Wind-Power Projects Halted (by DoD)

CHICAGO -- More than 130 wind turbines are proposed for the hilltops of central Wisconsin, but that project and at least 11 others have been halted by the Defense Department as it studies whether the projects could interfere with military radar.

Wind farm developers, Midwestern legislators and environmentalists say the farms pose no risk, noting that there are already numerous wind farms operating in military radar areas. They say a renewable, domestic source of energy such as wind is crucial to energy security and independence.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/09/AR2006060901420.html

:rofl:

......They say their wind turbines are victims of the ongoing dispute between Cape Cod residents and developers of the proposed Cape Wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The Defense Department study was put in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act -- inserted, say wind farm developers, by senators who want to block Cape Wind.

"This legislation was intended to derail Cape Wind, but it had a boomerang effect and affected a lot of projects around the country," said Michael Skelly of Horizon Wind Energy, a Texas company constructing the country's largest wind farm near Bloomington, Ill.

This spring, facilities in the works in North Dakota, South Dakota, Illinois and Wisconsin received "proposed hazard" letters from the Federal Aviation Administration saying the projects must be halted pending the Defense Department study.

FAA spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere said the letters are in keeping with the agency's usual review process, which has been slowed by the quickly increasing number of permit applications for wind turbines nationwide......

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I think the DOD needs to adjust. Sounds like a Dick Cheney order.

Ass Wipes

elitist a-holes

farms? He said the number of bats they kill isn't worth the energy gained. Wind farm in Virginia killed like 2000 bats last year. I'm not sure how I feel about wind farms now.

This could be bad as the stove was already keeping the high trees from messing up our next war with blowing up some one from 30,000 feet. With war our only pass time in DC we can not let tall trees, wind mills and bats mess this up. All these things are un-American and anti-Bush.

Bats are incredibly accurate flyers and can skim in and out of tree branches. The newest windmills are quite tall (but not tall enough to get in the way of radar) and the turbine turns very slowly. If a bat is killed by one of those windmills, it's almost certainly sick and old.

For they too are SICK and OLD


http://pamspaulding.com/weblog/2005_10_01_pamspaulding_archive.html

That unless it was Indiana bats, they are not endangered.

Heck, buildings kill tons of birds, as do power lines. I am not sure how many bats are killed by power lines and buldings.

Wind power, I would wager, would kill far less animals than...let's say.....global-scale climate change.

The world could run out of bats any day now.

Seriously, birds will adapt, just as micro-evolution teaches.

I find that hard to believe, as the turbines generally don't turn very fast, plus bats have excellent hearing and most North American species use echolocation to navigate.


A reduction in bat numbers would be a serious issue if true, though, as population drops in various regions have always lead to population booms of various insect species, many of which transmit diseases or devour crops. Some bats are also responsible for the survival of certain trees and plants as well, as their seeds need to pass through the bat's digestive tract before they can germinate. Bats really are one of the most beneficial species on earth.

Go stand underneath a large turbine and focus, not on the lazy turning
of the hub, but the blade-tip.

and the tips of the blades move at 6 miles per hour. Go to an airport if you want to see animals killed by fast moving turbines inside jet engines.

This is all designed to get us to love our friend, the atom. General Atomics is owned by friends of Bushco after all.

Can't go gettin' the ultimate in non-polluting totally renewable energy, now, can we? Won't somebody think of the fossil and atomic industries???????

The speed of the blade tips is proportional to the speed of the wind. A typical modern wind turbine has a tip speed ratio of 6, which means that the blade tip speed is 60 mph in a 10 mph wind or 120 mph in a 20 mph wind.

guess I don't want them to get all sliced up either.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/us/06wind.html>

concern. Without bats, you would have a lot more mosquitoes, West Nile Virus and other diseases the mosquitoes carry.

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=18432



This does indeed seem curious. I was always under the impression that bats were better fliers than to run into these turbines and die. Anyone here have any more info or insight into this?

Studies show that the number of birds killed by wind turbines is negligible compared to the amount that die as a result of other human activities such as traffic, hunting, power lines and high-rise buildings and especially the environmental impacts of using non-clean power sources. For example, in the UK, where there are a few hundred turbines, about one bird is killed per turbine per year; 10 million per year are killed by cars alone.<30> Another study suggests that migrating birds adapt to obstacles; those birds which don't modify their route and continue to fly through a wind farm are capable of avoiding windmills,<31> at least in the low-wind non-twilight conditions studied. In the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) concluded that "The available evidence suggests that appropriately positioned wind farms do not pose a significant hazard for birds."<32> It notes that climate change poses a much more significant threat to wildlife, and therefore supports wind farms and other forms of renewable energy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Ecology

I imagine one could find sites that disagree, though.

hard to love...but I guess necessary

Even though they are mammals. I have never been much bothered by bats, personally.

the dark.

at night and in very small spaces.

There's always going to be a tradeoff.

I'd imagine that the pollutuon and carbon emissions from a coal plant of the same power would kill a lot more than just a few bats.

about bats was talking about, this is a wierd situation where environmentalists are not united.

is reprocessed into weapons or is transported and dumped in Yucca Mt., that Nevadans don't want?

The beam goes above most turbines, and it can be filtered out of the ground clutter by the software.

If your radar is that awful, ask the British what radar systems they are using. Apparently they spot the stealth airplanes with ease, so if their radar can spot planes that are supposed to be invisible then i'm sure the radar can ignore the wind turbines.

