Daventry District Council Planning Committee tonight (Wednesday 27th January) refused permission for development of 7 turbines on the Harrington Airfield because it breached planning regulations.  The council rejected the application on a majority vote.  Nuon was backed by a host of supporters “imported” from Wales but they were significantly outnumbered by local residents who were against the proposal.  So many objectors attended that many were forced to listen to proceedings from a meeting room downstairs.  It was standing room only in the council chambers.

The SNTHWF committee would like to thank those who have helped them in their action against the ill-conceived development proposal - the hundreds who wrote to the planning department voicing their concens and objections, those who donated funds to help our fight and those who attended Daventry council offices this evening.

Daventry’s planning case officer, Mrs Chuong Phillips, recommended that the application be approved but after statements from this action group, a representative of the Parish councils, and Councillor Chris Millar (leader of DDC) who all opposed the application, two speakers in support, and much debate, the Planning Committee rejected the recommendation.

We don’t at this stage know what the next steps will be, but this web site will continue to be updated with any statements from Nuon.

Folks

Here, at 4.0pm on a cold still day is a Christmas thought. If you go to:

http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php#generation_by_fuel_type_table

… you will see that the 2,000 or so wind landscape ruining turbines built so far are at this very moment contributing just 0.2% of the country’s electricity.  On days like these, we’d need just a million to power all our needs and even to get to the renewables target we’d need 300,000 of them. In short even if we could build them, we’d need to make the entire country one giant wind farm and even then it would be a bit tight on space.

Would you want to rely exclusively on these guys to provide the energy to cook the Christmas dinner?

Happy Christmas!

The Say No to Harrington Wind Farm action group.

Nuon’s website now refers to a ‘delay in deciding’ that ‘also provides a better opportunity for finalising potential community benefits linked to the wind farm’, but neglects to tell you that the delay is at their instigation.  They say:

‘We had been expecting the Council to decide before Christmas which I reported in the newsletter I sent you last month.’

The implication here is that the delay had nothing to do with Nuon when in fact our understanding is that the postponement of the determination meeting that was to be held on December 16th was a direct result of Nuon asking Daventry District Council Planning Department for more time in which to conclude their discussions on matters of what they chose to call ‘community benefits’.  Even if discussions are going on, it has long been understood that, for obvious reasons, matters of ‘benefit’ of this sort related to planning decisions should not influence them.

Just what are these ‘community benefits’?  Nuon’s website now lists them as:

1) ‘An exciting wild life habitat project in fields near the Brompton (sic) Way’.  Presumably this is to offset the massive environmental damage their project will inflict elsewhere?

2) ‘A circular walk taking in the wind farm and the history of the air field and missile base’.  This is a walk that most of us have being doing for years!

3) ‘A Community Fund of £50,000 a year for local projects and potential initiatives in local sustainability such as micro generation and energy efficiency’.  Well, you will find that our District Council already do a great deal to promote energy efficiency in the home.  £50,000 each year sounds a lot, but who would administer it, and anyhow it is a very small fraction of the profit they stand to make at our community’s expense.

As a community, through our Parish Councils, we have repeatedly told both Nuon and Daventry District Council that the great majority of us do not want this monstrous development.  These ‘community benefits’ do not, and should not, change this in any way.

The other matter reflected on Nuon’s website that we have issue with is their unashamed recruitment  of

‘supporters to join us at the committee meeting (likely to be 6.15 on Wed 27 Jan. at the Council Offices, Lodge Road) to be a part of a positive wind energy lobby and encourage a yes vote.” 

This is combined with a facility automatically  to  generate an email to DDC planners, with no postcode checker to ascertain that the supporters are local to the development or have genuine addresses.  The Say No to Harrington action group is similarly asking for support in our endeavour to have the application defeated at the Planning Committee meeting, but we have done this via a newsletter distributed locally to those who have a genuine interest in the detrimental implications of the proposed development.

