Swindled“Residents in Somerset and Yates recently received another deceitful sales brochure from Apex.” Wyoming County resident, Mary Kay Barton, gives her analysis of the Apex ad.

Apex’s windy disinformation campaign ignores reality

Jun 1, 2018 Mary Kay Barton Commentary.

Apex’s newest mailing suggests that industrializing your entire town with wind factories is so wonderful that “communities with the actual experience of living amongst windfarms have repeatedly chosen to invite additional projects into their backyards.”

That is simply not true!
Apex also quoted Town of Sheldon Supervisor Brian Becker in its mailer, while failing to mention the fact that the Becker family are leaseholders in the Sheldon project. Becker’s personal financial interests are clear.

Let’s consider other pesky little facts that Apex (and Supervisor Becker) forgot to mention regarding the wind mess in Wyoming County, including, but not limited to:

  • The Wyoming County tax rate has skyrocketed by over 85 percent since the first, relatively tiny project was built in Wethersfield in 2000, while the population of Wyoming County has simultaneously declined .
  • Real estate values are significantly negatively impacted within the footprints of the wind factories.
  • Properties in Orangeville are selling well below their assessed values, if they sell at all. Many have ended up going to auction.
  • few, if any, meaningful permanent jobs have been created in Wyoming County thanks to industrial wind.\
  • Complete and utter civil discord is the only thing that’s been reliably generated by wind factories.
  • Wind factories are not paying their fair share of taxes.
  • Nobody is getting “free” or reduced rate electricity in Wyoming County.
  • In fact, New York state already has some of the highest rates in the nation, in large part due to the tens of billions of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars Governor Cuomo has thrown into the wind.
  • Habitat fragmentation (cited as one of the main reasons for species decline worldwide)
  • Miles and miles of industrial sprawl, access roads associated with wind factories, and all the added transmission lines has forever destroyed “the sense of place” that Wyoming County was famous for.
  • Negative impacts from wind turbine-related noise and “infrasound”

All of the negative realities listed above are even more infuriating when one understands the fact that the diffuse energy of wind provides no firm capacity, and therefore, can not replace our reliable, dispatchable baseload power generation sources that do.

Industrial wind is simply an assault on all New York state taxpayers, ratepayers and our environment for what is a massive consumer fraud. It’s long past time that these Big Wind bullies hit the road.

 

Mary Kay Barton resides at Silver Lake, Wyoming County. via lockportjournal.com/opinion