Anti-wind bill costs Ohio schools hundreds of thousands of dollars

Superintendent Ken Amstutz dreamed of propelling his rural Ohio school district into a high-tech future with nearly a million dollars in annual revenue from a single wind farm set to go online this year.

That was until the state legislature blocked wind development across Ohio, halting construction of the Long Prairie Wind Farm and leaving Amstutz’s district in financial limbo.

Will Obama Pull the Plug on Wind Energy?

Yesterday President Obama threatened to veto a $440 billion package of tax breaks negotiated by a bipartisan group of legislators led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). The bill, a White House spokesperson said, disproportionately benefits businesses over families. The bill excludes a child tax credit for the working poor that had been a top goal for Obama, but makes permanent a group of tax incentives for big businesses that had been provisional.

Windmills Are Beautiful (Yes, Even in My Backyard)

I have a cabin on Quadra Island off the British Columbia coast that's as close to my heart as you can imagine. From my porch you can see clear across the waters of Georgia Strait to the snowy peaks of the rugged Coast Mountains. It's one of the most beautiful views I have seen. And I would gladly share it with a wind farm.

Sometimes it seems I'm in the minority. Across Europe and North America, environmentalists and others are locking horns with the wind industry over farm locations. In Canada, opposition to wind installations has sprung up from Nova Scotia, to Ontario, to Alberta, to B.C. In the U.K., more than 100 national and local groups, led by some of the country's most prominent environmentalists, have argued wind power is inefficient, destroys the ambience of the countryside and makes little difference to carbon emissions. And in the U.S., the Cape Wind Project, which would site 130 turbines off the coast of affluent Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has come under fire from famous liberals, including John Kerry and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.

‘60 Minutes’ Does It Again

“I’m exhausted,” claimed 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl on Sunday, as she ticked off a list of clean energy companies that have failed in recent years.

What’s really getting exhausting is the amount of shoddy reporting that has aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes in recent weeks, from a retracted account of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi to segments on the National Security Agency and Amazon’s drones that were more infomercial than news.

Offshore Wind Lease Near Virginia Won By Coal Power Giant Dominion

WASHINGTON -- A giant of coal-fired power won a $1.6 million lease to build the first wind farm off the coast of Virginia on Wednesday, a development that renewable energy advocates are cheering.

Dominion Virginia Power had the winning bid on 112,800 acres of land 27 miles off Virginia's coast. Bidding on the plot went for six rounds, escalating from a starting offer of just $225,600. Dominion's final bid topped that of Charlottesville, Va.-based Apex Clean Energy.

Enbridge, EDF Energies Buy Greengate Wind Farm For $600-Million

TORONTO - Enbridge Inc. (TSX:ENB) and a subsidiary of EDF Energies Nouvelles have teamed up to buy the Blackspring Ridge wind generation project near Lethbridge, Alta., on a 50-50 basis from Greengate Power Corp.

The companies say Blackspring Ridge represents a $600-million investment in wind energy but financial details of the transactions weren't disclosed in Monday's announcement.

Windfarm sickness spreads by word of mouth, Australian study finds

Sickness being attributed to wind turbines is more likely to have been caused by people getting alarmed at the health warnings circulated by activists, an Australian study has found.

Complaints of illness were far more prevalent in communities targeted by anti-windfarm groups, said the report's author, Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University. His report concludes that illnesses being blamed on windfarms are more than likely caused by the psychological effect of suggestions that the turbines make people ill, rather than by the turbines themselves.

Top 4 Reasons the US Still Doesn't Have a Single Offshore Wind Turbine

Despite massive growth of the offshore wind industry in Europe, a blossoming array of land-based wind turbines stateside, and plenty of wind to spare, the United States has yet to sink even one turbine in the ocean. Not exactly the kind of leadership on renewables President Obama called for in his recent State of the Union address.

Light is just beginning to flicker at the end of the tunnel: On Tuesday, outgoing Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a gathering of offshore industry leaders he was optimistic the long-embattled Cape Wind project would break ground before year's end. And in early January industry advocates managed to convince Congress to extend a critical tax incentive for another year.

Surplus wind power could cost Ontario ratepayers up to $200 million: IESO

Coping with surplus wind power will cost Ontario electricity ratepayers up to $200 million a year if market rules don’t change, says the power system operator.

Moreover, it says, if it can’t control the flow of wind and solar power onto the Ontario grid, then “reliable and economic operation of the power system is, at best, highly compromised and likely not feasible.”

Cape Wind: Regulation, Litigation And The Struggle To Develop Offshore Wind Power In The U.S.

In 2001, Jim Gordon, a well-heeled developer of natural gas plants in New England, took up a long-discussed but never-pursued idea that advocates said would usher in a new era of clean energy in America: an ocean-based wind farm off the shores of Cape Cod.

The advantages of the site seemed plain: Relentless, hard-driving winds, shallow shoals several miles offshore on which to anchor large turbines, and, perhaps most importantly, a left-leaning population inclined to support what was already viewed at the time as an overdue migration away from dirtier sources of electricity.

