| Wind Watch is a registered educational charity, founded in 2005. |
HB6 saves Ohio from not-so-clean wind
Credit: The Columbus Dispatch | Jun 13, 2019 | www.dispatch.com ~~
Translate: FROM English | TO English
Translate: FROM English | TO English
Ohio’s best wind resources are Iowa’s worst. So why build thousands of massive 600-650-ft. wind turbines in northwest Ohio? It’s all about the subsidies. Wind turbines aren’t green by any stretch of the imagination, although corporations have spent millions in Ohio to convince the public otherwise. Wind turbines produce energy that is intermittent and unpredictable. They must be backed up by fossil fuels in new “peaker plants.”
Why would Ohio build inefficiency and extra air pollution into our grid? Follow the money in subsidies. Turbines require hundreds of gallons of oil laden with PCB’s. Do these turbines leak oil or crash to the ground? Absolutely. Do these turbines ever catch on fire? Yes, and the PCB-laden oil burns with the neodymium magnets to release a highly cancerous toxic cloud.
Estimates put the tear-down cost of a single modern wind turbine at over $200,000. The blades are a fiberglass composite which isn’t recyclable and can’t be sold. Consequently, 47 million tons of unsustainable blade waste could be added to the world’s landfills within the next few decades.
Even if we buried an area of Ohio about the size of Rhode Island in industrial wind generators, they still would not produce the consistent, robust energy that our two nuclear facilities make. In 2013 Ohio had an extended polar vortex during which natural gas pipelines could not keep up. What saved the day in 2013 and kept us all from freezing in northern Ohio? It was our two nuclear plants.
The Ohio Senate should do the right thing for Ohio and pass H.B. 6 to save our nuclear facilities, give local communities a voice in allowing wind development and level the playing field of subsidies for wind and nuclear.
Deb Hay, Bellevue
This article is the work of the source indicated. Any opinions expressed in it are not necessarily those of National Wind Watch.
The copyright of this article resides with the author or publisher indicated. As part of its noncommercial educational effort to present the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development to a global audience seeking such information, National Wind Watch endeavors to observe “fair use” as provided for in section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law and similar “fair dealing” provisions of the copyright laws of other nations. Send requests to excerpt, general inquiries, and comments via e-mail.
| Wind Watch relies entirely on User Funding |
 (via Stripe) |
 (via Paypal) |
Share:
[ Short URL: https://wind-watch.org/news/?p=93176 ]
