Windfarm Sickness Spreads By Word of Mouth

In Ontario, the right-wing establishment have successfully united the usual anti-government, anti-progress suspects with some pissed-off farmers, rural retirees, and rich NIMBYs to create a particularly nasty strain of anti-windmill sentiment. They've become the Typhoid Mary of wind farm sickness.

It's true that the Ont. government was a bit overzealous in a few of its land acquisition, and there were a small number of households which were closer than what is considered a comfortable distance from some installations, but as far as i know, every such household has either been paid off or relocated.

The claimed negative health effects are spurious. I wonder what any of the hundreds of thousands of households located close to rail lines, expressways or airports must think when they hear people whinging about effects from wind generators...

Yes windmills kill some birds and bats. In North America the reported bird-kill from windfarms is a fraction of the kill from oil and gas operations.... and several orders of magnitude lower than the number of birds killed annually by.... house-cats. Like birds? Don't let your stupid cat out.

Finally, the technology is still pretty young. There's every reason to expect that wind generators will become more reliable, efficient, quieter, and that their energy can be stored and used more effectively. How many centuries has coal-burning taken to get efficient and clean up a bit?

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/4D0GSuO1s0w/story01.htm

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