I’m not going to editorialize on this issue one way or another for a variety of reasons, but I found the following on YouTube this morning and thought it quite an interesting encapsulation of the conflict playing out on the ground. No doubt it will be fodder for interesting discussion.
So here is – from the YT description – video from “Near the end of the 2+ hour meeting between the community of Ira, Vermont and proponents of Vermont Community Wind Farm, an 80 MW “concept” of Per White-Hansen, with public relations person Jeffrey Wennberg”, presented without comment…
Think about how much of Vermont’s future really is at the mercy of Gov.Douglas’Public Service Board
On one side I totally agree about the size of the projects and towers and the what I believe is a need to generate as close to the point of use as possible ….
On the other side which is going to be worse? Mountain top removal or highly visible wind towers on a treasured ridge?
On one side should we be pushing to install wind towers that appear to have palpable physical effects on people?
On the other side not building the wind towers will result in yet more airborne pollutants that have a palpable physical effect on people … not to mention an inheritance of deadly radioactive debris left over from the nation’s Entery Yankees.
On one side is the ability of a local community to control what they will put up with.
On the other side is national impetus.
In my opinion a perfect mix would include reduced use of electricity, smarter use of what is consumed and a move to solar and other passive generation.
Ain’t gonna happen soon … so … we all need to get past well intentioned NIMBY regarding these wind towers. If we do it right, they can always come down in a generation.
Check out a couple other clips from that site:
Seems these developers have been trespassing on private property and doing a pretty good job of alienating the locals. Then there’s the question of whether or not this particular proposal is even feasible:
Pretty easy to support wind in the abstract. Get on the ground with the people who live there and look at the specific locations and go to the meetings before blindly supporting this or any other wind project. There are reasons why people get so upset by big wind development in Vermont. We need to have an honest discussion about it rather than calling people names if they even try to ask questions.
I know some folks from that area who have attended a number of these meetings. The developers have done just about everything wrong. One could catalog their process into a book: “How to Alienate Local Communities and Botch a Wind Development Project.” They started with secret lease agreements with gag orders attached. Then they trespassed on people’s land and put up monitoring devices without the landowner’s permission. They changed their story depending on who they were talking to. And so on. I relayed this info to a friend of mine who is involved with Renewable Energy Vermont, our state’s renewable energy organization. He said that he had already gotten a dozen calls about it from withing the organization. The consensus was “These idiots are making us all look bad.”
Ok, so these particular developers are making a bollocks of the job. What about the subject in general?
Non-renewable energy is non-renewable, so we are going to be running on renewable at some point. That is a definite end state. Fewer, larger energy systems are more cost effective than many small ones, in general. If we want relatively low cost energy we are going to have to install fewer, larger generators, which will have concentrated impact on particular communities. In the case of wind, these will be communities with specific topography such as the high ridgelines in Ira, Middletown Springs, Tinmouth, and Danby.
It raises questions of local vs. state balance. We could say “Fine, citizens of Ira (or any other town with a good wind site), you want a few small wind turbines for yourselves, so you and the rest of Vermont will endure dramatically higher electricity prices in the future.” We could, with appropriate attention to local concerns and reasonable mitigation of effects, tell them to host a megawatt-scale wind farm. The locals would experience a mix of benefits and problems.
People sometimes ask me, “Why not just solar? Why do we have to have these huge wind turbines?” I ask them if they are willing to pay five times as much for electricity in the winter, when sun-hours are scarce and wind is plentiful. That’s the decision we have to make.
That said, we do have to put in place some kind of rational guidelines for wind development so that developers like those presented above don’t bulldoze in and screw people around. Conversely, so that one occasional summer resident can’t throw a wrench in the works and deny us renewable electricity.