Finally, Nuon’s website lists summaries of the various Consultee Responses but omits the response from English Heritage which is firmly, and importantly, against the proposals, and says that Brixworth Parish Council support the application when in fact that is absolutely untrue.

By Christopher Booker

Daily Mail

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1210569/CHRISTOPHER-BOOKER-Green-zealots-muddled-ministers-condemning-blackouts.html#ixzz0PwgxhSGM

Power-cut Britain, to anyone who remembers it, will seem utterly antediluvian. It predated home computers and mobile phones, and colour televisions were only then beginning to appear.  Those who were young in the early Seventies will remember poring over their homework by candlelight, and there was a clear division between people who liked the reek of paraffin lamps and people who didn’t. Then, along with the three-day week and crippling industrial disputes, powercut Britain disappeared into the past, never to return. That is, until now. Once again we are being warned that within a few years this country could be facing its worst wave of power blackouts since those far-off days more than three decades ago - and that even the Government itself now admits these might be inevitable. For seven years it has been glaringly obvious to energy experts that Britain will soon be facing a colossal energy gap, as the ageing power stations which currently supply 40 percent of our electricity are forced to close down. Eight of our nine nuclear power plants are coming to the end of their life. And half of our coal and oil-fired power stations are rapidly running out of the hours they are allowed to keep running under the EU’s Large Combustion Plants directive, designed to stop the pollution blamed for acid rain. By 2015, or even earlier, we shall thus begin to lose two-fifths of our present electricity supply, and the question energy experts are asking is: how do we propose to fill this yawning gap?

Britain faces a colossal energy gap

The seriousness of this cannot be overestimated. Cosy images of candlelit Britain in the Seventies are all very well, but since then we have been through a revolution which makes our society almost wholly dependent on computers. It is no longer just our lights, cookers, fridges and televisions for which we rely on electricity, but pretty well our entire working lives, from offices, banks, petrol pumps and supermarket tills to traffic lights, railway signals and virtually all our transport system. The tragedy is that for seven years, politicians of all parties have refused to face up to Britain’s fast-looming energy gap because they have all been bewitched by the great ‘green dream’, that we could somehow save the planet by generating much of our electricity from ‘renewables’, such as building thousands more wind turbines. In reality this is just makebelieve. The 2,300 turbines so far built in Britain supply barely 1 per cent of our power, less than a single medium-sized conventional power station. The Government talks about spending £100 billion on building 10,000 more windmills to meet our EU target that within ten years we must generate 32 per cent of our electricity from

‘renewables’. But, first, there is not the remotest chance that we could build three turbines a day between now and 2020. And, second, even if there were, they would do virtually nothing to close our energy gap, not least because we would need to build a dozen or more conventional power stations just to provide back-up for when the wind is not blowing. Almost the only politician who realised this was John Hutton, the former energy minister, who last year reversed Government policy by announcing that we needed at least a dozen new nuclear and coal-fired power stations to fill the gap.

As he starkly declared to the 2008 Labour conference: ‘No coal and no nuclear means no power, no future.’ Two weeks later, however, Hutton was moved to another department, and Britain’s energy policy was handed over to Ed Miliband, a ‘green’ zealot in charge of a new ministry ominously named the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC). Mr Miliband still makes noises about allowing the French and German companies which now dominate our electricity supply industry to build a new generation of nuclear power plants. But under EU rules they cannot, unlike the wind industry, expect any subsidies, and the chances that any new nuclear plants could be built before 2020 are virtually non-existent.

Wind turbines won’t solve the problem

As for new coal-fired power stations, he has decreed that these cannot be built without socalled ‘carbon capture’, piping off their CO2 to bury it in holes in the ground.

Not only would this double the cost of the electricity, but the technology to do it hasn’t even been developed yet. In other words, Miliband is so obsessed with the need to halt ‘climate change’ that his concern with the ‘energy’ half of his brief - keeping Britain’s lights on - so obviously takes second place that it is scarcely evident at all.

