Inherit the Wind Part III — the lay of the land
Tela Zasloff, Advocate, March 10, 2005
[Reprinted with permission of the author. This is the third in a series of columns on wind power development in the Berkshires.
Ms. Zasloff, a writer living in Williamstown MA, frequently writes on environmental issues for The Advocate.]
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"He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind." - Proverbs 11:29
The Town Board chairman of Lincoln, Wis., published a letter four years ago about living near wind turbines. From the beginning, the wind-power companies and their political and private supporters had given this Wisconsin community wrong information about the supposed benefits of the project and denied that the problems the residents most feared would occur. But they did occur and still do, within a several-mile radius of each turbine - low- and high-frequency noise that interferes with sleep, enjoyment of the outdoors and mental health; flashing strobe lights and rotating shadows from the circulating turbine blades; destruction of thousands of birds and bats flying into the blades; a decrease in property values; extensive soil, streams and plant damage from turbine construction (requiring widening and paving of roads and leveling of the slopes); TV reception interference; stray voltage; and flying debris from malfunctioning turbines.
If this is how wind power development will conserve the environment, it sounds very much like what an American officer said during the Vietnam War - that we had to destroy a village to save it. The Lincoln Town chairman urged communities to take their time, ask questions of the companies and authorities and establish local zoning regulations, conditions and penalties that protect community residents.
Why should this concern us here in Western Massachusetts? Because an alliance of political, business and some environmental interests is now pushing for a massive alteration of our land in the Berkshires, with the development of wind-power factories on our mountaintops.
Gov. Mitt Romney's secretary of environmental affairs, Ellen Roy Herzfelder, has been facilitating, without substantial environmental review or a state-wide planning process, the opening of Western Massachusetts land to wind-power developers: the Hoosac project in Florida and Monroe (enXco, a French-based company); on Brodie Mountain (DisGen/Dale Osborn); in Lenox (town preparing to erect a wind-measuring tower); in North Adams (on Michael Deep's land next to the enXco project, rejected by the city but will be resubmitred); in Williamstown (Williams College proposed a wind-measuring tower for Berlin Pass in New York but was rejected by the town of Berlin; the college put its wind-measuring tower in Hopkins Forest); in Savoy (Minuteman Wind LLC has had a wind-measuring tower in place for about a year).
The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Act of 1997 requires that by Dec. 31, 2009, 4 percent of our state's energy sales must come from newly built renewable sources, and the Mass. Technology Collaborative overseeing this effort is planning for about 726.4 megawatts of that energy to be from wind power. Since the Cape Wind project has now been opposed by Romney, after objections from the Cape community, the Berkshires will have to provide most of it. If each turbine is 1.5MW (the size of the Hoosac enXco project turbines) and 10 turbines are placed on each ridge, that means that 48 of our state's mountains will be covered with turbines, each about 340 feet high with huge rotating blades, flashing lights and grinding noise extending for miles around.
One observation is that, if all these Berkshires projects go through, visitors to the top of the Mount Greylock Veterans War Memorial Tower will be partially encircled by miles of turbines and perpetual flashing lights to the southwest, northwest, and northeast. How should we compare that landscape destruction with the fact that all those 485 turbines, spread over 48 mountains, still won't equal the average energy output (1,000 MW) of one power plant of any type?
Local communities nationwide and in Europe have had a say in wind-power projects. So should we.