state.

Most of the time they are not running, either because it isn't windy, or because the electricity they generate isn't needed. They were erected mostly so the utility company could get permission to build a massive, ultra-clean coal powered plant in the Milwaukee area.

I wanted to hear the kind of noise the made so last summer I took my dirt bike out and got near a couple of them, down a service road, way out in the field. They make a low-frequency "thwop" whenever the blades go past. And the generator waaaaay up on top of the pole hums and buzzes. I cannot imagine wanting to live near one, not to mention several dozen, as some farmers do.

The farmers were paid a lot of dollars to sell the small plots of land on which the towers were built. Now they either want the damn things torn down or (soooprise!) more money to put up with the noise.

I don't care what they do, except that the windmills an the payments and now more payments and ultimately the dismantling and scrapping of the windmills is being paid for by .... me.

Us, really. All of us who pay taxes and utility costs are paying for this shit. It's corruption. We pay billions for a bad idea because some people make a lot of money selling bad ideas that the taxpayers and utility companies buy into in order to keep watts flowing down the line.

Fookin' moonbeams will believe any and every idea that makes no sense.

JAL said...

Wind Energy's Ghosts

14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines

Chip Ahoy said...

I wanted to take a picture of the things I saw going on out in Weld County, the long rows or brand new trucks are interesting. A huge garage it seems. Sort of like Sears auto repair on steroids, say 15 of those in a row. The road I turn off to is suddenly overarched by a conveyor about a mile long from ? to ? and I'm curious about that. I wanted to stop and said so. Twice. But we drove right by. Vehicles are marked Halliburton.

When I mentioned the place, before we got to it and passed by, one of the fellows, an artist, delivered unto us his blessed moral insights. It is a basic and child-like question, "How could you to that to the Earth?"

I wasn't interested in what he was imagining happening with fracking and horizontal drilling, chemicals, I suppose, and the whole desperate extraction like raping or something. I can relate to that feeling of betrail betrayel betrialxxxx treachery.

But yesterday I thought, well what's wrong with leaving gaps all over the place? People like caves don't they? Aren't caves intriguing? Spelunking and all that.

Chip Ahoy said...

14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines. Oh man, we opened for them in Toledo.

rhhardin said...

They're called wind farms because you have to wind them up. Green energy.

The Dutch had ones that ran on diesel power.

JAL said...

Tehahcapi

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

The nice thing about water wheels was every now and then an evil wizard would fall from atop his tower and impale himself to gruesome effect

Man, do I loves me some internets!

Dust Bunny Queen said...

There is a big array of windmills on top of a ridge near our area. It has ruined the view, but more importantly it is a bird Cuisinart killing hundreds if not thousands of birds. No one knows because the chopped up birds that fall directly below the 30 story tall blades are just a fraction of those that fly on and fall into the forest.

The biggest hypocrisy about the whole thing is that when the windmills are actually running and generating power.......they have to shut down the hydroelectric plant that has been operating since the 1920's. The grid can't handle both outputs at the same time.

Sooooo......they close down a completely renewable, green source of energy....water. A source that has had its initial investment amortized (paid for) through time and requires minimal current and future investment. They just let the water that was diverted from the river just free flow through the power house so that they can generate expensive ...VERY expensive....wind powered electricity and charge the consumers more.

Why? Because California in all its retarded wisdom demands that PGE generate a certain percentage of its power through "green" sources and deemed water/hydro NOT a "green" source.

Morons.