Fox Islands Wind Neighbors

Wind energy panel recommends against Lennox Mountain turbine

blogger — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 02:02:16 +0000

Updated: 02/16/2012 04:08:49 PM EST

Berkshire Eagle, MA, Thursday February 16, 2012

LENOX — A study group’s report says the town should abandon a wind energy proposal.

After four months of study, the majority of the Wind Energy Research Panel is recommending the proposal be scuttled because it won’t be a financial benefit to Lenox, but would raise health concerns and yield a negative environmental impact. The panel was assigned by the Select Board to evaluate a single or double municipal wind-turbine installation atop Lenox Mountain.

The 44-page, heavily annotated report is on the town’s website, www.townoflenox.com.

The findings will be discussed at a forum at 7 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 27, at Town Hall. Two days later, the Select Board is expected to vote to move forward or abandon the project.

The six-member panel, with two alternates, was comprised of half supporters and half opponents of the turbine proposal. It was formed on the heels of a study by Weston Solutions Inc., of Concord, N.H., which found the mountaintop a “viable” site for wind-driven energy.

Despite initial discord, the group developed a mostly harmonious working relationship with the guidance of moderator Kenneth Fowler, a Select Board member who was applauded by more than 40 members of the public attending Wednesday night’s Select Board meeting, where the report was submitted officially.

Panel members decided to divide into subgroups to explore the financial, health and environmental impacts of

the turbine proposal. Meeting 10 times since Oct. 31, including a visit to Lenox Mountain, two of the three subgroups — environmental and financial — prepared consensus reports, while the two members of the health subgroup submitted separate findings. Each panel member also included personal statements in the final report.Key findings:

– The financial subgroup declared that for the Select Board to recommend moving the project forward, the project’s “benefits should outweigh the project’s impacts and be worth the project’s associated risks and uncertainties.” But it determined that if Lenox owned the turbine installation, it could lose several million dollars under a worst-case scenario, exposing the town to “considerably more financial risk and uncertainty than ownership by a third-party developer.”

But ownership by a third party would place control of the project and its site in the hands of the developer “with the best outcome being only a very small annual net benefit to the town — less than one half of one percent of today’s town budget.”

Panelists Joanne Magee, an opponent from the start, and Eric Vincelette, an initial supporter, agreed that “given the likely poor financial performance of the project and the associated risks and uncertainties, the financial subgroup does not recommend going forward.”

– The environmental panelists, Jamie Cahillane, an initial supporter, and Channing Gibson, an opponent, warned that the town “has the profound responsibility to treat its natural legacy with respect and careful deliberation. Once construction begins, Lenox Mountain will cease to exist as it does today. Before any further consideration of siting wind turbines on the mountain, in order to understand as completely as possible any potential risks to its environment, the panel recommends the town commission additional studies by qualified experts in environmental fields.

“Additionally, before proceeding with any proposal to site turbines on Lenox Mountain, residents of the town should be provided, in multiple public forums, a clear understanding of all positive and negative environmental impacts.”

– The health subgroup returned a split verdict, with Dr. Michael Kaplan, a Lee family practitioner, recommending that the project “should continue to be planned, as it would not likely harm the health of nearby residents. Further study regarding expected sound levels at nearby homes would be necessary. Both Richmond and Lenox residents would need to find benefit from a community-owned wind project for it to succeed.”

But MIT Professor Christopher Magee, citing numerous studies, concluded that “there is significant risk that at least some if not many of the residents living within a mile of the potential Lenox Mountain site would suffer from sleep disturbance. Thus, we cannot recommend proceeding any further with such a development at this time.”

Mass: Wind turbine critics question panel’s report on health impacts

blogger — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:44:14 +0000

“When I read the report, I saw many of the same patterns that we saw early on with those issues where the information is cherry-picked, despite tremendous amounts of information,” she said. “The people who are suffering are dismissed as having annoyance … The patterns are the same and the outcomes are the same.” … Eleanor Tillinghast

By Kyle Cheney / State House News Service

Boston Herald, Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Massachusetts residents insistent that the drone, flicker and vibration of land-based wind turbines can shatter the health of nearby communities invoked Tuesday the onset of the United States’ HIV/AIDS epidemic to reject a recent report debunking their claims.Although an independent report commissioned by the Patrick administration concluded last month that wind turbines present little more than an “annoyance” to residents and that limited evidence exists to support claims of devastating health impacts, Falmouth and western Massachusetts residents argued that the report was biased, crafted in secret and based on “cherry-picked” information that ignored the real-world impact of turbines.

“By ignoring those of us in Falmouth and excluding most of our supporting literature and testimonials, this so-called health study has done a great injustice to the citizens of this commonwealth,” said Neil Andersen, a Cape resident, at a State House hearing held by the Department of Public Health and the Department of Environmental Protection intended to gather public feedback on the new report.

Eleanor Tillinghast, a longtime critic of the Patrick administration’s efforts to proliferate land-based wind turbines, said the Patrick administration’s report recalled public health officials’ slow realization about the scale of the AIDS epidemic, as well as on tobacco and asbestos issues around the county.

“When I read the report, I saw many of the same patterns that we saw early on with those issues where the information is cherry-picked, despite tremendous amounts of information,” she said. “The people who are suffering are dismissed as having annoyance … The patterns are the same and the outcomes are the same.”

Critics of turbines, however, were matched by proponents of renewable energy, one of whom compared the low drone of a wind turbine to “the ocean lapping gently against the waves.” Advocates for expanding wind energy in Massachusetts contended that the most ardent critics of turbines were stalling progress at the expense of residents in communities like Somerset, where coal-fired power plants cause air pollution and have demonstrably harmed residents’ health.

“While we are sensitive to the concerns of those who are adversely impacted, controversial wind projects in Massachusetts represent the exception and not the rule,” said Stephan Wollenburg, marketing and program manager at the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance. “The projects we have worked with have proven to be good neighbors. This report has confirmed what common sense already tells us. Turbines create sound. If it’s too loud, it can annoy people … still, the vast majority of turbines don’t have these impacts.”

The widely divergent testimony underscored a challenge for state officials as they weigh whether to embrace the panel report and ways to achieve Gov. Deval Patrick’s goal of generating 500 megawatts of wind energy per year by 2020.

“We have not made up our mind,” emphasized Ken Kimmell, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection.

The wind turbine impact study was compiled by a panel that included Jeffrey Ellenbogen, Massachusetts General Hospital’s sleep medicine division chief; Sheryl Grace, a Boston University mechanical engineering professor; Wendy Heiger-Bernays, a Boston University professor of environmental health; James Manwell, a UMass-Amherst wind energy expert; Dora Anne Mills, a public health expert with the University of New England; Kimberly Sullivan, a Boston University environmental health professor; and Marc Weisskopf, a neuroscientist and epidemiology expert from Harvard University.

