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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron who wrote (5618)	1/13/2004 12:22:43 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

Unfortunately for that scenario, as so often with Utopian concepts, reality sticks in its head. First, the Oregon/Washington Gorge is one of the most reliable wind areas in the country. (Parasurfing in the lower Columbia River is internationally renouned because of the strong, steady, and frequent winds.) Second, do you want a wind farm in your back yard? I thought not. They make cell towers look like modest trees. They are tall, they come in big bunches, and while they may look pretty when you drive by them, they quickly pall. Third, wind farms take a lot of land. That costs money. If you put them where people want to live, even if they will let you get past the NIMBY, it's expensive land. If you put them where people don't want to live -- in the desert, in mountains too tall and cold for anybody to want to live there -- the infrastructure to get that power from the remote area to the places where people want it is masssive, very expensive, and ugly -- think several times as many transmission towers as we have today criss-crossing some of the most pristine land in the country. And the more we learn about high tension power lines the less people are going to be willing to live near them, which makes a major problem, and expense, finding corridors to run them through to get the power to the cities where people need it. It's going to be be damn hard to locate a wind farm anywhere near the Boston/D.C. corridor, or LA, or San Francisco, which is where the power is needed. There's not that much demand for power in North Dakota, where there is a pretty reliable wind stream. Out in the West where much of the land and and the steady wind is, you have lots and lots and lots of national forests which would have to be logged to provide open space to build and maintain the towers and run the transmission lines. Not to mention that you have to build the things on the tops of the mountains, where they can be seen for long distances, not down in the valleys. The Sierra Club would go ape$h!t. It's a pipedream. Makes a good political polemic, but nothing more.