[ButThreeLeftsDo]

The 'Green Police' will be by shortly to quiet these heretics....

[cripplecreek]

The green economy of the midwest has begun its collapse before it ever got going.

“Michigan- BPW blows off two wind power prospects (”too expensive”)”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2426536/posts

[DesertSapper]

An hour east of Lubbock, TX there are many of these eyesores. I’m glad I don’t live near them.

[steve-b]

Nina Pierpoint, a New York physician who has examined the issue, describes "wind turbine syndrome" with symptoms that include sleep disturbance, ear pressure, vertigo, nausea, blurred vision, panic attacks and memory problems.

What, she left out headaches, fatigue, back pain, and the heartbreak of psoriasis? Sorry, Nina -- I'm afraid you aren't going to get any ambulance-chaser-consultant business with that kind of half-hearted "effort"!

[Kickass Conservative]

Those windmills wouldn't be there if their name was Kennedy.

[Dem Guard]

It amazes me major road projects are held up for years by environmental concerns over frogs and snails and yet these things are going up all over the country with no environmental concerns from our green pointy headed libs!

[Brimack34]

This is why Pawlenty has no shot. He is the Green Police.

[Publius6961]

This is absurd, and typical of bureaucratic "project so-called management."

Private construction projects have always been analyzed and planning requirements met and mitigation put in place.
Public projects are not.

How much intellectual horsepower does it require to set minimum distance from residential structures, and at least a cursory environmental impact statement?

I was in the design and processing end of developments and construction of both public and private projects. Fortunately, mostly at the pointy end of design and "processing." This BS has been going on for many decades.

[chimera]

Aside from the environmental impacts noted here, the inconvenient truth is that wind is just poor at generation. Right now Great Britain is in the midst a severe cold snap (check out some of those satellite images, the whole island is frosted over) and their wind generation assets are producing at about a 4% capacity factor (high pressure and lack of wind). California had a similar problem a few years ago when they were dealing with their heat waves. The wind-based power sources had about a 5% capacity factor during that time of peak power demand.

On average wind-based generation has capacity factors in the range of 25% or so. That means to have an equivalent output compared with more reliable sources, you have to overbuild by a factor of four. Not good when you factor in things like transmission infrastructure requirements, power management and grid stability, land use, etc. Your other choice is to have available quick-start, high reliability backup generation, and right now, that means natural gas. So relying on wind for a significant portion of your baseload capacity builds in a structural requirement to burn more fossil fuel, which of course undercuts one of the main arguments for developing it as a resource.