June 18, 2016
Letters, South Dakota

Wind farms ruin quality of life

LETTER: Wind farms ruin quality of life | The Daily Republic | Jun 18, 2016 | www.mitchellrepublic.com

To the Editor:

I’ve been following your paper on the proposed wind farms for Davison or Sanborn County.

I commend the county and township officials in each county for standing up for their residents and against the smooth talking developers. In Bon Homme County, our zoning committee and county commissioners went against the overwhelming majority of residents who were against the short 1,000-foot setbacks and voted for everything the developer wanted every time he wanted it.

I live 9 miles south of the 41 towers southwest of Tripp. Every night, I can sit in my lazy boy and see the red lights flicker. When I put up hay almost next to the towers, I can hear them, see their obnoxious 500-plus feet steel structures ruin the skyline, and experience the shadow flicker when the sun is coming up or going down.

There are only a couple of things you need to know about why wind towers are built in the first place: They don’t run on wind, they run of tax subsidies. The records show when the production tax credit was not in effect in the past, construction of wind farms fell 93 percent. As Warren Buffet says, “That’s the only reason to build them.”

And, remember, wind energy is not alternative energy, its supplemental energy. When the wind doesn’t blow, there is no production, so how could you call that an alternative?

The federal production tax credit is supposed to phase out in five years. All the big tax money they promise to the counties where the wind farms are, will soon be distributed state-wide, so there is no advantage to have them in your county. Drive east of Pipestone, Minnesota, and see the farmers on $10,000 an acre land weaving in and out of rusty bankrupt wind towers. Go to Antelope County, Nebraska. The biggest shareholder of that huge project just went bankrupt.

Industrial wind farms are nothing more than a transfer of money from taxpayers to large, and mostly foreign, corporations.

Do your homework. They will ruin your quality of life.

Gregg Hubner

Avon

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2016/06/18/wind-farms-ruin-quality-of-life/