DEP and DPH officials emphasized that the Patrick administration had no role in contributing to the report and said panelists were vetted to ensure they had no bias for or against wind energy.

Backers of renewable energy have argued that Massachusetts has vast wind resources that could diminish the state’s reliance on imported oil and dirtier forms of energy production. Although most of that potential is concentrated offshore, Patrick administration officials have long sought policies to ease the construction of land-based wind turbines, in part by streamlining the permitting process for developers.

A plan to do so nearly landed on Patrick’s desk in 2010 but failed as the clock expired on legislative business and campaign season began. Since then, Senate President Therese Murray has indicated she has soured on the comprehensive wind energy siting proposal, and Patrick’s top energy adviser, Richard Sullivan, has suggested the administration will scale back is efforts this year, seeking only to establish siting standards for land-based turbines.

The hearing drew interest from Jim Gordon, president of Cape Wind, a 130-turbine offshore wind project slated for construction in Nantucket Sound. Gordon’s efforts have been frustrated for years by opponents who have argued that the project will impact their views of the storied water body, present a danger to wildlife and planes, and drive up energy costs. Cape Wind is seeking a buyer for half of its potential energy generation, and Gordon has said he hopes to begin construction by next year.

“I got into this business because I wanted to actually help improve the environment and health. I don’t believe that wind energy is a threat to health,” he said. “I empathize with Mr. Anderson and Ms. Elder’s concerns, but I want to say that the only threat that wind energy poses is a threat to the bottom line of fossil fuel generators and coal and oil purveyors. Please do not be exploited by special interests that would fund efforts to block the administration’s renewable energy goals and carbon emission reduction goals. That would actually have the greatest impact on the health of commonwealth citizens.”

Kathryn Elder, a Falmouth resident who said she supports renewable energy and environmental protection, said her life has been “turned upside-down by a turbine that has been sited too close to my house.”

It is not my perception. It is not my opinion, and it is certainly not annoyance that wakes me up repeatedly at night,” she said.

Other than this story URLs of interest :
Standard Times -editorial board
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbeKcntfJ8c

The Bruce McPherson Infrasound and Low Frequency Noise Study: The “smoking gun” of noise reports
http://randacoustics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/The-Bruce-McPherson-ILFN-Study.pdf

Fairhaven Wind Wise website
http://www.windwise.org/

Trailer for movie Winfall
http://firstrunfeatures.com/trailers_windfall.html

Fairhaven World Press
http://windwisefairhaven.wordpress.com/

Blown Away: Big Wind’s Inconvenient Truth

blogger — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:10:56 +0000

Blown Away: Big Wind’s Inconvenient Truth, by Alan Farago

(Counterpunch, Feb 10, 2012) The installation of wind turbines too close to houses and personal property is a major headache for the wind power industry, but headache scarcely begins to describe their impact to nearby property owners and neighbors. My property and home are scarcely three quarters of a mile from a three 1.5 megawatt turbine wind farm that went online in November 2009 with blades stretching nearly 400 feet into the air.

Large scale wind turbines represent a tiny and lucrative—thanks to federal tax incentives—corner of the electric power industry. By siting large turbine facilities close to population centers, the industry hopes to minimize the cost of expensive new transmission lines, but it faces a whirlwind of resistance from citizens objecting to the destruction of mountains, seascapes, wilderness areas, and natural quiet.

Opponents argue that wind power is a bad deal for everyone but shareholders who use subsidies to prop up an industry that is otherwise not economically viable. But on Vinalhaven, a small island in Penobscot Bay—where only three turbines are in operation—neighbors have opened up the industry’s Achilles heel: excessive noise.

New permit applications in towns across New England are raising hackles of anyone who pays attention to the way citizen dissent has been throttled in Maine where wind warriors mobilized to breach protective legislative barriers erected by the wind industry.

Vinalhaven is a small port town of only a few thousand residents whose primary business is lobstering. During the project’s planning phase in the early 2000’s I understood that my viewscape would change. My neighbors and I wanted to believe the promise of the promoters that our lives would otherwise be unaffected.

As an environmentalist who has often been on the receiving end of the NIMBY argument—opposing ill-advised developments that threaten the Everglades and water quality in Florida—I didn’t want to be part of a movement against wind. Environmentalists can’t wait to jettison hydrocarbons driving our economy, but the lessons of the past three years have tempered my perspective. Wind power is the easiest to seize the popular imagination. It is also the breeziest. There are massive obstacles to bring wind power technology to useful grid scale. Wind is intermittent. Storage of electricity when winds fall is highly problematic. Homeowners and businesses skeptical about noise impacts of wind turbines should revisit sitting on the proverbial fence: if the Maine experience is any guide, NIMBY means that the “next idiot might be you.”

The wind power industry and its local advocates on Vinalhaven insist that turbine noise is an inevitable cost supported by the public. On Vinalhaven, they trumpet that the vote to approve wind turbines was 380 in favor and only 5 against.

Neighbors have spent three years trying to get the State of Maine to enforce its own inadequate noise standards. As a veteran of wars against water pollution, I never expected that a place of solace and respite would prove the point that government can be its own worst scofflaw. It would be one thing if the small size of our community, fad or preference for local control over state or federal mandates, brought closer to resolution a problem that needs to be fixed. Instead of equity and fairness, neighbors are buried in procedural curliques tied to proving violations of state noise standards. We might as well be hog-tied to those spinning wind turbine blades.

Proving noise pollution is no trivial matter. On Vinalhaven, George Baker, a former Harvard Business School professor and executive of the local wind power facility, claims that the noise of the wind turbines is masked by the wind in the trees.

On a summer morning, there is scarcely a whisper of wind in the trees. The sky is blue and the early morning light casts long shadows in anticipation of day. Twenty five years ago I bought my property for its peace and quiet. In the background, the turbines churn like a rotating drum powered by Blakean bellows. What is so distracting is that the quality of sound varies from moment to moment. This is not the noise of a highway, a factory, an airport, or even the noise scape of a city. Turbine noise is as variable as the shifting wind, cementing one’s attention to intermittency like the rotating lights on a police cruiser. That is on the good days.

Neighbors can be woken in the middle of the night with an unidentifiable pounding; it is either in one’s head or chest or the walls of one’s house. From aural flickering to a constant disturbance: either way; having to spend significant time, energy and money to prove the point compounds the despair.

The worst are the hours shrouded in fog that I treasured. They now pulse with turbine noise. The Maine fog associates with a weather pattern—wind shear– that the wind turbine promoters knew about but ignored. They knew because in 2008 their experts told them so. It can be dead still on the ground and hundreds of feet in the air, the wind is howling. Not only did the project supporters omit informing neighbors of wind shear during the permitting phase of the Vinalhaven project, they obstructed discovery of the consultant report and, now, are spending ratepayer resources to contest a legal challenge in state superior court. Their objection: that neighbors do not have a judicial line of appeal. It is incorporated, they say, in a 2008 state energy law that few legislators read much less questioned before passing.

