We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price.
Onshore wind turbines are visually a very considerable intrusion on any landscape.
Hopelessly uneconomic on any substantial scale, since it requires a conventional power back-up for when the wind stops blowing, forests of wind turbines are rightly regarded in most countries as an environmental monstrosity.
The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires.
I wouldn't be against them (large wind turbines) if they actually worked.
We seem to forget that everything that is good for the environment is a job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Houses don't retrofit themselves and put in their own new boilers and furnaces and better-fitting windows and doors. Advanced biofuel crops don't plant themselves. Community gardens don't tend themselves. Farmers' markets don't run themselves. Every single thing that is good for the environment is actually a job, a contract, or an entrepreneurial opportunity.
People forget: solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Businesses don't retrofit themselves to waste less energy and water, nor do homes weatherize themselves.
Replacing half of the U.S. ground-transport fuels with hydrogen from wind power by 2050, for example, might require 1,400 gigawatts of advanced wind turbines or more... replacing those fuels with electricity might require less than 400 GW.
I used to think Cape Wind was a great idea. That was when Ted Kennedy was alive and railing about how he might spill his Chivas if he had to keep maneuvering the Mya around all those noisy seagull-murdering wind turbines. Anything Ted Kennedy was against, I was for.
You can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet with 73,000 to 145,000 five-megawatt wind turbines. That would take between one and three square kilometers of footprint on the ground.
I find those wind turbines around Lake George to be utterly offensive. I think they're just a blight on the landscape.
We must not let ourselves be swept off our feet in horror at the danger of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous. It's just dangerous, much as coal mines, petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning and wind turbines are dangerous.
Even if you accept the theory of man-made climate change, wind turbines are a rotten way to reduce CO2 emissions, or to improve energy security.
The famous statue of Christ the Redeemer that overlooks Rio de Janeiro is only 130 feet tall. McGuinty's eco-idols [Wind Turbines] will be three times that height, but will serve the same imposing purpose.
or simply:
