Should the development of wind farms really be up to community vote?

Alternative energies should be mandatory.

NIMBY will win out every time; local referendum is the worst way to decide energy poilcy!

This is tough. I can understand why people don’t want windfarms in “their backyards.” I am hopeful that bloombox (or something similar) or solar energy on top of our roofs in teh form of roof tiles will be the real answer. So we can be better to the environment and less dependent on the grid, paying some energy company every month.

Goddamned NIMBYs. They’re always getting in the way.

No, it should not.

#1
Wind farms are stupid unless you live in an area that is always windy. They don’t produce any energy if there is no wind.

#2
Wind farms are visually obtrusive. There is no way around this. You can see them for miles. Maybe hundreds of miles.

#3
Wind farms are not always consistently maintained over time. I’ve seen many abandoned, decrepit wind farms that look even uglier than when they were first installed. Abandoned, decrepit wind farms are not producing any energy at all, and yet are visually obtrusive. They look like a giant’s graveyard of forgotten toys.

#4
They are land consumptive. Maybe this isn’t a problem on the US mainland where land keeps going on and on seemingly forever, but in an island setting where I live where land is finite and in demand, land use is a major issue that people have squabbled over ever since “we” suckered the Native Hawaiians into giving away all their land. Why devote hundreds of acres to a wind farm when we could be growing food there? Or building luxury hotels? Sure you could theoretically grow food under the windmills, but no one intends to. Especially if it will eventually be abandoned. Especially if we haven’t got solar panels on every single roof in the city already (because that does not take up any additional land that has not yet been developed). Our state recently passed a bill that allows “renewable energy” operation on prime ag land. Prime ag land should be used to make food, plain and simple.

#5
Because ultimately today’s technology is but a stepping stone to better things. This technology will one day, hopefully, be obsolete. And then what? Today an industrial power plant wind farm, tomorrow a nuclear power plant? A hotel? Some other commercial or industrial land use? Once you start building on land, it is highly unlikely the land will ever go back to farm use or open space.

When the community stops having a say in what goes on in the community, it stops being one. Hopefully that community makes a good decision. I’m not saying wind farms are never a good idea, but there are legitimate concerns that need to be vetted. If the community can’t make good decisions, the problem is with cretins and inchworms, not the idea of community. So, yes, the community should have a major say as they ultimately have to live with it. This is not always how it goes down. Sometimes politicians and developers get together, conspire, and push projects down the collective community throat. That never goes over well. Sometimes the community prevails and the developer goes bankrupt in legal battles.

Realistically, one wind farm is not going to save the world. Neither will a hundred. If a community doesn’t want it in their backyard, whatever. There will be one that does. If no one wants it, then it is a failed technology isn’t it, and engineers need to come up with a refined solution. Our solution to the fossil fuel problem is an evolutionary process that will not work itself out in our lifetime. It is more productive to focus on the individual contributions you can personally make than to piss and moan about what other people are not doing. To do the latter is to be unreasonably idealistic and out of touch with reality.

Frankly, I think the land requirement of wind farms is a major negative, even more so than aesthetic. As population grows, land use will be even more critical. Wind farms are not an elegant or final solution to our energy needs, but they may lead to something better.

Maybe we should be considering smaller, less visually startling types of wind generators and ones that individuals can use to cut their electric bills? But guess who would fight that? The power companies who would be put out of business, and if you think NIMBY has a lot of power, ....!

@Jewel That would be less efficient. The power companies, I don’t see them fighting that. They know that not everyone would elect to install one. They know that the technology isn’t there for a little windmill to offset your entire energy demand. They know that little individual windmills will not make the power company obsolete, and so they instead choose to embrace these kinds of technologies through incentives.

The objections against wind farms are not simply for visual / aesthetic reasons. There have been reports (sorry, I don’t have a link now) of physical / psychological problems because of the low-frequency vibration and noise that they put out. One wind tower probably won’t be too bad (other than the birds it kills), but huge collective farms of these things do emit a pulsing harmonic ‘noise’ that people feel more than hear, and it has apparently been causing problems.

Though I work for a company that produces utility-size (i.e. ‘huge’) coal-fired steam generators for electric power production, I wouldn’t want to live next door to one of those, either. Give me a nuke plant any day. In Michigan years ago I lived ten miles north of one, and 15 miles south of another. I wouldn’t mind living next door to either of them—or any other domestic (US) nuke that I know of.

@CyanoticWasp no nukes.

@JLeslie oh, we’ll be there when we get cold enough, or when we get tired of doing everything at night under the equivalent of 40W bulbs. Nukes are fine. Spent fuel is a problem for now, but not a hugely worrisome one—nowhere near as bad as it’s made out to be by non-experts (or by experts who have a vested interest in alarming you).

I think it’s fine for them to say no to a wind farm in their backyard, as long as they agree to have a gravestone of a soldier killed by an IED that was paid-for with profits from oil-sales.

In all seriousness though, I think @CyanoticWasp makes some fair points about some of the environmental challenges they create. I don’t think that means we shouldn’t invest in the technology, but that we should focus on placing them where it makes the most sense. I think they’re actually aesthetically pleasing, like giant moving sculptures churning out money from (not-so)thin air—what patriotic capitalist wouldn’t like something like that?

I think so. It’s not like a hidden system that doesn’t impact others. Noise pollution is an issue, It’s important to remember things things you see as small sacrifices can greatly affect another’s quality of life

The thing is if you put a wind farm in your backyard, people will still be killed at war. Your single wind farm is not going to end a war. Perhaps it is one small step in the right direction. Even then, if not a war on oil, it will be a war on something else. War is just too profitable to eliminate entirely.

