Serious opposition to wind
The Orleans Record, orleanscountyrecord.com 16 February 2012
There is gathering opposition to utility-sized wind projects. We endorse it, and we hope that the movement spreads. The northeastern side of Vermont with its ridges and low population density makes it prime real estate for wind farm entrepreneurs hoping to make a killing on taxpayer subsidies for “green,” renewable energy supplies.
To date, the only killings that such projects have returned to Vermonters are ruined ridgelines and ruinous utility bills. Without serious examination of the climatic facts, everybody got on the wind alternate energy source bandwagon, never questioning or slowing down to examine the reliability of sufficient wind to make power or the outrageous taxpayer subsidies that the environmental activists got past the Legislature.
Since then, like a wicked hangover, the facts of unreliability and economic irresponsibility have set in, and more and more people realize that we have been taken by the snake-oil traveling wind salesmen. Just two of them: the wind blows only intermittently across our ruined ridges, making wind power so unreliable that we must build/retain fossil fuel backup plants for when it doesn’t blow; and paying five times the cost of clean nuclear power, even fossil fuel power, will have businesses and jobs flying across our borders.
There is a crying need for extensive, non-partisan, scientific evaluations of the blessings/damages/reliability, and costs to Vermont’s economy of large scale wind farms. Until those studies are done and the results are in, the state should place a strict moratorium on further projects.
As former Obama adviser Larry Summers cautioned his boss in 2009, “The government is a crappy venture capitalist.”
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/02/16/serious-opposition-to-wind/