March 6, 2011
Letters, Ohio

Here are some tips for wind energy proponents

Mansfield News Journal, www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com 6 March 2011

The Cincinnati writer omitted an important positive aspect of wind farms: None will be erected in Cincinnati. Urban residents are accustomed to industrialization, we country mice moved out to avoid it.

In defense of my maligned felines, I also dispute his claim that more birds are killed by cats than by windmills. It is an often-cited statistic that never includes the specifics of the founding study. More people are attacked by pigs than by sharks, but I personally will take my chances with the pig. I do occasionally see here at home the feathery remains of a sparrow or other small bird. I have yet to find the carcass of a red-tailed hawk, blue heron, peregrine falcon, great horned owl or bald eagle. Perhaps the writer has more ambitious cats than I.

If you are a true believer in wind energy, or a company promoting an industrial wind installation, you could help your cause tremendously by doing the following:

• Buy the turbines from an American manufacturer.

• Don’t use future taxpayer money funded by debt to China to finance wind installations.

• Use manufacturer-recommended turbine setbacks from your non-participant neighbors’ properly line, rather than residence.

• Offer neighbors property value guarantees.

• Suspend your denial of adverse impact from noise and shadow flicker. Offer compensation to neighbors beforehand, rather than litigation afterward.

• Allow competition between the 20 or so wind companies working over Ohio. Let the landowner choose the company with the best contract before the boundaries are awarded.

• Share the income from renewable energy credits, carbon offsets, tax credits and other revenue streams with your partner, the landowner.

• Put one on your property and pay for it yourself.

If the writer sincerely believes that we are not paying the full cost of coal generation, his time is well spent alerting the public to those costs, and creating systems to address them. But to offer a technology with proven economic and environmental failures worldwide as a substitute for our systems that work, and funding it with debt upon future generations, will not solve the stated underlying problem.

Bert Heffner

Shelby

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2011/03/06/here-are-some-tips-for-wind-energy-proponents/