This was glaringly obvious from his recent policy statement on making the ‘transition to a low-carbon economy’: hundreds of pages about how we are going to build windmills and achieve imaginary cuts in our CO2 emissions, but notably short on any practical suggestions as to how we are going to keep our economy running. From a statement put out by Mr Miliband’s ministry this week, it has become even more obvious that the one thing they hope will save Britain’s electricity supplies from disaster is a scramble to build dozens more gas-fired power stations - just when our own North Sea gas reserves are fast running out. This means we shall be looking to gas to provide anything up to 80 per cent of our electricity, and the gas will be largely imported from politically unreliable countries such as Russia and Algeria at a time when world gas prices are likely to be soaring. It is exactly the disastrous scenario which Mr Hutton warned against last year. Even if, by this extremely risky gamble, we might manage to close the energy gap now fast approaching us, it could only mean a further massive hike in electricity prices, driving millions more into ‘fuel poverty’.

Not for nothing is Mr Miliband also proposing that we should spend £7 billion on fitting every home in the country with what are called ‘smart meters’. These are two-way devices, connected electronically to our supply company, which would not only allow us to see how much electricity we ourselves are using but would enable the firms to ‘manage demand’ by controlling how much power we receive.

A massive price hike is inevitable

If the power cuts come, this ‘Big Brother in the cupboard’ would allow the firms to ration our electricity use. And it is revealing that instead of looking to that £7 billion to be spent on two or three new nuclear power stations, the Government prefers a system which would allow the misery of electricity cuts to be spread around in a ‘managed’ fashion. It is ironic that this week’s stories about the Government admitting that we face the possibility of blackouts should have originated with the Tory Party, whose own energy policy has long been indistinguishable from the Government’s - windmills, ‘carbon capture’, ‘smart meters’ and all. The truth is that, if David Cameron comes to power in nine months’ time, there will be no bigger headache confronting him than how to avoid precisely the disaster which his spokesman was yesterday warning about. If there is one issue to which he and his colleagues should now be giving their fullest attention it is how to keep Britain’s lights on without prices going through the roof. And that will mean abandoning a lot of that childish Milibandian make-believe which now threatens us with as great a crisis as any our politicians have ever landed us with.

“Oxendon, Kelmarsh, Maidwell …. Square Norman towers with arrow slits, thatched pubs, tiny Victorian railway stations, nesting in a bosky countryside of high hedges and dense copses. It was enough to make you want to break into a chorus of  ‘There’ll always be an England …’ ”

Robert Harris, ENIGMA, (Arrow Books 1996), p. 273

Through the industry’s mouthpiece, the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) we are often told that public opinion is on the side of onshore wind farm development. For example the FAQ section of the BWEA’s website states:

 “Opinion surveys regularly show that just over eight out of ten people are in favour of wind energy, and less than one in ten (around 5%) are against it.”

How you interpret this ‘fact’ depends on the detail of how the questions were framed, how informed the respondents are about the issue, and the way the ‘population’ of people was sampled.

First, it is very easy to ask questions that solicit the answer you want and then misrepresent the results. It might well be that when asked a straight question if wind energy is a good thing, nine in ten will tick the ‘yes’ box. It’s ‘motherhood and apple pie’ isn’t it, who could possibly object? What there is abundant evidence to show is that when a reasonably informed public are asked a more direct question such as “Do you want commercial wind ‘farms’ in the countryside?” the large majority always answer with a resounding NO.

Second, asking somebody who has no experience of living close to a wind farm is really asking what for them is a ‘hypothetical question’ about something of which they have no knowledge. One way to ensure that respondents are aware of the nuisance that winds farms create is to look at the results of the all-too-frequent attempts by developers to extend already ‘up and running’ wind farms or where there are proposals for new winds farms close to existing sites. In such cases local residents and their councilors have a good idea of what to expect. The evidence here is that people who know about them are overwhelmingly against them. Ages ago in 1999 a survey of polls by Angela Kelly of the Countryside Guardian summarized a number of such expressions of opinion, for example:

