For those who dislike herbicides it can be pointed out that those treeless scars for the transmission lines are kept treeless with some significant herbicide doses. The poor animals who eat the frequently poisoned berries just get sick quietly.
Most people seem to overlook the roads that have to be built to put in each turbine. These are not tiny dirt fire/access roads. A turbine that reaches 440 feet into the air is composed of large parts that have to be trucked in (along with the equipment, such as cranes to raise the turbine) on long trucks. This requires some good roads that have to be built, and these roads have to be built to each of the 130 sites.
It's ridiculous to call a project consisting of 440 ft. wind turbines, such as this one, a "farm." This is a large, heavy-industry facility that is spread out across a substantial area of land. What makes it much worse in this case is that it is going to be spread out across areas of land that the US should be trying to protect, the national forests.
I have to respectfully disagree, here. I love getting out and hiking as much as the next guy, but a) it's not like the shenandoah is all that remote. You can see civilization from almost anywhere on the ridge. Seeing wind turbines would probably fill me with a tinge of pride actually. b) compared to the other alternatives, the environmental disruptions involved with wind farms are minimal.
decal:
Have you ever stood near a 440 foot tall wind turbine? It is a massive machine that makes a rather large impact on a reasonably good sized piece of land.
The project that is the subject of the post plans to install 130 of these behemoths stretched over 18 miles of ridge line. That cannot be considered to be a minimal environmental disruption - especially when the total amount of electricity generated over the course of a year would be equivalent to about 1/10th of what a moderate sized nuclear facility can produce.
A nuclear plant the size of a modern submarine propulsion unit could reliably produce that much electricity each year, and they fill less than half of the volume of a 560 foot long submarine!
Commenting by HaloScan
