Former LHA president Randy Wagner always makes clear his opposition to windfarms and their impact on the view along Western roads like the Lincoln Highway, so as an Easterner, I asked him to explain. Below is his response.
Windfarms are destroying the natural Western landscape and are bringing to an end the wide open spaces that those of us that live here have so long enjoyed. Wherever they grow, they dominate the viewshed like nothing else ever invented by man. While normal man-made visual intrusions, like power lines and oil wells, tend to fade from view in 3-5 miles, windmills boldly stand out for up to 30 miles, always on the skyline. An example would be the once beautiful Lincoln Highway drive from Fort Bridger to Evanston, a journey through a pristine landscape since 1913 that is now a windmill forest. Another example is closer to home: Cheyenne residents have forever enjoyed an unobstructed view of the Laramie Mountains and the Sherman Summit to the west. Now a windfarm blocks the view and the feeling of living in the wide open, unspoiled west is forever gone.
I could go on and on about the facts that wind energy is highly inefficient and can only be economically justified with heavy federal (taxpayer) subsidies; that windmills are very high maintenance items; that they don’t work on those hot, still, muggy days when energy is in high demand; that they are seriously altering the habitat for native wildlife species such as sage grouse and pronghorn antelope; that Wyoming is destroying its landscape to send power to Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Counter viewpoints are welcome.
Tags: Cheyenne WY, highway landscape, landscape, Lincoln Highway, modern windmills, viewshed, windfarms, Wyoming
Lincoln Highway News 
July 6, 2009 at 5:52 pm |
That is too bad it is so windy in Wyoming. There are some truly ugly places I can think of that are not so windy that could be improved with a wind farm, i.e. rusty and empty factory areas on the east side of Chicago. Those factory ghost ‘towns’ have no residents and already have a gazillion power stations and power lines already in place that are going unused. There is almost no economic activity going on in those areas.
In DeKalb County, there was a record-breaking public hearing on wind farms. The first one had to be canceled because the number of people who showed up at the County Board’s auditorium exceeded the room’s capacity by a few hundred. So, they moved the meeting to a local high school auditorium. The meeting started at 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning. I had something going on in the morning and did not attend. I thought it would be over by noon. By the time it was over, it was after 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning. DeKalb County will get a wind farm.
What I do not want to see are more nuclear power plants. There is one I can see from forty miles away. When I lived in Russia, I saw victims of Chernobyl begging in the subways. The United States does not have the same type of nuclear reactor as what was in Chernobyl but I still say no thank you.