•  A Summer 1997 Windfarm Poll by the County Times about wind farms in Mid-Wales had 781 responses resulting in a 79% ‘no’ to more wind farms in Mid-Wales. Two years later, at Easter 1999, the same newspaper reported that over 90% of responses said ‘no’ to more wind farms in Montgomeryshire;
• Also in 1997 at  Cold Northcott, Cornwall, showing a dramatic change of attitude, councillors rejected a planning application for an extension to an existing wind farm by 25 votes to 9 and had 780 letters against with not even one in favour!
• In the same year at nearby Davidstow an application for a wind farm was overwhelmingly rejected with 813 letters against and only 3 in favour.                                                                                                                                                            

These reactions were over a decade ago, so perhaps as the alleged threat from global warming has become greater, opinion might have swung the other way? Again, the evidence is pretty conclusive, the more people know about them the more they are opposed:

• In Scotland, where there are many operating wind farms, the Lochaber News  in August of this year (2009) reports that in response to the question “Should councillors approve NBW’s plan for four wind turbines above Corpach? The results was 10% in favour and a wacking 90% against;
• At the other end of the country but again where wind farms scar the landscape, the Cambridge News for 27^th March 2009 asked the simple question “Do you think we should build more windfarms?” with a ‘yes’ vote of 29.4% and a ‘no’ vote of 70.6% ;
• In Wales surveys by the Western Mail (December 2008) and S. Wales Evening Post (November 2008) with much the same question gave ‘nos’ of  86% and 71% ;
• Even more amazing was the submission of objections to the recent Isle of Lewis proposal where the voting with 11,456 submissions was 0.5% in favour and 99.5% against.

Quite how this can be translated into ‘eight out of ten in favour’ escapes us!

Third, any professional in surveys of public opinion will tell you that what also makes the results hard to interpret is ensuring that the sample of respondents is in some sense ‘representative’. This cuts both ways. For example, if a newspaper or website asks people to vote on some proposition or other, chances are that only people who are engaged with the issue will do so, with a resulting bias in the percentages either for or against. We are well aware, for example, of carefully orchestrated campaigns elsewhere in the county to bias opinion polls in favour on local wind farms by the ‘green’ lobby without considering any of the local circumstances or arguments.

At Harrington, Nuon have tried to play the same game and have persistently misrepresented local opinion. In their Statement of Community Involvement they have used extremely lax social survey methods to justify ludicrous and entirely incorrect claims about the community response to their proposal. For the record, a survey conducted by Maidwell and Draughton Parish Council in 2008 distributed to every household in the two villages most affected received responses that were 84% against the proposal. A further poll after a public debate in the same parish held on 30^th March 2009 at which both sides of the argument were presented and gave a similar proportion against. A similar public meeting in Harrington on 6^th April 2009 was even less equivocal, with all (100%) present being opposed to the scheme.  

Perhaps the BWEA’s statement should be amended to read:  

“Reasonably well-sampled and carefully worded opinion surveys regularly show that eight to nine out of ten people are against wind farms being built in their locality, and less than one or two in ten are for it.”

DU.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8206615.stm

BBC News Tuesday, 18 August 2009

Profits fall at protest-hit firm

Vestas says many customers are unable to fund turbine projects

Protest-hit Danish wind turbine firm Vestas has seen profits fall on the back of job cuts and falling orders.

Workers had staged a sit-in protest at its site in the Isle of Wight this summer, as Vestas closed its factory
there with the loss of 425 jobs.

The firm, which also axed 1,142 jobs in Denmark, said net income dropped 34% to 43m euros ($60.8m; £37m) in the second quarter from the same period last year.

Vestas also said that it shipped 618 turbines, 12% fewer than last year.

But the firm did see its revenue increase by 11% to 1.2bn euros.

“Since the autumn of 2008, the credit crisis has impacted the wind power industry, causing limited order intake during the past nine months,” Vestas said.

“Many customers have been unable to finance scheduled projects either due to increasing funding costs or an actual lack of funding.”