If wind power isn’t economically viable because wind is intermittent by nature, the costs to my life and property are continuous. There is not a single regulation against excessive noise– at the state, local or federal level– to enforce and protect. Given the level of controversy and impact, one would think that industrial wind turbine noise is a public threat where the nation’s environmental agency, the US EPA, ought to engage. But the sole staffer of the EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement retired years ago.

A 2010 petition to the EPA by Maine residents —triggered by the Vinalhaven controversy—implored the agency to involve itself in regulating wind turbine noise. It was rejected by EPA and an administrator who referred petitioners back to the same state regulator in Maine who subsequently resigned after the regulatory effort to tame turbine noise was thwarted by political meddling.

Dead still. So quiet that a conversation can carry a mile. Hundreds of feet above the island, wind shear picks up the turbine blades and hurls them around (The sardonic anthem of turbine advocates on Vinalhaven is “Spin, baby, spin”.) casting sound pulses through moisture heavy air. At other times, sound from the turbines skips like a rock on the surface of a cove.

Think of the sounds from a wind turbine as of a thunderstorm. The noise metric, called the dbA scale, captures the peal of thunderbolts. It fails to capture the low rumble of the storm; the vibration and hum of the turbines. Most wind noise controversies are framed around the dbA level because that is how the industry established the metric for sound in the 1990’s. At nighttime in Maine, for instance, the upper limit is set at 45dbA. For ordinary homeowners, though, to prove 45dbA is more complicated than pointing an acoustic measurement instrument and registering its results. Our neighbor group has chased in the middle of the night, in the middle of the freezing cold, pointing microphones and instrumentation at the pitch black sky in an effort to provide statistics and samples that state-hired consultants will accept. You can’t pick up the phone and complain. You have to pay for tests to prove your complaint. On that playing field, ie. what constitutes a verifiable and legitimate complaint, the goal posts keep moving. So far as low frequency noise is concerned, the goal posts that citizens are trying to reach might as well be on the other side of the world.

Various terms have been used to describe the low frequency sound output of wind turbines: a droning noise or the dreaded thump that alternates or morphs into and out of a woosh. Sometimes, it is like the low sonic end of a spinning dryer. Depending on the wind and direction, the thrum quickens or slows. It can change from the whine of a jet engine to a pulse in the space of seconds. For unfortunate homeowners who live even closer to wind turbines, the effects are mind-blowing. Those who live closest—within half a mile– report their entire dwelling can throb and pulse in time with the swoosh of the turbine blades.

For neighbors in Vinalhaven, learning how to provide data deemed valid by state regulators, including its own consultant, to prove violations by the wind turbine operator (whose shareholders are soundly sleeping, tucked away in their quiet quarters) required learning, spending and acquiring a level of acoustic expertise no homeowner should be required to produce under any circumstances simply to protect themselves. But that is not how it works with industrial pollution.

All neighbors wanted was peace and quiet, and all neighbors have are data files of acoustics measuring turbine noise in the gigabytes. All neighbors wanted was quiet, and all neighbors have is the enmity, indifference, or silence of those who know an injustice was done on Vinalhaven but feel powerless to solve it. The fact that local electric rates on Vinalhaven have significantly increased in recent years while the cost of merchant power in the region has remained stable is an embarrassment of someone else’s riches.

The industry understands that chasing citizens around the dbA scale is a fool’s errand. The Vinalhaven neighbors pursued Maine state regulators up the regulatory ladder from the bottom only to find at the top, that lobbyists pressured the governor’s office to intervene against neighbors on their behalf. There ought to be a law, and indeed there should. It is not exactly an insight to point out that polluters are expert at erecting high legal hurdles to keep citizens at bay. It is a good regulation, in other words, so long as it is one they wrote. The wind industry spends in states where those “should’s” are likely to change the playing field.

Every large law firm in the state is under restrictive agreements with the wind industry. Well-placed lobbyists and shareholders rotate in and out of government office and appointments. The state environmental agency’s top regulator, Patty Aho, is a former lobbyist for the law firm representing the wind turbine utility on Vinalhaven. Aho “did what she was told” by throttling provisions that might have offered hope to Vinalhaven neighbors in future compliance measurement and enforcement. At a July 2011 public hearing at the state capitol on revisions to the state noise regulation—ostensibly to stiffen them to protect people—Aho affirmed that the purpose of regulatory review was to assist industry.

A former governor, Angus King, is a large shareholder of a wind turbine company, First Wind. He wrote in a Maine business publication that he spent last July 4^th on Vinalhaven and didn’t meet a single opponent of the wind turbines. He also didn’t seek the neighbors out. A recent single-question poll by First Wind claimed to measure public support for wind power. A similar poll question, limited to a single question, might solicit the opinion of neighbors who live within three miles of industrial scale wind turbines.

The public is ill-informed about wind turbine noise for a variety of reasons. Usually, a gag order accompanies payment when homeowners are bought out—often after a exhausting, protracted struggle. The industry counters with arguments; wind noise disturbs different people in different ways. The inference is that if you object to noise, you are a complainer in the great scheme of freeing energy tied to oil. In small communities like Vinalhaven, these formulas can be used to great effect, dividing the local population.

In the early phase of permitting the Vinalhaven project, a sound consultant to the project developers wrote tellingly that the site chosen for the wind turbines was likely to generate noise complaints from nearby homeowners and residents. Instead of dealing with property owners up front as the consultant recommended, the wind turbine operator buried the report and hired another consultant. In doing so, Mr. Baker, the former Harvard Business School professor and chief executive of the Vinalhaven turbine operation, made an implicit decision that pit islanders against each other. The result imposed a significant cost on the turbine neighbors; let them fight the state.

Divide and conquer is not the last refuge of polluters but it certainly is a popular one. At a public hearing last July when citizens battled industry on the outline of regulatory reform, a neighbor of a wind turbine installation in another part of the state despaired to me privately– she would not be quoted– that her livestock fences had been cut and garbage dumped in her rural driveway when she spoke out against the turbines in the permitting phase. Now that the turbines roar, her children can’t play in their backyard. The noise is so relentless in her home, another mother testified, that when her children go to bed she asks every night: “Did you brush your teeth, say your prayers, and take your sleeping pills?”

On Vinalhaven, supporters of the wind farm project—goaded by the local utility board and executives—posted a drawing of goat heads in a bucket of blood on a Facebook page, wishing the worst for neighbors who subsequently moved—for health and safety reasons. There are nights when the lobsterman Arthur Farnham, whose home is only seven hundred feet from the nearest turbine, turns his television volume to high, the fans on, and still can’t drown out the noise. It is worst in the winter. But the Harvard Business School professor and turbine operator insisted and the state acquiesced so that wind noise for compliance would only be measured in summer months on Vinalhaven.

