h/t to Tom Nelson
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Flokalavisen.dk%2Fse-billederne-havoern-hakket-midt-over-af-vindmoelle-%2FSjaelland-Politi%2F20130506%2Fartikler%2F130509461%2F1265&edit-text= translated original story
5 of those monsters went up just east of us. We’re right in the middle of the Arctic migration route…. another 10 have gone up to the west of us. They want to build THE largest wind turbines in Canada- 600 feet tall- 77 of them, all around us, 8 within a mile and half of our house. We’re in a lawsuit with a score of other families to stop them. There are all kinds of birds in this region, including 25 pairs of eagles.
How can these people be so blind.
Ideology, the belief they are saving #Gaia and atoning for their sins of being born into affluent society, and of course the rent seeking by those whose only concern is profit at the expense of everyone else.
Otter, I sincerely hope you and your neighbors are successful at stopping this madness!
This is truly disgusting!!!
Recruit some jihadis … maybe leave a few drums labelled “Ebola – Handle With Care” laying around the site.
Otter, if you don’t already know, there is a good Australian site on wind-farms;
http://stopthesethings.com/
Recently they had this story; “Board of Health Declares Wisconsin Wind Farm a “Human Health Hazard””
http://stopthesethings.com/2014/10/16/board-of-health-declares-wisconsin-wind-farm-a-human-health-hazard/
It’s not just birds and bats, it’s your own health as well.
I want the politicians and scientists and activists who forced this all upon us to be financially responsible for the dismantling of these bird killers. Then I want the deadly green gaia ideology to be declared as dangerous (just like Shintoism and Naziism after WWII) and banned from public discourse.
As much as I’ll defend someone’s right to free speech there comes a time when particular speech is so effective that it’s outcome, if followed, will lead to economic suicide.
If they want to follow that ideology in private and live the miserable life that Gaiaism entails then that’s fine with me, but keep it to yourself. Darwinism will take care of the problem if they decide to go that route.
Unfortunately, our forefathers expected the vast majority of us would have common sense and not go stupidly off the deep end over anything. Mass stupidity and no sense about reality is the order of the day. Our universities, which are supposed to contain the “smart ones”, seem to be full of people indulging in fantastic thinking. These people seem to think that when they say the most outrageous things , then their fantasies will become the new reality. So many of them are perpetually angry because that doesn’t seem to happen. This makes them dangerous. They hate skeptics because we conflict with their fantasy worlds by observing and accepting reality. So now some of the worst are calling for us to be murdered because we have a grasp on reality, and they are clueless about how to deal with it.
I meant to add that this hawk never appeared in their fantasies about free energy and so they will never accept that this chopped bird exists.
Good point, Ernest!
Wind power- The clean energy of the future.
Killing Bats
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15126.full
and pollution
http://www.sundaypost.com/news-views/scotland/special-investigation-toxic-wind-turbines-1.282890
Sacrifices to Gaia.
I suspect that the bird and bat fatalities from windmills are understated. When the electric company erected windmills on our farm, the government hired researchers from a university 150 miles away to study the resulting bird and bat fatalities. They came once or twice a week to look under the windmills and counted the dead birds. In the meantime, the coyotes and foxes had long ago scampered away with the carnage. I am confident that the fatalities on our farm exceeded what they reported for the whole project. Meanwhile the mosquito population in our area has exploded with the arrival of the windmills. What politician thinks through the issues clearly and far enough to connect increase in West Nile disease with their mandated windmills?
If you look closely, I think you’ll find that’s just one, not a pair. The turbine chopped it in half.
Wind turbines increase bird populations, turning one into two, don’t you know?
Good obervation. After enlarging the picture I tend to think you are right. That just makes the picture more gruesome, however. It gives credence to the term “bird choppers.”
See the google translate link Ima Skepticidal posted in the first comment. It gives the details.
I’ve never been really clear on why, if they can spend so much to erect a wind turbine and the technology to connect it to the grid, they cannot put a flexible plastic grille around the zone that the propellers turn in, to deflect birds either under, over, or around this zone. If they make the plastic parts small enough and aerodynamic enough, there need not be a major impact on the wind power that is available to the turbines. Are they really so greedy that they won’t even give up a couple of mph to save the lives of millions birds?
RTF
It’s not likely an easy engineering task. The smaller the parts of the grille, the weaker and more external support requirements. And what happens to creatures that inevitably find their way inside of the grille? Bird in a blender? Bugs, birds, dirt and vegetative debris would accumulate on both sides of the grille and make a maintenance nightmare. The grille would have to withstand variable forces on inside and out.
Points taken, but if it were up to me, I’d try anyway. We cannot under any circumstances be responsible for the extinction of hundreds of species of migratory birds, just for a few measly megawatt-hours.
I appreciate your analysis.
RTF
Richard, here’s an idea … don’t build the fucking things in the first piace!
Problem solved!
It’s a Toss-up! Solar thermal mirrors concentrating before the power tower, or wind, What is the biggest bird killer? We’ll have the data from Ivanpah in a few years. Then we can award the Greatest Bird Killing technology on Earth.