The company maintained that it expected revenue to rise this year by 20% to 7.2bn euros.

And it said it was expanding heavily in China and the US because those markets were among the fastest growing.

Senior vice president Peter Wenzel-Kruse told the BBC that the protest at the Isle of Wight was a “very sad episode.”

“When we see a strong, stable onshore market in the UK we will definitely reconsider going back,” he said.

But he blamed the attitude of the general public for the company’s lack of progress in the UK.

“The ‘nimbys’ need to be more open [minded] and acknowledge that wind turbines would be good for the UK.
The government is doing a lot but the final decision makers are the local councils and boroughs.”
———————————————————————-
BBC Radio 4   18th August 2009

“Today” Programme  6am – 9am

Listen again on:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm

and at 8.45am you can hear that Vestas shares have plummeted by one third in recent months.

The Swedish director of Vestas blamed it on “nimbyism” and said that the opposition to wind turbines was stronger in the UK than anywhere in Europe and beyond.  He did  not blame the government - just we NIMBYs !  I felt really proud to know that we still have enough  fighting spirit in this country to protect our land from those who would wreck it from sheer greed.  Unfortunately, we still have to contend with “the enemy within” - i.e. many of our own elected representatives, as well as the unelected ones in Europe ! 

Our political masters, by forcing the consumer to subsidise the wind folly, are just adding to the millions already threatened with energy poverty due to the credit crunch. 

The director of Vestas said that they could not set up  a manufacturing base in the UK unless a strong market for onshore wind turbines could be established.

Of course, there was not a mention of offshore wind turbines. The developers know it is far too difficult and risky to build them and that dependable conditions for access for service  and repair are about as predictable as the wind itself!  The insurance costs are astronomical.

Denmark has reached saturation of onshore wind and the Danes are making it very clear that they’ve had enough.   They only tolerate them because they know their huge export market is the main  plank in their economy and provides employment for thousands. To this end their country has been sacrificed to about 6.000 wind turbines as a huge shop window to sell their wares.

As Howard Hayden, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut, wrote in 2001 :-
“In recent years, the little country Denmark has gained a certain amount of fame with its wind turbines.
No, they don’t get much electricity from them. They sell them to suckers.”

So, NIMBYs unite and  keep up the fight! 

Join the NIABYs  - Not In Anyone’s Back Yard !

And Google :- “VESTAS Swedish director Hansen Isle of Wight” :-
To read a very different story just one year ago !

Angela Kelly

Countryside Guardian

The wind farm industry always claims that the main reason why they have to cover the country with turbines is for security of supply. They argue that if the wind stops blowing in one place, chances are that it will be blowing in another and that anyhow such low wind conditions don’t correlate with high levels of demand. Both arguments are dangerous myths that proper data analysis can disprove. When the wind stops it often stops over the entire country and this occurs frequently during the winter peak in energy demand. This note by John Webley provides the details.

Onshore wind turbines the myth the reality and the bottom line

By Edmund Conway - Daily Telegraph
Published: 12:15AM BST 10 Aug 2009
The Government’s plans to increase the proportion of Britain’s energy generated by “green” sources is set to cost between 11 and 17 times what the change brings in economic benefits. The figures are buried deep in the Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy paper produced last month.

According to the document, while the expected cost will total around £4bn a year over the next 20 years, amounting to £57bn to £70bn, the eventual benefit in terms of the reduced carbon dioxide emissions will be only £4bn to £5bn over that entire period. The figures make up part of the Government’s impact assessment of the policies, which include plans to raise the proportion of British electricity produced by renewable sources from 5.5pc today to 30pc.
It is the Government’s assessment that the non-monetary benefits of the policies will compensate for the possible £65bn shortfall, but economists are sceptical as to how much of this sum such factors can make up. The White Paper has also calculated that household gas and electricity bills will have to rise by up to £249 a year, although Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband has insisted that new measures to improve consumers’ energy efficiency would reduce the extra cost to an average of £92 a year per home.