Unless you have had something of deep value stripped from you, you don’t understand what the noise does to a fine summer morning on Long Cove or a deep winter night when the noise is roaring in your head or in your house.

The solutions are expensive to polluters. 1) Require fair market price buy-outs or property value guarantees for property owners within two and a half miles of turbines, 2) apply 35 dbA limits to nighttime operations immediately, 3) require the wind turbine industry to pay for the costs of noise monitoring and make all data available through web sites in real time, and 4) develop metrics that capture and regulations that protect against low frequency noise.

As stories pile up of citizens driven from their homes by turbine noise—sometimes health and property values ruined —the absence of effective wind turbine noise standards reflects the quest of polluters and their shareholders to demonize regulations. Shifting the costs of noise pollution has created a new caste of politically connected entrepreneurs who in turn have hired consultants, attorneys and lobbyists to obscure the wind power industry’s most inconvenient truth.

In its brutal outline, regulating noise from wind turbines illustrates the struggle of our times: whether government regulation can protect public health, or, whether private industry should be left alone to do a better job, whether or not it can demonstrate the results. Industry responds by hiding in the deep weeds of “complexity” and “disagreement with interpreting facts”. They buy time for an industry desperate to keep federal subsidies flowing; subsidies set to expire at the end of 2012. The wind power industry hopes Congress and the White House will ignore the fact that people, property values, and natural quiet are collateral damage to popular enthusiasms whose economics have failed to pan out.

We used to say with pride, “this couldn’t happen in the United States”. But wherever the costs of pollution are unallocated, it happens every day the wind blows.

Alan Farago is a writer living in Coral Gables, Florida and president of Friends of the Everglades. His website is alanfarago.wordpress.com.

“Wind-energy industry faces an unprecedented backlash from angry rural residents”: Robert Bryce, NY Post

blogger — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:40:35 +0000

Tilting at windmills, OPED NY POST
By ROBERT BRYCE
Posted: 10:14 PM, February 4, 2012
Documentary makers are always hoping that their film will come out at just the right moment, when a favorable news cycle and popular sentiment are converging so that the public is primed for their message.

In 1989, Michael Moore made his career with “Roger & Me,” a documentary that pinned the decline of his hometown — Flint, Mich. — on General Motors. By focusing his fire on GM’s chairman, Roger Smith, Moore tapped into the public’s anger at tone-deaf corporate bosses as well as the growing disenchantment with the American car industry.

Laura Israel’s new film, “Windfall,” has the same sort of fortuitous timing. Her documentary — which focuses on the fight over the siting of wind turbines in the small upstate town of Meredith — premieres at the same time that “green energy” stimulus failures fill the news, and the wind-energy industry faces an unprecedented backlash from angry rural residents.

Consider this Nov. 1 story from The Village Market, a news outlet in Staffordshire, England, about 150 miles northwest of London. The paper’s reporter, covering the staunch local opposition to a proposed wind-energy project near the tiny village of Haunton, wrote, “Huge numbers of people in rural areas are rising up against the technology, despite government assuming they would support it.”

Throughout the UK — indeed, all over the world — fights against large-scale wind-energy projects are raging. The European Platform against Windfarms lists 518 signatory organizations from 23 countries. The UK alone now has about 285 anti-wind groups. Last May, some 1,500 protesters descended on the Welsh assembly, the Senedd, demanding that a massive wind project planned for central Wales be stopped.

Although environmental groups like Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace claim that wind energy is the answer when it comes to slowing the rate of growth in carbon dioxide emissions, policymakers from Ontario to Australia are responding to angry landowners who don’t want 100-meter-high wind turbines built near their homes.

Last September, CBC News reported that Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment has logged “hundreds of health complaints” about the thumping noise generated by the province’s growing fleet of wind turbines. In December, government officials in the Australian state of New South Wales issued guidelines that give residents living within two kilometers of a proposed wind project the right to delay, or even stop, the project’s development.

Back here in the States, many communities are passing ordinances that prohibit large-scale wind energy development. On Nov. 8, for instance, residents of Brooksville, Maine, voted by more than 2 to 1 in favor of a measure that bans all wind turbines with towers exceeding 100 feet in height.

Meanwhile, the promoters of Cape Wind, a large offshore wind project proposed for Nantucket Sound, are still hoping to get their project built. But they continue to face lots of well-heeled opposition, including, most notably, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Well-known for his advocacy of renewable energy, Kennedy opposes the wind project — because it will be built a few miles from his family’s estate in Hyannis Port.

As “Windfall” is premiering this week in New York, wind-energy lobbyists in Washington are desperately hoping to convince Congress to pass a multi-year extension of the 2.2-cent-per-kilowatt-hour subsidy for wind energy. Without it, the domestic wind business, which is already being hammered by falling natural-gas prices, will likely end up becalmed.

Israel’s portrayal of the bitter feuding that happened in Meredith over wind-energy development is similar to fights that have occurred in numerous other rural communities around the world. The battle in Meredith (population: 1,500) pitted landowners who stood to profit by putting the wind turbines on their property against those who didn’t. Israel interviews one couple, Ron and Sue Bailey, who took money from a wind company, a move they soon came to regret. The couple said they “were blinded by the money” and “never thought about what our neighbors across the road would think.”

The landowner faction in Meredith was led by the town’s supervisor, Frank Bachler. Israel portrays him as a well-intentioned man who, in favoring the wind development, is trying to help the area’s struggling farmers. Bachler dismisses the opponents of the wind project as “a minority of people who are very aggressive.”

But Bachler is proven wrong. The anti-wind faction quickly gains momentum and the resulting feud provides a textbook example of small-town democracy. Three wind opponents run for election to the town board with the stated purpose of reversing the existing board’s position on wind. In November 2007, they win, and a few weeks later pass a measure banning large-scale wind development.

Israel’s film also features a colorful interview with Carol Spinelli, a fiery real-estate agent in Bovina, a town of about 600 people located a few miles southeast of Meredith. Bovina passed a ban on wind turbines in March 2007. Spinelli helped lead the opposition, and she nails the controversy over wind by explaining that it’s about “big money, big companies, big politics.” And she angrily denounces wind-energy developers “as modern-day carpetbaggers.”

That’s a brutal assessment. But it accurately portrays the rural-urban divide on the wind-energy issue.

Lots of city-based voters love the concept of renewable energy.

But they are not the ones who have to endure the health-impairing noise that’s created by 45-story-tall wind turbines, nor do they have to see the turbines or look at their red-blinking lights, all night, every night.

So many want to make the world green — so long as it’s not them who have to suffer for it.

