Originally Posted by Scitlipo

You cannot live off landscape.

Heard of "tourism"? Its a ~ 6Bn per year industry that employs ~ 200,000 people.

Originally Posted by GreenIsGood

When some clown says "I think wind turbines are beautiful" or " I love the noise of a wind turbine in a gale", does that mean that everyone else has to think so too?

Are we not allowed to have opinions that conflict with those of the wind power industry?

I don't know any other form of power station that get built so routinely in protected habitats, near mountain ridge lines, in unstable peat bogs, or create harmful noise within 500m of someone's house. Or where people who see a problem with this are so demonised. I just don't.

Who's being demonised? The wind farm should meet its planning stipulations. If it doesn't, shut it down until it does.

No-one claims that a gas plant looks pretty - they don't. But they don't build them on top of mountains .. or in such numbers.

A typical gas plant may provide say 300MW. A typical wind farm may be say 30MW in capacity. With an average capacity factor of 25%, we need 40 30MW wind farms to provide the same average power as the gasplant.

Yes, 40.

We all know by now this is economic madness, but it is also environmental madness. Pure subsidised stupidity.

While gas plants are cleaner than coal plants, they still deliver CO2 and pollutants into the atmopshere where renewable energy does not.

The state of Texas is not a place where renewable energy is subsidised. But here is a announcement to supply a 200MW wind farm. Tesax is a popular palce for wind farms in the US.

Duke Energy Renewables, a commercial business unit of Duke Energy, will build, own and operate the 200-megawatt (MW) Los Vientos I Wind power Project in Willacy County, approximately 120 miles south of Corpus Christi and 20 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico.

REVE - Regulacin Elica con Vehculos Elctricos -

And the Texan farmers who get paid to have the turbines on their land are not complaining about the noise, nor are these ones in Minnesota.

Originally Posted by owedtojoy

I agree.

It is amazing how many people who whine about the "ugliness" of wind farms will absolutely cream in their pants at the sight of an oil rig.

I'm pretty sure there isn't anything amazing about... nobody.

Plus, nobody, as far as I am aware, is planing on building twenty oil rigs on a hillside hear my house. They tend to be at sea.

Originally Posted by CookieMonster

I'm pretty sure there isn't anything amazing about... nobody.

Plus, nobody, as far as I am aware, is planing on building twenty oil rigs on a hillside hear my house. They tend to be at sea.

Unless your house is sitting on an oil deposit.

Originally Posted by Conor the Bold

aye. dB values need be weighted for human hearing. Convert the values into dB(A) for a truer reflection.

Hearing threshold also depends on frequency, being lowest around 3-4KHz:



There is also a auditory masking effect whereby an adjacent sound [both in frequency & time] may mask weaker sounds. So just stick on some chunes & enjoy your free fuel.

BTW: wouldn't Vertical Axis Turbines generate less noise, be less visually intrusive & friendlier to birds & bats, even if less efficient?

Originally Posted by owedtojoy

The state of Texas is not a place where renewable energy is subsidised.

Yeah, right.

You really need to wake up. Enron ... Republican governor Rick Perry .. renewable energy mandates .. fleeced consumers ..

Originally Posted by CarnivalOfAction

BTW: wouldn't Vertical Axis Turbines generate less noise, be less visually intrusive & friendlier to birds & bats, even if less efficient?

Efficiency would be the same . Just little or no wind in the vertical plane. So it would essentially be the same as a horizontal axis turbine on a calm day.

Originally Posted by GreenIsGood

Heard of "tourism"? Its a ~ 6Bn per year industry that employs ~ 200,000 people.

so are you prepared to buy my land and keep it for the tourists-only one this summer was an american lady on her bike-who by the way said it would be a great site for a windfarm...so this tourist has no problem with windmuills- sounds to me like some people like to tell others what to do with their land- any chance you work for the state?

I'm out in Austria for the past 2 weeks and the sound of the crickets at night is very audible - so are we gonna kill all the little buggers?

I thought we had some big wind farms (near Gort for example) in Ireland until I drove from Vienna to Budapest where there is a seemingly endless windfarm(s) stretching for 25-30 miles with about 300 (?? open to correction) turbines.

Must be some noise off those babies.

Ten years ago in Clare there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the prospect of two windfarms in the county. Apparently it was suggested that pregnant women, were they to see spinning blades would spontaneously abort, two headed calves would be born, television signals would be obliterated and the air would be a mass of feathers and drops of blood, and that the local population would be driven mad from the noise.
Hasn't happened yet.
After some well known alleged scullduggery by a couple of cute hoors on the local authority, one got the go ahead-in a valley-where it produces at max 65% of what it could produce were it not hidden from view.
The other on a height was refused, ostensibly because it violated the county development plan at the time with respect to visual amenity. More likely that the promoters refused to payup-£70000 is the alleged figure doing the rounds.