Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Buffalo Mountain, Tennessee

Buffalo Mountain is a local recreation area that once was of considerable beauty. It is the degradation of that beauty by a TVA windfarm that incensed Senator Lamar Alexander. Senator Alexander grew even more angry when he learned that the Buffalo Mountain windfarm produced less than 10% of its rated capacity during some months.

6 comments:

The North Coast said...

Egads!Looks like an alien insect infestation.

Soylent said...

Here's what I don't understand.

Why don't they just paint the damn things vegetation-green, sky-blue(or sky-gray for that matter...)? They'd be a bit less of an assault to the senses if they weren't bright white.

crf said...

I am a supporter of wind and solar, and nuclear. But this is an example of the mis-regulation and mis-incentivization of an industry.

Forests in North America should not be cut up with roadways to make piddling amounts of power.

Wind should be built in large concentrations off-shore, or in smaller amounts in already disturbed areas near moderately populated settlements that might use the power or feed it to the grid (for example, see Denmark, offshore, and Holland, along roadways and canals)*. Large concentrating solar can be built in deserts (at least, I'm not against trying this), or smaller installations can be built on roofs by people who value the little power they use for their homes at much more than its market rate.

Nuclear should be built out now, and even more so in the future, to supply cities, electric cars, and large industries with the vast majority of their ever-increasing energy needs. Nuclear is best solution, socially and environmentally, for most anywhere in the world. Attempting to avoid Nuclear, would be mean the sacrifice of a large proportion of North American wilderness to monstrosities similar to that shown in this picture.

* For how wind can, in my mind, be responsibly implemented on a landscape, see the picture book "Holland from the Top" by Karel Tomei. Holland is not one bit like North America. It has long been an almost entirely an engineered landscape.

Anonymous said...

Is Senator Alexander also incensed by this? I think Appalachia's beauty faces a far greater threat - and has for some time - than wind farms. I hope Senator Alexander is going to fight mountaintop removal coal mining as hard as he fights wind farms.

Chuck P said...

@ Soylent
The whole point of building wind turbines is to LOOK like you're helping the environment.
Making them unobtrusive would defeat the purpose.

FC said...

I have wind power - it works great.

http://kissenergy.com/

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