March 18, 2007
Letters, Massachusetts

Use of wind power will solve nothing

To the Editor of THE EAGLE:

I was shocked at your editorial of March 5 titled “Let wind project breathe free.” Your statement that the Hoosac Wind Project “will provide enough power to the grid to serve roughly 9,000 homes” is utterly ridiculous since it implies that the beneficiaries will be residential users. Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of our electricity use is encumbered by business and industry. Furthermore, whatever electricity provided by the project does not go directly to residential users anyway.

Wind power has never caused a fossil fuel or nuclear power plant to be shut down. Wind power is so unpredictable (and generation is much less in summer months when demand is high) that all those nasty polluting plants still have to continue to operate.

You also write about with the “perils of global warming and of dependence on Middle Eastern countries for oil, wind energy is moving to the foreground” Windmills produce electricity, not effectively or efficiently, but that is all they produce. Less than 3 percent of U.S. electricity is produced by oil-fired plants. So given the paltry amount of unreliable electricity produced by wind farms, would we reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil? Of course not.

CLARK H. BILLINGS

North Adams, March 9, 2007

berkshireeagle.com

18 March 2007


URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/03/18/use-of-wind-power-will-solve-nothing/