New York’s Windmill Folly
By Don | August 18, 2008
Rural communities in New York have seen an explosion of windmill farms under the guise of saving energy and going green.
From the New York Times.
Everywhere that Janet and Ken Tacy looked, the wind companies had been there first.
Dozens of people in their small town had already signed lease options that would allow wind towers on their properties. Two Burke Town Board members had signed private leases even as they negotiated with the companies to establish a zoning law to permit the towers. A third board member, the Tacys said, bragged about the commissions he would earn by selling concrete to build tower bases. And, the Tacys said, when they showed up at a Town Board meeting to complain, they were told to get lost.
“There were a couple of times when they told us to just shut up,” recalled Mr. Tacy, sitting in his kitchen on a recent evening.
Lured by state subsidies and buoyed by high oil prices, the wind industry has arrived in force in upstate New York, promising to bring jobs, tax revenue and cutting-edge energy to the long-struggling region. But in town after town, some residents say, the companies have delivered something else: an epidemic of corruption and intimidation, as they rush to acquire enough land to make the wind farms a reality.
Looks like the real green is all the money the politicians and others are raking in at taxpayer expense.
3 Comments | Post a Comment
August 18 at 2:48 pm | #1 | Link
On thing these people don’t address, such as T. Boone Pickens, is that these wind farms do not generate enough energy consistently to keep them online in the grid. So you have to have switching stations out there, too, to get the power, when flowing, into the grid. There is no way to store the energy, either. The cost of connecting to the grids is staggering because the hypocritical environmentalist are now suing to keep power lines from ruining the landscape. Pickens and Nancy Pelosi are heavily invested in companies for natural gas and want this to happen so that natural gas prices will go up elsewhere.