A study Group pros and cons of wind and or alternative energy sources.

[Guidothesemipsuedocaptitalistpig]

The following links are the official sites for the wind farms operating in my new home state of PA. I have passed the bear creek farm several times on I81 on the way to Scranton PA. I was not impressed as they are not what I would want to look at on my way up into the mountains.
But other than aesthetics, over the next few days I will try to dig up all the information on what the average PA resident thought about the projects, or if those thoughts have changed now that they are a reality.
Feel free to ask me questions of specifics you are concerned with in my old home state of MI. I will try to be fair as I really do believe in the concept of clean energy. I just have seen too many people jump on the bandwagon for too few KW of power. For me personally visual pollution is just as bad as. the smog fossil fuel plants can produce. PS I can see the cooling towers of the Susquehanna river Nuclear plant from my back yard. While I know the emission here, is steam, from cooling the turbines, it does have a visual footprint also.

http://www.pawindenergynow.org/pa/farms.html

http://www.actionpa.org/cleanenergy/wind.html

The first thing I noticed in setting up this study, was the vast number of farms being considered. If all of these occurred I do not believe there would be too many mountains in the area that would not have a wind turbine in view. Thoughts? questions? Please I am game to look into this and provide as much info as I can in an accurate manner.

[XLFD]

Thanks for looking into this Guido. I will reserve comments and questions for later, once I can look more at your links.

[Guidothesemipsuedocaptitalistpig]

This is another article I found pertaining to the Bear creek farm here in my area. This one seems to deal with the Pros cons and misconceptions made about wind farms. One thing to note in the case of the farms I see in this area and that is most are well away from ant type of structure residential or commercial, due the the ridges they tend to be built on. In my opinion they are not pretty compared to the rocky ridge that would be in view without them. But I also do not consider them to be ugly.
My personal concerns over any of these projects have been for the geographical (footprint) they take up how much are they really doing to save building larger more productive things like Nuclear plants. There are 7 Nuclear plants up and down the Susquehanna river from me here and one is actively in the process of licensing a third reactor. One Nuc plant here produces more than the entire output of all the wind plants currently and future planned in PA. I live close enough to Susquehanna reactor one and two to take a picture of the cooling towers from my back yard. No one here seems to be worried and many here support additions to those plants as well. This Weekend I will go on a tour and snap pictures of two wind farms as well as the Nuclear plants and you can decide for yourselves as to which is more obtrusive to the natural beauty of the area. I do now the foot print of the actual Nuclear plant here is only about 60 acres where as the wind farms are all in the 100s of acres (usually stretched out) in a narrow line across a ridge line or mountaintop.

http://standardspeaker.com/news/bear-creek-offers-example-for-munic...

[Guidothesemipsuedocaptitalistpig]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html

This will not click as a link copy and paste it into your browsers to read this is my other concern for wind energy. It only seems viable with heavy subsidies the above article shows what happens if the subsidies run out. Would you want these dead towers in your county?

[XLFD]

I was able to click on it and read it. I think I remember reading through this back at the time the Lake Michigan turbines looked to be an eventuality here. This is a well written article which asks the questions that should be asked.
Why do we need to subsidize this industry so heavily?
How much bang for the buck do we get for these?
What is the history of wind turbines on a large scale?
Are wind towers alone going to be able to supply our energy needs?
What are the limitations and strengths of this energy source?

The article covers only land based turbines; water based ones have a host of other issues, mostly problems.