Wind power is an attack on rural America
By ROBERT BRYCE
FEB 27, 2017 | 4:00 AMUrban voters may like the idea of using more wind and solar energy, but the push for large-scale renewables is creating land-use conflicts in rural regions from Maryland to California and Ontario to Loch Ness.
Since 2015, more than 120 government entities in about two dozen states have moved to reject or restrict the land-devouring, subsidy-fueled sprawl of the wind industry.
Objections to the encroachment of wind energy installations don’t fit the environmentalists’ narrative.
Rural residents don’t want to see the red-blinking lights atop the turbines, all night, every night for the rest of their lives.
Rural residents are objecting to wind projects to protect their property values and viewsheds.
They don’t want to live next door to industrial-scale wind farms. Nor do they want to be subjected to the audible and inaudible noise the turbines produce.
In New York, angry fishermen are suing to stop an offshore wind project that could be built in the heart of one of the best squid fisheries on the Eastern Seaboard.
Three upstate counties — Erie, Orleans and Niagara — as well as the towns of Yates and Somerset, are fighting a proposed 200-megawatt project that aims to put dozens of turbines on the shores of Lake Ontario
Outside the U.S., about 90 towns in Ontario have declared themselves “unwilling hosts” to wind projects.
Wind energy simply requires too much territory. That means we can’t rely on it for major cuts in emissions. Indeed, the more wind energy encroaches on small towns and suburbs, the more resistance it will face. That resistance will come from homeowners like Park who told me,
“We feel this renewable energy push is an attack on rural America.”
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