Clarification of my idea. If building them were up to me, I wouldn’t build them. If not, I would at least put in a grille to try to save birds. If it failed, it failed. If it was a mess, it was a mess. But I would not leave the birds helpless, knowing that the plan is to blanket the land with these things.
For a tenth of the space and a tenth of the cost, build a rail to transport coal.
Or maybe God put coal on Earth to tempt people into sin. I will have to ask Katharine Hayhoe what the teleological meaning of “coal” is.
Oh no, please don’t. Using coal in moderation is not sinful. That’s what it’s there for! Wind turbines, as used, are sinful because in the long run, they are an ineffective solution, and they remove resources from solutions that would be effective. I don’t have a problem with smaller scale uses of wind power for non-critical applications, but to connect them to the grid is simply insane.
To those who would say coal is meant as a short-term solution to get us over the technological hill to something else, I might agree if it weren’t for the fact that we seem so inept at finding better solutions. Do I think we are supposed to blast an entire mountain range to smithereens in order to keep the energy flowing? No. But if we prove unequal to the task of finding abundant sources of renewable energy, then we need to keep finding the coal and using it. The greater sin would be leaving it in the ground while there is a shortage of usable energy.
I happen to think run-of-the-river hydro is great, and I think concentrating solar generation and tidal generation have their place. But all of these technologies are suffering from overly negative portrayals. So they are underutilized, and instead we end up with wind farms and totally ridiculous PV farms hooked to the grid. Completely, utterly useless and a complete waste of time and money.
RTF
P.s. I live close to a rail line that brings coal for power generation every few days, and that power goes out to both the Tampa and Orlando metropoleis, in addition to locally. The noise of the train is awful, the vibration is aggravating, and there is always a risk of derailment. (It happened once just a couple miles from here.) But I often say a prayer of thanks when I see that coal. Those cars racing south, with the heaps of shiny coal jutting out from the top, equal life itself for millions of people. If, God forbid, it stopped tomorrow, the grid would go down from Miami to Tampa to Jacksonville within one day. And it would stay down for a long time. (That is more than 17 million people who would be in the dark, and most of them without jobs.)
By the way, nearly everyone down here uses electric heating for their homes and businesses.
We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to the guys who make those coal deliveries possible.
RTF
Richard
I take then that your talking the tracks going to the Crystal River generating complex. BTW they also barge coal in. Units 1&2 are the old Combustion Engineering/Raymond (Now ABB). Units 4&5 use the more modern Babcock and Wilcox system. Unit 3 is a nuc unit. All of them condense sea water as their water source. Unit #1 used to supply Disney but I don’t know about how they do it now. Anyway it is an impressive complex. I’m wondering if they ever built any of those desalination plants they were talking about back last decade?
Rah,
The only desal plant that I know of is in Hillsborough County, and was completed around, I think, 2001. It’s a fairly small plant. It was designed to be more substantial, but because of local contracting corruption they ended up with a plant that had major defects that substantially reduced the throughput.
Florida definitely needs a lot more desal capacity, but people are so obsessed with CO2 right now that it’s on the back burner.
I’m actually in Polk, which has either three or four coal plants, depending on whether the Bartow combined-cycle plant (9 units, 1133 MW) uses any coal, which it may do. Three of these plants (McIntosh – 941 MW, Polk – 940 MW and Larsen – 76 MW) are definitely coal plants, and the first two send a lot of power west and east, respectively. Bartow also sends the great majority of its power west to Hillsborough and, probably, Pinellas.
I am about five miles from McIntosh and Larsen, which are right together. MacIntosh, last I knew, was the fifth largest coal plant in the state, though at present only one of its five units is coal. Coal for at least these two plants, as well as Bartow if in fact Bartow uses coal, comes by my street. It also seems possible that some of Big Bend’s coal (Hillsborough County, 7 units, 4 of them coal, total 2000 MW) comes by here.
The reactor at Crystal River has actually been down since 2009, and is now being decommissioned. This was a big scandal, and is playing a huge role in the current gubernatorial race.
There’s some talk around here from the local municipal electric utility, about them partnering with TECO and some other unspecified utility (hopefully not Duke!) and building a nuclear plant in or near Polk County. As you might expect, the planning process is chaos, and if it ever gets built it’ll probably cost about $15 billion and take 10 years to build. At some point prior to that, they’ll probably decide to shutter most of our local coal capacity and convert it to gas. This will likely happen just as the price of gas is soaring again. That’ll free up all that coal to sell to China. Then we’ll really be having fun!
Sorry, I didn’t mean Bartow, that’s a different plant. I meant Hines Energy Complex, which is located in Bartow, Fl.
In looking at Duke’s website, they’re calling Hines an “Oil/Gas Fired Plant”.
http://www.duke-energy.com/power-plants/oil-gas-fired/hines.asp
So that means that the majority of the coal that goes past me is headed for McIntosh.
People got fed up with ugly power lines and phone lines on poles, so a lot of communities started burying the cables underground. Maybe we should do that with wind generators as well.
🙂
These idiots always throw out the excuse that cats and cars kill more birds. Ever see a cat hauling around a eagle or hawk or one hitting your windshield? Its hard to stomach such stupidity in so-called smart people. They will end up being rusted monuments of failure, greed, arrogance and fraud.