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book, “Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green’ Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future,” is now available in paperback.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/tilting_at_windmills_dCLfcd82L6wuEwkxbt856J#ixzz1lWdZaio6

Wind Energy, Noise Pollution

blogger — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:36:09 +0000

“The growing resistance to large-scale wind projects raises a number of questions that must be addressed before Congress approves any further subsidies. The most important one is also the most obvious: If the noise generated by wind turbines isn’t a health problem, why are so many people, in so many different countries, complaining about the noise in nearly identical terms? And why are some of them going so far as to abandon their homes?”

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

Wind Energy, Noise Pollution

By Robert Bryce

February 2, 2012 4:00 A.M.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Barack Obama touted renewable energy and declared that he would “not walk away from workers” such as Bryan Ritterby, who is employed by a wind-turbine manufacturer in Michigan.

But in their rush to embrace the wind-energy business, Obama and numerous other politicians are walking away from rural residents such as David Enz and his wife, Rose. A year ago, the couple abandoned their home near Denmark, Wis., because of the unbearable low-frequency noise produced by a half-dozen 495-foot-high wind turbines that were built near the home they’ve owned since 1978. The closest was installed about 3,200 feet from their house.

Shortly after the Shirley Windproject’s turbines began operating, the couple began experiencing numerous symptoms, including “headaches, ear pain, nausea, blurred vision, anxiety, memory loss, and an overall unsettledness,” says Mr. Enz, 68. Today, the Enzes are living in their RV or staying with friends. “We didn’t expect any of this stuff,” says Enz, who spent more than 30 years working as a millwright at a paper mill in Green Bay.

Policymakers and health experts are casting a hard eye on wind energy at the same time that the wind industry is desperately trying to convince Congress to pass a multi-year extension of a tax credit that supports it. Without the subsidy, the domestic wind business, which is already being hammered by falling natural-gas prices, will be forced to downsize even further. In December, the American Wind Energy Association issued a report predicting that some 37,000 wind-related jobs in the U.S. could be lost by 2013 if the tax credit is not extended.

That possibility doesn’t faze Wisconsin Republican state senator Frank Lasee, whose district includes the Enzes’ 41-acre property. Last October, Lasee filed legislation that would require the state to investigate the health effects of the noise produced by industrial wind turbines. If passed, the bill– the first of its kind in the U.S. — will impose a moratorium on new wind projects until the study is completed. “I’ve heard and seen enough from people I represent to know that we need a factual study,” Lasee told me recently. In addition to the Enzes, Lasee says he knows another family among his constituents who have abandoned their home because of wind-turbine noise. “We shouldn’t be embracing an agenda that hurts people’s property values and their health,” he said. In mid-January, Lasee filed another bill that could allow cities and counties to establish minimum setback distances between wind projects and residences.

It’s tempting to dismiss the complaints about wind-turbine noise as little more than NIMBYism. And to be clear, not every wind project is causing problems. Further, the most problematic noise generated by the turbines — low-frequency sound (20 to 100 hertz) and infrasound (0 to 20 Hz) — has varying effects. Some individuals feel the effects of the noise quickly and compare it to motion sickness. Others may not feel it at all. That said, the harmful effects of infrasound are well known. A 2001 report published by the National Institutes of Health said that exposure to infrasound can cause vertigo as well as “fatigue, apathy, and depression, pressure in the ears, loss of concentration, drowsiness.”

Furthermore — and perhaps most telling — are the news reports. And there are lots of them. Newspaper stories from Missouri, Oregon, New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Britain,Australia, Canada, Taiwan, and New Zealand indicate that the wind-turbine-noise problem is global and that the frustration among rural landowners is growing.

The wind-energy lobby desperately wants to downplay the problems associated with low-frequency noise and infrasound. That’s not surprising. The industry has no solution for the noise problem, except, of course, to increase the setbacks between wind turbines and residential areas. But doing so would dramatically reduce the industry’s ability to site turbines (and collect fat taxpayer subsidies).

In 2009, the American Wind Energy Association and the Canadian Wind Energy Association commissioned a group of doctors to review the available literature on wind turbines and noise. The two lobby groups published a paper that concluded, “There is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects.” It also said that the vibrations from the turbines are “too weak to be detected by, or to affect, humans.” However, that same study also said that extended exposure to unwanted noise can cause a number of symptoms, including “dizziness, eye strain, fatigue, feeling vibration, headache, insomnia, muscle spasm, nausea, nose bleeds, palpitations, pressure in the ears or head, skin burns, stress, and tension.”

To bolster its claims that turbine noise is not harmful, the wind-energy lobby is touting a study released in mid-January by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection that largely dismissed complaints about wind-turbine noise. But the authors of the Massachusetts report did not interview any of the homeowners who’ve left their houses because of turbine noise. Instead, they did a cursory review of the published literature.

Shortly after the Massachusetts report came out, Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, a non-profit organization that tracks noise issues, wrote that the authors of the Massachusetts report “dropped a crucial ball” because they did not “provide any sort of acknowledgement or analysis of the ways that annoyance, anxiety, sleep disruption, and stress could be intermediary pathways that help us to understand some of the reports coming from Massachusetts residents who say their health has been affected by nearby turbines.”

Over the past few months, a spate of reports have been released that provide credence to the complaints being made by the Enzes and people like Janet Warren, who raised sheep on her property near Makara, New Zealand, until a wind project was built near her home. Noise from the turbines caused “loss of concentration, irritability, and short-term memory effects” that forced her and her husband, Mike, to leave their property in early 2010.

Among the most important of the recent reports is a decision issued last July by Ontario’s Environmental Review Tribunal regarding a wind-energy facility known as the Kent Breeze Project. Although the Canadian officials allowed the facility to be built, they said that

this case has successfully shown that the debate should not be simplified to one about whether wind turbines can cause harm to humans. The evidence presented to the Tribunal demonstrates that they can, if facilities are placed too close to residents. The debate has now evolved to one of degree.

In other words, Canadian regulators have stated, on the record, that wind-turbine noise can harm human beings if turbines are built too close to homes. That finding was corroborated, again, in August, in a peer-reviewed article published in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. Carl V. Phillips, a Harvard-trained Ph.D. who now works as a researcher and consultant on epidemiology, concluded that there is “overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents, usually stress-disorder type diseases, at a nontrivial rate.” That same issue of the journal carried eight other articles that addressed the issue of health and wind-turbine noise.

In October, a peer-reviewed study of wind-turbine-related noise in New Zealand found that residents living within two kilometers of large wind projects reported

lower overall quality of life, physical quality of life, and environmental quality of life. Those exposed to turbine noise also reported significantly lower sleep quality, and rated their environment as less restful. Our data suggest that wind farm noise can negatively impact facets of health-related quality of life.

