“I will grant that [Kevon Martis] gave a polished presentation of some very selected ‘facts’ totally trashing wind turbines and the power companies and wind energy companies associated with them. His one hour presentation had all of 5 seconds where he had something positive to say about wind turbines as ‘giving local entities a little bit of tax money’ (Don Smucker, below).

“If there was a substantive criticism in my talk, Smucker never proffered it and resorted instead to base name calling.” (Martis, below)

Industrial wind turbines: Dilute. Intermittent. Unneeded. Duplicative. Taxpayer/government dependent. Ugly. Noisy. Blade shadows. Flicker light. Bird hazard. Infrastructure heavy (steel, concrete, and land). Energy sprawl (service roads, long transmission to markets with line loss). Landfill issues.

Is wind the perfect imperfect energy for the modern electricity grid?…

“Which source of mortality kills more or less birds is somewhat irrelevant…. the threat posed by wind turbines grows with each facility constructed in a high-risk area for birds.”

– Joel Merriman, American Bird Conservancy

The “avian mortality problem” has long been an issue for industrial wind turbines, as chronicled over the years at MasterResource. Even fossil fuel critics, such as Paul Gipe (and Christopher Flavin) in Wind Energy Comes of Age (1995), have lamented the by-products of industrial wind. And who can forget the characterization used by the Los Angeles head of the Sierra Club in a 1989 hearing? “Cuisinarts of the Air’.

The problem persists. At the anti-wind site, Stop These Things, one author wrote this week: “Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350Kph routinely smash them out of existence.”…

“Since 2015, nearly 300 government entities from Vermont to Hawaii have moved to reject or restrict wind projects. Local governments are implementing a panoply of regulations to restrict the growth of wind projects including strict limits on noise, minimum setback distances, and even seeking licenses for heliports. A thorough review of the studies [has] documented the deleterious health impacts of noise from wind turbines.” (Robert Bryce, below)

MasterResource has followed the growing issue of negative health effects of industrial wind turbines. The latest was an update (March 18, 2021) from acoustical engineer Stephen Cooper regarding vibrations and infrasound (low frequency noise) from wind turbines on nearby residents.

Cooper, part of the wind power debate since his pioneering study of the Cape Bridgewater Wind Farm in southwest Victoria in Australia in 2014 (also see here), is a scientist to watch.…

“[Brian] Ross was stunned by his first look at a map of the Twin Cities region … show[ing] a hypothetical horizon in 2050 filled with new wind farms sprouting less than 40 miles from downtown Minneapolis…. Five other U.S. cities are similarly “mapped”…. ‘Holy moly,’ Ross exclaimed. ‘How on Earth are you going to get people not coming with pitchforks and tar to these siting meetings?'”

“Though [the Princeton] study concludes that ‘adequate land area exists’ to deploy enough wind and solar power … getting there will require building wind and solar units and power lines right now matching the highest annuals levels ever achieved in the United States. And development would only accelerate from there.” (E&E News, below)

Sometimes even the mainstream media gets an inconvenient fact out there amid the hype of a narrative.…