filed: June 30, 2011 • Letters, Tennessee

Wind farms not worth the extra costs

Credit: www.knoxnews.com 30 June 2011 ~~

Drive through Indiana or Illinois and you will see miles of huge wind turbines, spaced about half a mile apart. To equal a typical 1,000-megawatt power plant, you need a wind farm about 17 miles square. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

Seventeen miles square is 289 square miles. New York City (metropolitan area) consumes 11,000 megawatts of electricity per day. To provide that much power, you need 11 such wind farms, or 3,179 square miles. That is all the rural area of the state of Connecticut made into a wind farm for New York City. Then you would need all the rural areas of Delaware and Rhode Island as a wind farm for Connecticut. And so on.

Of the 3.5 million square land miles in the lower 48 states, 3 million square miles of wind farms are needed to equal the electricity consumption of the nation. (They need to be) operating and ready to make up deficiencies on a millisecond’s notice.

All of this new capital investment and land purchase/lease, on top of maintaining the conventional power plants, will be hugely expensive, making, as President Barack Obama promised, electricity costs “necessarily skyrocket.” A significant part of our economy will shut down under this expense and reopen overseas.

Who could possibly object to this plan?

Rick Fischer

Loudon

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