Alec Salt, a research scientist at the Cochlear Fluids Research Laboratory at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has written extensively about the health effects of wind-energy projects. He flatly concludes that wind turbines “can be hazardous to human health.”

Dr. Robert McMurtry, a Canadian orthopedic surgeon, is also pushing for more study; he is among the leaders of a large anti-wind contingent in Ontario. Try as they might, McMurtry’s opponents cannot dismiss him or his credentials. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada and was recently named a member of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor.

Ontario has become ground zero in the fight against the wind-energy sector. In September, a Canadian family filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the owners of a wind project in southwestern Ontario. That same month, CBC News reported that Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment has logged “hundreds of health complaints” about the wind projects there. According to the Society for Wind Vigilance, a group of doctors, acousticians, academics, and health professionals that is focused on the adverse health effects of wind turbines, about 40 families in Ontario have moved out of their homes because of turbine noise. Last month, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the province’s biggest farm organization, said that the push for wind energy had “become untenable” and that “rural residents’ health and nuisance complaints must be immediately and fairly addressed.”

Finding people in Canada and elsewhere who are being victimized by turbine noise is easy. Over the past two years, I’ve personally interviewed, by phone or e-mail, homeowners in Wisconsin, Missouri, New York, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and England who’ve had wind turbines built near their homes. Their health complaints are nearly identical to those made by the Enzes. For instance, Darrel Capelle, a 34-year-old farm hand, lives in De Pere, Wis., with his wife and their two young boys. In October 2010, two large wind turbines were built within a quarter mile of their home. “Sleeplessness with the kids started right after the turbines went in,” says Capelle. His wife, Sarah, now suffers from frequent, intense headaches.

Although the federal government has yet to undertake any broad studies of infrasound and wind turbines, other countries are responding to the surging resistance against land-based wind projects. Among those countries: Denmark, which has become the Green Left’s favorite example of the merits of wind energy. Alas, the Danes themselves aren’t so enthusiastic.

In 2010, the Copenhagen Post reported that “state-owned energy firm Dong Energy has given up building more wind turbines on Danish land, following protests from residents complaining about the noise the turbines make.” The newspaper quoted Dong CEO Anders Eldrup as saying, “It is very difficult to get the public’s acceptance if the turbines are built close to residential buildings, and therefore we are now looking at maritime options.”

The controversy over wind-turbine noise has been raging in Australia for more than two years. Much of the fight has focused on the noise generated by the Waubra wind project in the state of Victoria. Residents near the project began complaining of health problems shortly after the 192-megawatt facility began operating in 2009, and several residents near the project abandoned their homes. Australia’s mainstream media have paid serious attention to the turbine-noise issue, including a 2010 TV report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that focused on the problems at Waubra.

In mid-2011, Victoria’s state government responded to the problems at Waubra by announcing that it would enforce a two-kilometer (1.25-mile) setback between wind turbines and homes. The state’s planning minister said the setback was needed for health reasons. In December, government officials in the state of New South Wales issued guidelines that give residents living within two kilometers of a proposed wind project the right to delay, or even stop, the project’s development. The rules also will impose strict noise limits.

The backlash against the wind-energy sector is particularly fierce in Europe, where the European Platform against Windfarms now lists 518 signatory organizations from 23 countries. In the U.K., where fights are raging against industrial wind projects in Wales, Scotland, and elsewhere, some 285 anti-wind groups have been formed. Last May, according to the BBC,some 1,500 protesters descended on the Welsh assembly, demanding that a massive wind project planned for central Wales be halted. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., about 140 anti-wind groups have been formed.

The growing resistance to large-scale wind projects raises a number of questions that must be addressed before Congress approves any further subsidies.

The most important one is also the most obvious: If the noise generated by wind turbines isn’t a health problem, why are so many people, in so many different countries, complaining about the noise in nearly identical terms? And why are some of them going so far as to abandon their homes?

Another question: Why isn’t wind-turbine noise getting more attention from the Environmental Protection Agency? The EPA has plenty of resources to investigate complaints about the oil-and-gas sector on the issue of hydraulic fracturing. Meanwhile, the wind industry is getting a free pass, even though tens of thousands of wind turbines could be built in the U.S. over the coming years thanks to the renewable-energy mandates that have been instituted in 29 states and the District of Columbia.

The Green Left is so married to the notion that wind energy might help reduce carbon-dioxide emissions that they are blithely ignoring the “energy sprawl” and noise problems that come with large-scale wind projects. Never mind if dozens, or even hundreds, of rural homeowners are being euchred out of their homes and property. They can be ignored. They can easily be sacrificed in the quest to appear to be doing something — anything — in the push to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, no matter how small or inconsequential those reductions might actually be.

That same mindset prevails in the White House and at the Department of Energy. Indeed, despite the panoply of evidence that shows wind-turbine noise causes health problems, President Obama has made it clear that he wants lots more renewable energy. In his State of the Union speech, he said that he wants to impose a national standard requiring the use of “clean energy,” and that he wants to “double down” on the “clean-energy industry.”

When Dave Enz heard the president’s proposal, his response was simple: “I don’t think he cares about people like us.”

— Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book is Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.

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Mass. Senate President Therese Murray says Falmouth Wind Turbines are Too Close

blogger — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:06:14 +0000

In An Appearance with Mindy Todd on WCAI’s The Point the Senator also Commented on the WESRA Bill

Contact: Malcolm Donald 508.566.5830 or MD@Zefarus.com

Woods Hole, MA - Senate President Therese Murray said “Falmouth’s industrial wind turbines are too close [to residents]“. Senator Murray also explained her turn-around on WESRA [Wind Energy Siting Reform Act] which died on Beacon Hill. The program will be rebroadcast at [correction] 7:30 PM this evening on WCAI, NPR’s (National Public Radio’s) station in Woods Hole, at FM 90.1, 91.1, and 94.3 or can be streamed at:
http://www.wgbh.org/includes/playerPopStream.cfm?station=objWCAI&ts
The program will also be available later in the week at:
http://www.wgbh.org/wcai/programDetail.cfm?programid=298
WCAI can be found at: http://www.wgbh.org/wcai 508.548.9600
Save Our Seashore
Welfleet, MA

Rick James, acoustic engineer, responds to Mass. wind turbine noise study, 2km minimum setback necessary to protect people

blogger — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:29:07 +0000

I have worked for many people who have severe response to wind turbine sounds. Most are within 1 mile of the nearest turbines, but some are at much greater distances. In 2008 George Kamperman and I applied standard acoustical principles to wind turbine noise to set criteria for siting wind turbines while protecting public health. We did not want to use setback distances because the required setbacks are a function of how many turbines are contributing to the sound immissions at a residence as well as the type and size of the turbines. But, after reviewing the sound studies for many of the participants in Dr. Pierpont’s research we did conclude that a setback of at least 2km (1.25 miles) was appropriate to protect the majority of people for the more common arrangements and types of turbines at that time. Now with the turbines being 2.5 MW and higher in energy output and also producing more infra and low frequency sound one might argue that the setback distance needs to be revisited. Based on increased infra and low frequency noise this setback should increase for larger wind turbines if those are the only factors. However, there are other factors that make a 2km minimum setback a hurdle for developers that have nothing to do with noise.