Ottawa’s wind-farm study a case of suspiciously political science

The Harper government is not known for fostering a strong relationship between science and public policy. Last week, scientists and researchers held a protest in Ottawa against cuts to hundreds of jobs and the closure of facilities like an Arctic atmospheric research laboratory that helps monitor the ozone layer and a facility to study the effects of water pollution. So it is peculiar, then, that the government has now commissioned a study on the health effects of living close to wind turbines – a decision that seems to have more to do with politics than with policy.

Ottawa wades into health debate over Ontario's wind energy

The Harper government, an ardent defender of oil sands extraction, is taking a keen new interest in Ontario voters’ concerns that wind power generation may be harmful to humans.

As part of its push to develop a green-energy sector, the Ontario government has encouraged the installation of solar generation and industrial-size wind power turbines. But Ontario’s Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty has run into resistance from rural landowners over wind turbines – opposition that may have cost him his majority in the last election.

Quebec-Vermont Wind Turbine Dispute Threatens To Become International Incident

A Quebec town on the Vermont border is threatening to shut off the water supply to a neighbouring American town if a plan to build windmills on the U.S. side goes ahead.

The mayor of Stanstead, a town in the Eastern Townships that controls the water serving the U.S. town of Derby Line, has said he would shut off the water valves if two wind turbines are installed just outside the limits of his town, on the American side.

“This is not a municipal council decision, but it is a measure I am proposing so that we can be heard,” Mayor Philippe Dutil said in a phone interview.

Dutil is furious. A few weeks ago, citizens and local elected officials learned that the company Encore Redevelopment, based in Burlington, planned to install wind turbines near the Canada-U.S. border.

It turns out the Americans intended to install the windmills only a few metres from the residential area of the Canadian town, but far from the houses on the U.S. zone, the mayor explained. Stanstead residents are outraged.

“They (Encore Redevelopment) want to build two wind turbines only 150 metres away from about 50 or so houses, the Stanstead Mayor declared, while on the American side, there are no houses within at least six kilometers from the proposed location of the wind turbines.”

Ontario Couple Loses Wind Turbines Property Tax Case

An Ontario couple who launched a case arguing that nearby wind turbines devalued their waterfront home and should be a factor in their property assessment has lost the challenge.

A two-person panel from the province's Assessment Review Board has ruled that proximity to wind turbines would not be a factor in deciding how much property tax Edward and Gail Kenney should pay.

The Kenneys first told CBC News last October about the potentially precedent-setting court challenge against the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, a Crown corporation in charge of assigning values to properties for tax purposes.

The couple has lived on Wolfe Island for 48 years and appealed their property tax assessments on the grounds that the 86 wind turbines erected around their home brought unwanted noise and posed a health concern.

“We figure we’ve lost 40 to 50 per cent of the value of these places," Edward Kenney told CBC News.

But the decision from the review board begged to differ, saying there was no such evidence the turbines negatively impacted property values.

The Kenneys' property tax assessment was set at $357,000 in 2010. They had said there had been virtually no real estate sales from over a three-year period near the turbines on Wolfe Island.

Grassroots organizations concerned about potential adverse health effects linked to wind turbines say that the constant, low-frequency noise emitted can disturb sleep or cause headaches and nosebleeds. Champions of wind energy, however, say there are no such health risks and argue that wind farms are a prime example of clean energy.

Original Article
Source: Huff
Author: cbc

Sacrificing the desert to save the Earth

Reporting from Ivanpah Valley, Calif.—

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket.

Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors — each the size of a garage door — are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar power project will soon be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a wastewater processing facility and a gas-fired power plant. To make room, BrightSource has mowed down a swath of desert plants, displaced dozens of animal species and relocated scores of imperiled desert tortoises, a move that some experts say could kill up to a third of them.

Federal wind turbine rules coming

Health Canada is drafting national guidelines for electricity-generating wind turbines that will establish a recommended minimum safe distance between the structures and homes.

Across Canada, many are concerned about "wind turbine syndrome," a suite of symptoms suffered by some living in proximity to wind turbines. Anxiety, sleeping problems and headaches are among the negative health effects some think are caused by the low frequency hum emitted by wind turbines.

"Health Canada has been working in collaboration with the provinces and territories to draft voluntary Canadian Guidelines for Wind Turbine Noise," wrote Health Canada spokeswoman Olivia Caron in an email.

"The voluntary draft guidelines are health-based, and focus on minimizing potential impacts such as sleep disturbance by recommending noise limits, sound measurement standards and minimum setback distances from homes and occupied dwellings."

Right now, there is an incomplete patchwork of regulations on wind turbines in Canada, with some provinces - such as Ontario - already having guidelines already in place.

"There were some requests from provinces to help create these guidelines," said Steve Outhouse, a spokesman for federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq. "Its similar to what we do with air quality, noise pollution, cellphones and fluoridation of water."