In other words: sounds like the radar is crap, or there's politics involved here.

Mark.

Further interesting notes:

"There are half a dozen Air Force sites that have wind projects next to them," he said. "There seems to be little consistency in how they're identifying whether a project is impacting a radar site or not. It's a wide net being cast out to stop any project in its tracks until this study is complete, and there's no clear deadline being adhered to for the study."

Critics of Cape Wind, including Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), have said that the 130 proposed turbines about six miles offshore would hurt views, tourism and migratory birds."

NIMBY!

My bad. I was under the impression that Kennedy supported this.

...with box cutters.

they don't have this problem?

As to birds and bats getting shreaded, migration and flight trajectories should be plotted before installation. Many of our dams do it fish, which can be remedied. The mercury from coal fired plants makes it so that you can eat the fish you catch, etc.

faster than the corn..no one objects but the wacky people

not enough need for oil = not enough need for military spending

not enough need for military spending = no support for wind power from the military

Follow the money.

Oil is where these people get their money.

That would actually save fossil fuels for the tanks, not that I am crazy about tanks anyway. So the military ought to be in favor of alternative energy sources.

Corporate greed makes no sense. A reduced demand for oil would force them to lower their price. They don't want that. Prices are just fine where they are.

Basic arithmetic.

have to cut their oil prices. :nopity:

Honestly, there is an intelligence gap in the military, all right, and I don't mean spies.

Can't have oil company competition, can we? I mean, look at all of our investment in Iraqistan!

What if the enemy heard about this vulnerability. They only have to erect a few windmills to protect from radar! That's a twofer

Dont tell anyone. Infact, I think we better delete this thread just to be safe.

That, imo, is what it is all about.

Look at the some of the alternative energy "solutions" that are promoted by the gop:

~ natural gas-->> A market cornered by big oil. Pipelineistan is also the motivation behind our foreign policy.

~ ethinol-->> Corn, grown on huge corporate farms, to be mixed with petrol. Another market that they will control and monopolize.


If they cannot monopolize the market, they will do whatever they can to kill the market.

Renewable energy = bad.

Weapons development boondoggles = good.

J

Ray-gun began wasting money to develop the program and BushCo continues to pour more billions in.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0530-02.htm

snip:
It started as a dream of Ronald Reagan, the Strategic Defense Initiative he presented to a disbelieving world on 23 March 1983, a Cold War vision of a space-based shield that might protect the US from an attack by Soviet long-range ballistic missiles. Critics nicknamed it star wars and said it could never work. A decade later, with the Soviet Union consigned to history, Bill Clinton attempted to do the same to SDI.

snip:
The best guess is that the Pentagon has already spent $22bn (£13bn) on space weapons research - although no one can be sure since much of it is financed out of a classified black budget. Some specific programs are said to have been canceled Equally likely, they may merely have been renamed.

A more pertinent question is why all the focus on space weapons, given the meager results of two decades of work on missile defense. Since 1983, the US has spent $92bn, and over the next six years plans to invest $58bn more, to develop a downscaled version of the space shield which was envisioned by Ronald Reagan.

But there is no guarantee even this will work. The first eight interceptor missiles have been installed at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Hopes of declaring the system operational by the end of 2004 were dashed by failed launches in December and February.

Canada, meanwhile, has infuriated Washington by saying "thanks but no-thanks" to a US offer to participate. Analysts say the ultimate cost is certain to exceed $150bn.

But since 11 September, the US has been on a military spending binge. Just last week, Congress approved overall Pentagon spending, including on Iraq, of $491bn for fiscal 2006 - more than the combined defense budgets of the 15 next largest military powers. But in the open ended "war on terror", nothing is ever enough.

it protects me from the NSA, too!

I think I have one of those too. Perhaps next the two tin cans and a piece of string will become significant to the DOD.

Love it. :-)

:rofl:

Step right up, folks! Gitcher tin foil hats and pinwheels right here! Protect yerself an' yer loved ones from evil rays from the guvmint!

I love it! :rofl:

the same f'k'rs that just killed 40% of homeland security money to NY and closed down the only airbase serving the northeast (I still can't get my mind around the fact that there were only 4 jets covering the entire NE 9/11 and now there are none?) has tabled wind turbine power generation because it MIGHT cause problems with military radar? Oh yeah, I believe this. I am putting a small one in the field behind my house. If everyone with a little land and a couple big fields put up a small wind turbine and everyone who was able to take advantage of the subsidies for photovoltaic put solar panels on their roof (I'm putting them on my home and on the roof of my business) did so, and we all cut back on our oil and power consumption - we could ruin these assholes. And that is what they fear.

blocking of wind power. Yep, he's the man pulling the strings at DoD - the all powerful man behind the curtain. Sheez.

(follow link for audio after 10:00 am ET)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5478150

A Federal Aviation Administration study stops work on more than a dozen wind-to-electricity farms. The giant turbines may interfere with military radar. But some say the probe stems from a political battle over a proposed wind farm off Cape Cod.

Big Oil's monopolies and obscene porfits and yet theydon't want to ruin their water views. What about the nation as a whole? I think wind farms are lovely, myself, and I especially love the fact that we don't have to be involved in expensive, grotesque wars to protect oil supplies. Rhoda Grits (post 48) is right---we need to put solar panels and wind turbines up on our little plots of land for ourselves and fuck these powers-that-be and that includes the Brahmin Kennedys. (I never thought I'd be opposing them on something this important but there it is).