I have several clients who live more than 2km from the nearest turbine who have problems. Some have been discussed in this email thread and other are participating. When I look at their situations, based on both on site tests and familiarity with where homes are located I conclude that had there been a 2km setback requirement in their community the turbines would never have been allowed in the first place. Thus, I would argue for a consensus on a minimum setback of 2km, not because it is safe for all, but because it is more easily supported in a public forum as being reasonable. 2km does not appear to be a “0” tolerance position. 5km or 10km does. We do not regulate other pollutants to a “0” risk level because it becomes too hard to justify the broad impact of such limits. We might want “0” heavy metals in our drinking water, or “0” NOx in our air but it may not be possible to get enough support to do it. The same applies to noise from wind turbines. If we have to pick a distance for setbacks instead of evaluating each project for noise impacts (which is my preference), we need a limit that protects most people and includes some mechanism for those who are more sensitive to be relocated at the cost of the utility operator. This would greatly alter the dynamics of a new project.

I like the concept of requiring all residents within the setback distance to agree to the project that I understand is being used in parts of Australia (Victoria?). If someone refuses to sign off, the developer can choose to either not build the project, relocate turbines, or to make some financial deal with the people who refuse to sign.

For example, my clients in Wisconsin understood that a large setback was needed but did not think they could get political support for 2km. They used maps of the state’s better wind regions to determine that if the setback was only 1800 feet there would be no place in the State that could host wind turbines in any significant numbers without running into someone else’s property. Since the economy of wind energy requires a large number of turbines to support the cost of substations and other infrastructure this rather small setback rules out any large scale projects. I see the 2km setback minimum in the same light. It may not be completely protective but it will force wind energy developments in areas with even moderate population densities to address the concerns of local residents before getting a permit to build and operate. That might be sufficient until the industry dies for the many other reasons why wind turbines are not a good way to produce renewable energy.

We do not need a zero tolerance solution just one that is effective in separating people from turbines. We do need one that forces the industry to deal honestly and fairly with people living in established communities instead of what is happening now.

The Massachusetts Study is a step backwards. I noticed while reading it that many important references were not included and even those that were, like Dr. Salt’s recent research, were not given appropriate weight. None of the panelists tried to contact any of the people who have publically complained. Old papers from non-medical and non-independent sources, such as some by Leventhall, are given undue weight. It was a poorly conducted literature review designed to support a political position and not to present an unbiased summary of current evidence. For that I would look to the recent paper (January 2012) by Barbara Frey and Peter Hayden “Wind Turbines and Proximity to Homes: The Impact of Wind Turbine Noise on Health.” Although not a literature review, I also have a paper in an upcoming issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, titled: “Wind Turbine Infra and Low-Frequency Sound: Warnings Signs That Were Not Heard” that debunks much of Leventhall’s work for the wind industry and explains how other sources of dynamically modulated infra and low frequency sound have been identified as the cause of similar symptoms in the past.

Rick James
E-coustic Solutions

Why The Wind Industry Is Full Of Hot Air And Costing You Big Bucks, by Robert Bryce

blogger — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:18:56 +0000

Fox Islands Wind has been the focus of a “charm offensive” with various proponents claiming what a great success the project has been, ignoring the significant ongoing controversy over wind turbine noise that has marred the project’s reputation both within the wind industry and in the press. The charm offensive relates mainly to tax subsidies set to expire in 2013, as detailed by Robert Bryce below.

December 21, 2011
Robert Bryce

The American Wind Energy Association has begun a major lobbying effort in Congress to extend some soon-to-expire renewable-energy tax credits. And to bolster that effort, the lobby group’s CEO, Denise Bode, is calling the wind industry “a tremendous American success story.”

But the wind lobby’s success has largely been the result of its ability to garner subsidies. And those subsidies are coming with a big price tag for American taxpayers. Since 2009, AWEA’s largest and most influential member companies have garnered billions of dollars in direct cash payments and loan guarantees from the US government. And while the lobby group claims to be promoting “clean” energy, AWEA’s biggest member companies are also among the world’s biggest users and/or producers of fossil fuels.

A review of the $9.8 billion in cash grants provided under section 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (also known as the federal stimulus bill) for renewable energy projects shows that the wind energy sector has corralled over $7.6 billion of that money. And the biggest winners in the 1603 sweepstakes: the companies represented on AWEA’s board of directors.

An analysis of the 4,256 projects that have won grants from the Treasury Department under section 1603 over the past two years shows that $3.37 billion in grants went to just nine companies — all of them are members of AWEA’s board. To put that $3.37 billion in perspective, consider that in 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration, the total of all “energy specific subsidies and support” provided to the oil and gas sector totaled $2.84 billion. And that $2.84 billion in oil and gas subsidies is being divided among thousands of entities. The Independent Petroleum Association of America estimates the US now has over 14,000 oil and gas companies.

The renewable energy lobby likes to portray itself as an upstart industry, one that is grappling with big business and the entrenched interests of the hydrocarbon sector. But billions of dollars in 1603 grants – all of it exempt from federal corporate income taxes – is being used to fatten the profits of some of the world’s biggest companies. Indeed, the combined market capitalization of the 11 biggest corporations on AWEA’s board – a group that includes General Electric and Siemens — is about $450 billion.

Nevertheless, the clock is ticking on renewable-energy subsidies. The 1603 grants end on December 31 and the renewable-energy production tax credit expires on January 1, 2013. On Monday, AWEA issued a report which predicted that some 37,000 wind-related jobs in the US could be lost by 2013 if the production tax credit is not extended.

But the subsidies are running out at the very same time that a cash-strapped Congress is turning a hard eye on the renewable sector. The collapse of federally backed companies like solar-panel-maker Solyndra and biofuel producer Range Fuels, are providing critics of renewable subsidies with plenty of ammunition. And if critics need more bullets, they need only look at AWEA’s board to see how big business is grabbing every available dollar from US taxpayers all in the name of “clean” energy. Indeed, AWEA represents a host of fossil-fuel companies who are eagerly taking advantage of the renewable-energy subsidies.

Consider NRG Energy, which has a seat on AWEA’s board. Last month, the New York Times reported that New Jersey-based NRG and its partners have secured $5.2 billion in federal loan guarantees to build solar-energy projects. NRG’s market capitalization: $4.3 billion.

