Wind power is no panacea
Wednesday, April 10, 2013, concordmonitor.comWednesday, April 10, 2013, concordmonitor.com
Wednesday, April 10, 2013, concordmonitor.comWednesday, April 10, 2013, concordmonitor.com
Kyle McAdam’s letter, “Wind is part of the solution” (Monitor, April 1), is misguided.
Wind power is not the panacea that many seem to think it is. Yes, climate change is real, is happening and is serious. No argument there. The real question is, what should we do about it?
Renewable energy doesn’t move any cars off the road, even figuratively. At best, we are reducing equivalent emissions of a number of additional cars that come on the road. Reducing energy consumption and increasing energy efficiency needs to be our first line of attack.
Wind farms have been built on several New Hampshire mountain ridges, and there are proposals to build many more. Four-hundred-foot towers over 100-foot trees is not something those of us who love the outdoors like to look at.
Putting in wind farms means building roads on mountain ridges to get the stuff up there. It means fragmenting the forest and cutting trees around the towers to create empty space around the towers to increase wind flow.
Another problem is that the wind doesn’t always blow. The intermittent nature of wind means that a backup source must be kept in place. Normally, this will be of a fossil-fuel nature.
Putting wind farms up isn’t going to stop global warming, but it will detract from the beauty of our state, a beauty that brings many of our tourists here in the first place.
DAVID MILLS
Concord
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2013/04/12/wind-power-is-no-panacea/