“AgForce is aware of excessive noise complaints at both Mt Emerald and Coopers Gap Wind Farm with a court case on noise nuisance still in progress against the Mt Emerald Wind Farm5…. Noise pollution can cause … fatigue, headaches, elevated blood pressure, irritability, digestive disorders and increased susceptibility to cold and other minor infections.”

“AgForce also has concerns about the impact of wind farms on livestock…. The British Horse Society Advisory Statement recommends a setback of at least 4 times the overall height away from the path of horses to minimise safety risk.”

MasterResource has long reported on the health and nuisance problems of industrial wind turbines on residents and wildlife. There is a reason why such turbines are built remotely and need so much transmission, adding more cost to the high costs of dilute, intermittent, uneconomic energy.…

“This seems a little crazy. During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying ERCOT to take their power…. You could … build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.”

Some 15 years ago, Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem commented on a strange phenomenon–negative pricing by wind power, where operators with very low marginal costs (the wind is free) were paying takers per KWh to gain big tax credits, mostly federal.

Giberson’s analysis (reposted below) identified the malinvestment and ‘big anti-conservation incentive’. But he did not focus on what cumulatively would result from this distortion: a wounded Texas grid from chronic low prices/margins knocking out thermal generation. The unreliables–via government privilege– knocking out the reliables (what Bill Peacock would call predatory pricing).…

“I was in Boone, North Carolina, from 1977 through May 1983 at Appalachian State and, trust me, we got many laughs out of this windmill. Especially how it generated one MW of reliable electricity and, somehow, did so without the blades ever turning.”   – Victor Culpepper

On social media, environmental scientist Victor Culpepper remarked (above) about an early wind project with reference to an article, Ill-Fated Windmill Just Outside Boone (July 11, 2016). A previous MasterResource post recounted the 1940–45 Grandpa’s Knob grid wind power project in Vermont; the article below from North Carolina’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources summarizes a 1979 wind project.

On July 11, 1979, Boone celebrated “Windmill Day” with a street festival to dedicate NASA’s Mod-1, the world’s largest megawatt industrial windmill on Howard’s Knob.

The windmill was installed on the 4,400-foot peak as part of a program run by NASA and the U.S.