But NRG is not a renewable energy company. The company currently has about 26,000 megawatts (MW) of generation capacity. Of that, 450 MW is wind capacity, another 65 MW is solar, and 1,175 MW comes from nuclear. So why is NRG expanding into renewables? The answer is simple: profits. Last month, David Crane, the CEO of NRG, told the Times that “I have never seen anything that I have had to do in my 20 years in the power industry that involved less risk than these projects.”

Or look at E.On, the giant German electricity and natural gas company, which also has a seat on AWEA’s board of directors. In 2010, the company emitted 116 million metric tons of carbon dioxide an amount approximately equal to that of the Czech Republic, a country of 10.5 million people. And last year, the company – which has about 2,000 MW of wind-generation capacity in the US — produced about 14 times as much electricity by burning hydrocarbons as it did from wind.

Despite its role as a major fossil-fuel utility, E.On has been awarded $542.5 million in section 1603 cash so that it can build wind projects. And the company is getting that money even though it is the world’s largest investor-owned utility with a market capitalization of $45 billion.

Another foreign company with a seat on AWEA’s board: Spanish utility Iberdrola, the second-largest domestic wind operator. But in 2010, Iberdrola produced about 3 times as much electricity from hydrocarbons as it did from wind. Nevertheless, the company has collected $1 billion in section 1603 money. To put that $1 billion in context, consider that in 2010, Iberdrola’s net profit was about 2.8 billion Euros, or around $3.9 billion. Thus, US taxpayers have recently provided cash grants to Iberdrola that amount to about one-fourth of the company’s 2010 profits. And again, none of that grant money is subject to US corporate income taxes. Iberdrola currently sports a market cap of $39 billion.

Another big winner on AWEA’s board of directors: NextEra Energy (formerly Florida Power & Light) which has garnered some $610.6 million in 1603 grants for various wind projects. NextEra’s market capitalization is $23 billion. The subsidies being garnered by NextEra are helping the company drastically cut its taxes. A look at the company’s 2010 annual report shows that it cut its federal tax bill by more than $200 million last year thanks to various federal tax credits. And the company’s latest annual report shows that it has another $1.8 billion of “tax credit carryforwards” that will help it slash its taxes over the coming years.

The biggest fossil-fuel-focused company on AWEA’s board is General Electric, which had revenues last year of $150 billion. Of that sum, about 25 percent came from what the company calls “energy infrastructure.” While some of that revenue comes from GE’s wind business, the majority comes from building generators, jet engines, and other machinery that burn hydrocarbons. The company is also rapidly growing GE Oil & Gas, which had 2010 revenues of $7.2 billion. GE Oil & Gas has more than 20,000 employees and provides a myriad of products and services to the oil and gas industry.

GE has a starring role in one of the most egregious examples of renewable-energy corporate welfare: the Shepherds Flat wind project in Oregon. The majority of the funding for the $1.9 billion, 845-megawatt project is coming from federal taxpayers. Not only is the Energy Department providing GE and its partners – who include Caithness Energy, Google, and Sumitomo — a $1.06 billion loan guarantee, as soon as GE’s 338 turbines start turning at Shepherds Flat, the Treasury Department will send the project developers a cash grant of $490 million.

On December 9, the American Council on Renewable Energy issued a press release urging Congress to quickly extend the 1603 program and the renewable-energy production tax credit, because they will “bolster renewable energy’s success and American competitiveness.”

But time is running short. Backers of the renewable-energy credits say that to assure continuity on various projects, a bill must be passed into law by March 2012. If that doesn’t happen, they are predicting domestic investment in renewable energy could fall by 50 percent. A bill now pending in the House would extend the production tax credit for four additional years, through 2017. The bill has 40 sponsors, 9 are Republicans. The bill is awaiting a hearing by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Original file here:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/12/20/fossil-fuel-industry-big-business-cashing-in-big-on-renewable-subsidies/#ixzz1h90RNMR1

The other side of the wind power story

blogger — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:45:17 +0000

The other side of the wind power story by Christopher O’Neil (Published in The Sun Journal on Sunday, Jan 22, 2012)

An article in the Sun Journal of Dec. 30 raised eyebrows at Friends of Maine’s Mountains.

Included were the words: “Wind turbines came into Maine with a boom but two projects were able to go online without making a sound this month.” The article quoted Tom Carroll, an operative of the wind development company Patriot Renewables, and Gordon Gamble, a public relations man for Independence Wind, about Maine’s newest industrial wind turbine plants on Spruce Mountain in Woodstock and Record Hill in Roxbury. FMM is disappointed that the “other side” of this important story wasn’t told.

Readers of the story were essentially led to believe that these massive projects have come without incident. Unwitting readers might also infer that these new wind “farms” have disproved their critics, settled all debate and gained acceptance. The truth is that many people in the vicinity of the Roxbury and Woodstock wind projects are already experiencing problems with noise emissions.

Those wind facilities have most certainly not gone online “without making a sound.”

Massive wind turbines create unique sound which is unlike most other noise emissions. Maine citizens are suffering from sounds which are both audible and inaudible to the human ear. In fact, citizens all around the globe are experiencing poor health and a reduction in their quality of life due to the unhealthy sound emissions from nearby turbines.

Readers should understand that just because a wind developer’s public relations team says a wind project will be benign, that does not make it true.

Last month, Maine acousticians Robert Rand and Stephen Ambrose, two respected experts on industrial noise, published a report validating the complaints of people living in close proximity to industrial turbine developments.

Every day, more scientific data emerges showing that wind turbines’ unique noise emissions cause adverse health impacts on people who are forced to live or work in the vicinity of wind facilities.

As wind developments proliferate, Maine residents and property owners are increasingly unable to take for granted their own peace and quiet. In every Maine wind project built close to people, there are major issues.

Record Hill and Spruce Mountain did not go “online without making a sound.” Quite the contrary. Jay Cashman of Patriot Renewables and Angus King of Independence Wind will acknowledge that, in development, their projects met strong resistance at every turn, and they still do.

The story should have included interviews with turbine neighbors who suffer from noise emissions. It should also have mentioned the credible and persistent opposition that is gaining strength as citizens discover that the presumed benefits of wind power were oversold, while the impacts were overlooked.

Peaks Island citizens pay attention: no, to big wind turbines

blogger — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:46:56 +0000

“I am VERY concerned about the NOISE LEVELS generated by the windmill,” wrote Peaks Island resident Carol Fexa in a letter to Portland city staff . “SOUND CARRIES on an island. The tiniest of sounds are amplified because we are surrounded by a body of water.” Fellow Peaks Islanders Ann and Gus Karlsen agreed. “We would like to voice our opposition to ANY wind turbines on Peaks Island,” the couple wrote to city staff in part. “We were under the impression that the ‘wind tests’ there were not sufficient.”