Naive about wind project
Rutland Herald | via: Grandpa's Knob Wind Project 15 June 2012
Wednesday’s editorial was almost cute in its naivete. It said Reunion Power has a good case for building 20 490-foot-tall turbines along a six-mile stretch of ridgeline through four towns because there’s a road providing access to radio towers.
As anyone who’s seen the destruction on Vermont’s Lowell Mountain can tell you, wind developers blast their own roads wherever they want them. At 35 or more feet wide, these roads don’t resemble the dirt mountain road that currently accesses the radio towers on Grandpa’s Knob either. With extensive blasting, tons of stone used, and bridges built they are more like a modern highway. Ironically, the wind turbines may well interfere with radio tower signals anyway.
A common misconception is that wind farms in Vermont will somehow aid in the fight against global warming. While no amount of wind turbines will ever close a baseload power plant, a simpler way to look at it is this: We currently have a glut of electricity on the grid of ISO New England. VELCO, the company responsible for keeping us in a steady supply of electricity, projects at most a minuscule increase in our electricity needs over the next 20 years. The projected lifespan of a wind turbine is 20 years. So how could using the massive amounts of fossil fuel required to build a wind farm in Vermont, to create electricity we don’t need, result in a decrease of global warming carbon emissions?
It’s great the Rutland Herald is writing about this massive project proposed for Rutland County, but now it’s time to dig a little deeper and find out facts. Building wind farms does little more than assuage our consciences in our quest to combat climate change. It makes more sense to do things that actually work.
JOHN GEERY
Clarendon
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/06/15/naive-about-wind-project/