Here is an informative article. “The Low Benefit of Industrial Wind” By Eric Rosenbloom
http://www.saveouralleghenyridges.com/images/pdfs/industrial_wind.pdf

I don’t know what elegant wind turbines you have seen, but the ones I have seen are monsters. They totally dominate the landscape and many wind developments have dozens of turbines and some have over one hundred.

The experience of nations with significant installed wind energy is that it does not reduce reliance on conventional sources. I do not support nuclear, but this is not an issue of wind vs.nuclear, or wind vs. coal. We will still have nuclear and coal sources of electricity.

The only solution to reduce the negative extenralities of electricity-generation is increased energy efficiency and conservation.

In less than half a year a windturbine generates enough electricity to compensate for the energy it has cost to manufacture, build the windturbine and even the cost of demoslishing and recycling it again in the future.

One other thing: you are confusing efficiency with production factor.

Finally, I prefer looking at an elegant wind turbine over leaving an heritage to our future generations that exists of nuclear waste that will remain dangerous for 360000 years.

The fact is Wind Energy grows out to be more competitive with oil-based electricity generation. These costs include the transportation costs of all the materials, which are also embedded in the current electricity generation cost. It’s not like those costs were paid by no one or flew with the wind.

Yes, there are many downsides to Wind Energy and those ugly turbines, but so have each and every one of our energy transformation systems (even solar power, or nuclear power). Problems are there to be solved. I guess we should find a happy middle.

Reducing the personal consumption is also a short term goal. Hard to implement in a third world country with much more immediate needs.

A ‘distributed’ system has a much greater impact on resources, the landscape and natural reserves that would unquestionably be best used for other things to protect as well as promote humanity rather than to generate the power to run our televisions and charge the batteries in our Ipods. We could as just one example plant forests to absorb CO2 and provide timber for building and burning for energy.

If something is only 30% efficient at producing power as is a wind turbine, then it is only acceptable to use as an energy source if it has negligable impact on the planet as quite obviously we are going to need rather a lot of them to be of any use. We need at least 1170 of them to equate to one nuclear power station, the construction vehicles to erect them all will travel millions of miles in the process, hundreds of thousands of tons of steel, tens of thousands of tons of copper must be mined from millions of tons of earth. It must all be transported, processed and transported again to site. All of this uses immense amounts of energy..

And of course, we also need some kind of supporting power generator for days when the wind does not blow.

Let us spend our time, money and human effort on reducing our energy consumption so that we may buy our selves the time to find a solution that our children would be proud to inherit and not embarressed to look at whenever they travel through what will be left of our countrside.

Andy Burgess.
Dolfor.

Well, my friends, the feasibility of these turbines reducing the need for conventional power sources is an illusion. This is just another crazy scheme that will have its bust cycle, and not too far off either. Lower-consuming lifestyles might sound unsexy, but that is what we will all be dealing with in the future. Polluting our environments with expensive, destructive wind turbines will not forestall an inevitable economic transformation.