Where I live (southwestern Ontario) windmills are the source of a very heated debate. We have several windfarms by my house and I see dozens all the time when I drive around here. This is a HUGE issue here.
Personally? I love them. I like looking out on the horizon and seeing dozens of windmills out in the sunset. I live driving to Lake Erie and seeing windmills on the side of the road. I think it's fantastic my community is taking such initiative in the green energy industry.
But a lot of people dislike them here. There has been a lot of talk that people living near them have been experiencing health effects from the noise. There is a noticeable hum coming from windmills but to be honest, you can't really hear it audibly unless you're up close. The claims say that it disturbs sleep,
Now, the nearest windmill is a couple of kilometres away, and the main concern is for people (farmers, mostly) who have windmills on their property. I really can't say for sure whether or not the health concerns from windmills are valid or not, but many claims do seem blown out of proportion. I'm sure a lot of the health concerns are very much valid, and it would be irresponsible to continue building windmills without looking at reducing health effects as much as possible.
The argument that windmills are an eyesore is totally subjective and not even worth bringing up in a serious debate.
It's known for a fact that windmills do affect wildlife. A lot of migratory birds and bats are killed by the turbines, and species that live in places where windmills are built do not do very well. Obviously the less we affect wildlife the better, but unfortunately, some sacrifices have to be made to move forward.
We're having a provincial election here in October. The Liberals who are currently in power support the windmill project -they're the ones that really got it going a few years back. But they've received a ton of bad press recently, largely having to do with green energy. Their ratings have plummeted, and it's pretty much guaranteed the Conservatives are going to win in October. It's also well-known that they don't take nearly such a bold stance with wind energy, and I would not be surprised to see the program drastically reduced after they gain power.
It's a damn shame. The Liberals have not been handling this perfectly - they've made a lot of errors along the way. But the effort to take initiative with implementing green energy is commendable, to say the least. It's too bad there's been so much negative talk about wind energy. It's gotten so bad that it's actually associated with negative connotations, as in, people see it as a bad thing.
Wind energy is a good thing, as is solar energy (also becoming a hot topic around here). But you don't need to be an energy expert to know that relying on solar and wind energy won't even come close to satisfying our energy demands. It's a great start but we simply consume too much electricity for those kinds of green energy to replace all else. I'm a huge advocate of nuclear power but obviously the incident in Japan has been a big step backwards for that industry. I'd love to see nuclear, wind and solar power replacing coal/natural gas/oil within the next few decades but it's an uphill battle!
Plus we're so fucked from climate change that even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases this very second we'd still experience a temperature increase of at least 2 degrees.
hooray for optimism :V
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