August 9, 2009 • Letters, New York

Editor, Watertown Daily Times, Watertown, NY:I grew up in rural Wisconsin.and spent my adolescent summers at my aunt’s place on the St. Lawrence. I know and love the people and lifestyle. Not terribly cosmopolitan, sometimes, but peaceful, close to the earth, and very, very human.

I returned home recently for a visit and discovered that huge swaths of rustic Wisconsin countryside had been vandalized by armies of monstrosities the size of the Statue of Liberty, with a Boeing 747 pinned to her nose. Now Wolfe Island has been desecrated the same way, and plans are afoot for Amherst Island and Cape Vincent. Ye Gods, has everyone completely lost their minds?

Their whooshing and low-frequency thub-thub-thub, audible at disturbing volumes for up to five miles in the mountains or over water, prevents people from sleeping, upsets livestock to the point that productivity decreases sharply while miscarriages rise, and drives away all wildlife (who do not have to worry about mortgages or property values) within a three-mile radius. No deer, bear, or even squirrels. Offshore turbines in Great Yarmouth, England, are causing baby seals to be born dead or to be abandoned by their overstressed mothers. The FAA-required strobe lights disfigure the clear night sky. Our beautiful Wolfe Island now most resembles a poster for a low-budget science fiction movie.

But, of course, low-budget they aren’t; the towers cost upwards of $2 million each to erect, and about $1 million each to take down and decommission. (When the various investors and fly-by-night energy companies have taken turns depreciating the things, will they take them down? Or will our grandchildren live in a landscape of rusting 300-foot hulks topped by broken fans, leaking chemicals into our land? Looking now like the B-movie aliens after they lose the war…)

Industrial-grade heavy-duty access roads have to be hacked through the fields or woods. The smallest available industrial turbine is 1.5 MW, the equivalent of a two thousand horsepower electric motor, weighing on the order of 60 tons. The truck carrying it has to be able to get through. The nacelle containing the turbine is the size of a large bus; the armature must be turned regularly - even if there’s no wind - to keep it from sagging under its own weight, like the drivetrain on a battleship. Just to counter the CO2 from producing the tons upon tons of cement needed to anchor the towers, these things would have to operate near full capacity for over six years. They are not the cute little windmills behind the barn, or the picturesque features of the Dutch countryside. In operation, the tips of the fan blades are moving at around 200 mph; I hope the terns (and the eagles, and the falcons) stay alert in the middle of the night.

Not to mention, of course, that each turbine contains well over 60 gallons of chemically-sophisticated motor oil to lubricate its complex gearbox and bearings. When - not if - it starts to leak into your streams, rivers, and pastures as these notoriously unreliable machines age, what effect will that have on your drinking water - and your fishing, since all the game for hunting has cleared out? What effect on your peace of mind will it have when a lightning strike disintegrates a blade - throwing ten tons of carbon fiber, fiberglass, and aluminum, white-hot, in huge fragments, for distances up to half a mile, while igniting the lubricating oil 300 feet above the woods? (This sort of event has occurred several times in Germany, with turbines substantially smaller than those planned for Cape Vincent.) In the Wisconsin winter, the turbine blades regularly throw huge chunks of ice, weighing several hundred pounds, up to a thousand feet from the tower. Would upstate New York be so different?

But perhaps this is all worthwhile if we’re saving the planet? Nope. Wind power is so variable that backup fossil plants have to be kept fired up constantly anyway. No carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced. Denmark, the most turbine-ridden country in the world for more than a decade, has not been able to shut down a single power plant and, because its small electrical grid can’t absorb the fluctuations, has had to dump most of its hugely expensive wind wattage to the much larger grids of Sweden and Norway at (as we say) fire-sale prices. Denmark, Germany, and Spain - the leading European wind enthusiasts - have all put moratoria on any further wind installations, because of both public outcry and the budget drain of government subsidies. England, Scotland, and Wales are all in an uproar over the destruction of their countryside and coasts.