Agree that logical land use planning based on scientific evidence – and not politics and profit – is vital, unfortunately land use planning is highly politicized and we end up with zoning and long term plans far from ideal.

re: nukes, we are human and humans make mistakes. If we go all into nuclear, eventually, someone will fuck up and we will all suffer for it. And suffer terribly. For multiple generations. I don’t see us engineering our way out of living without the sun, so solar energy seems like the most elegant solution. We should figure that out once and for all.

I don’t see the “energy crisis” as an impending doom that some people like to make it out to be. We’ve been aware of the issue since at least the 70’s, and simply need to work on technology to figure it out. It is not worth risking contamination of ourselves, food, or water to solve the energy problem. We can theoretically live without electricity (obviously life would be very different, certainly not as posh), but WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT FOOD AND WATER.

When the community owns the wind farm, as happens in some places in Europe, they seem pretty happy to have them in the back yard because the production belongs to the people whose “view is obstructed.” They directly benefit.

While I’m sure it’s also important to give up your view so a corporation can move in and reap the profits, it doesn’t feel quite as fair. I suppose allowing We The People to own them instead of allowing a corporation to own them would be greeted with cries of “OMG, Socialism!!1!!” in the U.S., though. :P

^Great point.

@laureth you bring up an interesting point. I wonder if a percent of the windmill’s profit were donated to support the local schools if that would be seen as a more positive marriage of private industry and public works.

To me, that is not the same as ownership.

Yes. Not because I do not believe we need to focus on clean energy, but because I think nothing good will come of handing our say over to our politicians more than we have to.

@lilikoi You bring up some interesting points in your first post. I’d like to discuss my opinions on some of them.

#1. I’m curious, how many proposed wind farms have been planned for places where it isn’t windy? I would think that’s something people would take in mind before proposing such an expensive project…

#2. So they’re visually obtrusive. So are skyscrapers and McDonalds and the millions of other ugly buildings that suffocate the world. And they’re not serving a better purpose.

#3. I’ve heard about this; apparently the early wind farms weren’t very well maintained because of the limitations of the technology at the time. I am hopeful that things have changed by now, and that with the increased urgency for the need of alternative energy these wind farms would be adequately maintained. Perhaps I’m naive?

#4. This is true. There are other important uses for land besides land farms; obviously I’m not saying every available stretch of land should be crowded up with wind farms. But where there is excess space, like in mainland US where the land stretches on forever or in other places that don’t seem to be used for anything else, what good reason is there not to have a wind farm?

#5. I understand that technology will only get better, but we can’t sit around and twiddle our thumbs while we wait for scientists to develop the magical technology that will liberate us from needing oil forever. That seems to be what people are doing now. Fixing climate change is a multi-faceted processes, and we need to do all we can on various levels to reduce our use of fossil fuels. That includes utilizing all types of alternative energy, including wind farms.

No one farm or hundred farms will eliminate our need for oil, but it’s a start. Climate change is a problem with a delayed reaction, which we humans aren’t used to dealing with. We can’t wait until things have gotten so bad that they significantly hurt human life; by then there will be nothing we can do. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t seem to understand this, which is making the jobs of those who do get it and are trying to fix the problem a lot harder.

Should the geological repository sites for nuclear waste be up to community vote? I’m sure everybody would say no. Choosing between nuclear power and wind farms I choose the wind farm. Choosing between excessive burning of fossil fuels and wind farms I choose the wind farm.

@ParaParaYukiko got it exactly right. Climate change is a problem with a delayed reaction. Our ecosystems and food chains will get disrupted. Species can’t adapt that fast. We need to apply the precautionary principle. Choosing between dead fish and wind farms I choose the wind farm. Civilization isn’t entirely free.

Whether or not we have wind farms will be dictated by China. They have control of 99% of the rare earth minerals. No one can make a wind generator, for any price, without these minerals.

@UScitizen do you have a link? that doesn’t sound right to me.

This is a good place to start. google for more. There are many, many more articles in reputable publications.
http://www.allgov.com/US_and_the_World/ViewNews/US_Mining_Company_Hopes_to_Break_Chinese_Monopoly_of_Rare_Minerals_100423

@UScitizen I’m no more worried about “Chinese monopoly on rare earth metals” than I am about “all the oil is in the Middle East”.

No one can eat the stuff, so it’s useless to hoard—except for use. In order to be of value it has to be used or offered in sale or trade, like any other fungible commodity.

@UScitizen Thanks for the link, (although technically it says 97%). I misunderstood your statement to mean that 99% of the rare earth minerals were located in China, when in fact it’s simply that China is the only one mining theirs on a large scale because nobody else can do it as cost-effectively as the Chineese can. Interesting read.

@UScitizen I agree that China has a huge role in shaping the future of the world in many ways. In the documentary I mentioned in my original Q, it was stated that, statistically, a new power plant is built every day in China. Or something like that.

I don’t know what the situation is with promoting alternative energy in China, but we in the US—and other powerful Western countries—need to set the right example and step it up.

There is wide variety in wind turbines, and some of them are very noisy.
I think that’s the most valid reason for community opposition.
There is an island among the San Juans in the Puget Sound where wind power was installed. Many of the people there moved there to be away from cities and noises and it was idyllic for them until the wind farm came.
Not all wind turbines are as noisy, but… if you can’t sleep due to noise from the new power farm that’s a problem.