Wind turbines a monumental failure
www.guelphmercury.com 16 March 2012
Re: Wind turbines a good investment – Feb. 25
While I appreciate that John Hollen is sincere in his views, his letter smacks of a complete lack of knowledge about the entire wind industry.
It’s nice that, to Hollen, the wind turbines in Arthur seem majestic and a symbol of human ingenuity. He also states that the majority of people are completely indifferent when it comes to turbines.
My husband and I felt exactly the same way less than a year ago, until we started doing serious research into this issue. The more layers you peel back on this topic, the more appalling and smelly it becomes. Far from being benign gentle giants on our landscape, wind turbines are a colossal environmental, ecological and economic disaster.
While wind companies and the government would have you believe that turbines are totally innocuous, they fail to reveal the true environmental consequences of wind energy (pollution on a disastrous scale, human health effects, bird and bat deaths, the carbon dioxide generated from a two million pound concrete base, etc.).
1) The production of turbines creates tremendous pollution, specifically in China, where once fertile farmland has been turned into toxic waste dumps when rare earth elements needed for the magnets in these turbines is mined. As well, is Hollen aware that there are now thousands of abandoned wind turbines in the United States? The life span of a turbine is approximately 20 years. What do we do with these 180-metre concrete and steel hulking giants then?
2) If you don’t believe that wind turbines impact real estate sales, ask the developers in Port Elgin, who have had people back out of sales agreements to build homes, leaving some houses partially built and in one case, an entire block sale of homes was lost.
3) There are families all over Ontario who have abandoned their properties due to the health problems they’ve experienced living near wind installations. Some of them have walked away from farms that have been in their families for generations. Some of them now rent or have bought other homes to live in, while still having to pay the bills on their original property. No one does that without good reason. These were people – like the rest of us – who originally thought that wind turbines were a good thing. Go to YouTube and look up videos posted by people who have had to abandon their properties. They’re not hard to find and are gut-wrenching to listen to.
4) Finally, Hollen states that wind turbines are a “good investment.” Perhaps he’s unaware of the auditor general’s report just a few months ago that blasted the Green Energy Act and gave it a scathing failure mark.
I could go on and on, but I don’t think there’d be enough room on this page to detail all of the reasons why wind turbines are a monumental failure.
What may look nice to Hollen is an eyesore to someone else, and just because something is called “green” does not necessarily make it so. People need to stop being so easily duped by that title.
Lori Griffin
Port Elgin
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/03/16/wind-turbines-a-monumental-failure/