Moreover, after twenty years and $50 million of tax-supported research, the small coterie of UN scientist-bureaucrats trumpeting global warming have been totally unable to come up with any solid evidence that carbon dioxide is the cause of the warming (which has now apparently stopped, or at least paused for 30 years), much less that any additional warming will cause catastrophes.

All the evidence, from increasingly sophisticated satellites and deep-diving ocean buoys, is that climate fluctuates in response to natural cyclic changes in ocean currents and solar activity, and that the worldwide sea level has been rising at about eight inches a century for the last five thousand years or so, and is still doing so. So there is no reason to worry about CO2, a plant fertilizer, a necessary part of all life on this planet, in the first place. All this devastation of the landscape is for nothing. Less than nothing. Wind power is a fraud based on a fraud.

But the story is always the same. The wind promoter comes into a quiet rural area, stages several community presentations, pure Madison Avenue professionalism, promises jobs and a great boost to the local economy, chats up the local leadership, and paints rosy pictures of a prosperous environmentally-correct future in the industry of tomorrow. Landowners are wooed with talk of huge commission checks for the generated power.

If there’s any local resistance, the promoter buys the cooperation of said local leadership to paint it as NIMBY - he, of course, would not live within 50 miles of one of the things - and environmentally irresponsible (hah!). If this doesn’t work, he’ll buy a few county, state, or provincial politicians to simply deprive the local jurisdiction of any authority over turbine siting, as they did for example in Wisconsin. In Oregon, wilderness noise regulations prevented development of a wind installation, so of course in 2004 the wind promoters had their friends in Salem change them. In New York, Attorney General Cuomo’s investigations of wind developers’ bribery is continuing, and you now have an “Ethics Code”. Doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy feeling?

So the phalanx of giant towers goes up anyway. It’s always the same story - in Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wales, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Sweden, Missouri, Scotland, New York, Germany, Kansas, Hungary, Italy - the modus operandi never varies. The Internet is full of sad little websites put up by local community groups who opposed this vandalism of their countryside and their quality of life; they’ve posted their letters of opposition, their legal pleadings, and finally the horror-inspiring pictures of what happened to their woods and fields - and to their children, who often fall asleep at school because the turbine noise keeps them from sleeping at night. It is excruciating to see this over and over and over.

Jobs? The construction crews and engineers are brought in from outside - the leading turbine manufacturers are all European - and the long-term local jobs amount finally to one or two. The local economy? Politicians love to trumpet hundreds of millions in investment in the area. Now, If these hundreds of millions were to build a steel plant, or a giant amusement park, or a conventional nuclear power plant, it would indeed provide hundreds of long-term, high-paying jobs. Yes, these monsters will generate countless millions in tax breaks, taxpayer subsidies, and “carbon credits”. But not for the local people; they’ll be lucky to get two jobs and maybe a fancy maintenance truck. The money will all flow to the financiers (like Al Gore’s business partners in Goldman-Sachs) in New York City. The turbines produce essentially no useful power and no local jobs, but very efficiently blow our money into fat cats’ coffers.

The huge turbine towers will earn their installation cost back in tax breaks and subsidies (subsidies and tax breaks at _your_ expense) in less than three years. Then, of course, shell fly-by-night company A sells the turbines to shell fly-by-night company B, which then gets its years of boodle at taxpayer expense. And so on.

Until finally the turbines stop working. Again, they cost over a million per tower to decommission, and the wind magnates can afford much pricier law firms than landowners - as the landowners already know, having discussed the amazingly small size of their commission checks with the company. Does anyone seriously think these ugly monstrosities will be taken down and the land restored in twenty years?

Is this the legacy you wish to leave your grandchildren? The people of New York must fight against this nightmare takeover by the eco-industrial complex. You must fight to save your environment from, for God’s sake, the environmentalists. So future generations will not look around and say, “This must have once been so beautiful. I wish I could have seen it then. I wonder why they did it.”

Sincerely,

Craig Goodrich
Indianapolis