“Mr. Anderson and the Energy and Policy Institute marginalize themselves by assuming what must be debated. Thinking persons want to know about tradeoffs: economic and environmental. And what about the fact that Tom Stacy has been and mostly is a volunteer for his cause, unlike Anderson who gets a nice full-time, six-figure salary for his?”

It is strange to read a perfectly normal, accurate biography of someone only to realize that the other side is using facts to try to smear someone for doing a sensible thing.

And for Tom Stacy, that “thing” is pushing back at the grassroots level against monstrous industrial wind turbines that are environmentally invasive, anti-consumer, and anti-taxpayer.

Yet mainstream environmentalists, favoring high prices and less reliability for the master resource of energy, not to mention environmental energy sprawl, pretend that there is an inherent social good in renewable energies that are inferior in every which way.…

[Note this post is the most popular article ever published on Master Resource. It has been now been significantly updated. Go here to see the current version.]

Trying to pin down the arguments of wind promoters is a bit like trying to grab a greased balloon. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it morphs into a different story and escapes your grasp. Let’s take a quick highlight review of how things have evolved with merchandising industrial wind energy.

1 – Wind energy was abandoned for most commercial and industrial applications, well over a hundred years ago. Even in the late 1800s it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning, more modern needs for power. When we throw the switch, we expect that the lights will go on – 100% of the time.…

Editor Note: Steven Cooper has advanced our understanding of how people react to real recorded pressure pulsations from industrial wind turbines. In the last six months he has presented eight papers at Acoustic Meetings in Zurich, Boston and New Orleans. With this interview, he breaks down some of the salient points of his research discoveries. Cooper’s work is expanding our knowledge about “soundscapes” near projects, which could result in new legal requirements for manufacturers and developers.

“In general, wind farm applications claim that turbines do not generate any low-frequency, tonal, or impulsive characteristics, which is a matter disputed by residential receivers. The consequence of the pulsating signal generated by turbines (whether audible or inaudible) could potentially require a further adjustment to any perception or impact generated by wind turbines.”

“On discussing the resident’s observations (with the residents) for the first two weeks I found the use of describing the impacts in terms of Noise, Vibration, and Sensation was accepted by the residents as a better concept.”

“Next to aesthetic impact, no aspect of wind energy creates more alarm or more debate than noise…. Wind turbines are not silent. They are audible. All wind turbines create unwanted sound, that is, noise. Some do so to a greater degree than others. And the sounds they produce—the swish of blades through the air, the whir of gears inside the transmission, and the hum of the generator—are typically foreign to rural settings where wind turbines are the most often used.”

– Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York:  John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 371.

“Why is sensitisation to noise and vibration important? From a public health perspective, sensitisation of individuals to noise will predictably lead to worsening individual health outcomes, especially via the well-known disease pathways associated with chronic stress, and chronic sleep deprivation.”