Free Republic

Visiting America last week to talk to audiences across the country about "global warming", I was struck by television commercials for the two presidential candidates. Senators McCain and Obama were each shown in front of film of the same giant wind farm, to lay claim to virtually identical "green" credentials. Since America has already built five times as many wind turbines as Britain, covering thousands of square miles, I checked out how much electricity all those 10,000 turbines actually produce. The answer is around 4.5 gigawatts - not much more than a single large coal-fired power station.

[ROBERT M. SYKES is Professor emeritus Civil and environmental engineering Ohio State University Mount Vernon] I was disappointed to see that the very large negative effects on both Ohio's economy and environment were not discussed in the July 27 article "Wind power likely to blow in," on the wind-power projects in Champaign County. The first issue is the high cost of wind power, which is about 2.5 to three times the cost of coal-generated power. Large wind-power projects exist only because of large government subsidies. Otherwise, wind power would be restricted to a few applications where the physical isolation of...