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• Anonymous

  The University of Maine has some great engineers but they should not be confused with the Kool-aid grant seeking bunch at the school.

  FACT: The University has carried out only one experiment to date with respect to electricity production of an industrial size wind turbine and it has been an abysmal failure, producing at only 10-11% of nameplate megawatts.

  See:
  http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/umpi-wind-turbine-2011

• Anonymous

  European public is sick of the aesthetic intrusion of windsprawl? Not surprising. Will Americans wait until thousands more are built and then say “gee these things are really ugly” or will they start speaking up and at least demand PROOF that these things are beneficial to the environment? That proof will never come because wind turbines are detrimental on all levels. At least if the turbines are 20 miles out they will not be keeping people awake at night like in MarsHill. They are still a waste of money. There are new nuke plants which do not need water to cool. That option is worth looking into since most nuke plants in the US are aging and some were sited poorly, a trait not confined to the wind cabal. They make way more power too.

• Anonymous

  Evidently this will make it very difficult for Angus King and other on-shore wind developers to hide behind the ” European Wind power miracle ” !
  And why do you think the European are turning against turbines Mr King and others ?
  Because they are noisy and affect people’s well-being,because they are horribly unsightly and out of place in the rural landscape, because they are inefficient, unreliable and unnecessary , because they are not doing one thing to save on Co2 emissions ( the more wind turbines are coming on line , the more conventional generators are being built to regulate the peaks and valleys of wind power .
  There is no escape for the wind developers , their ineptitudes have been discovered and their European role model has vanished like snow in the sun .

• http://twitter.com/penobscotbay Ron Huber

  Maine can learn from the Europeans, too, and they are foolish if they didn’t. Norwegian ocean windfarm researchers have found marked impacts to their marine environments from these facilities. Why? Because ( and this is hard for Americans to understand) ocean windmilling is an extractive industry.

  The megawatts of energy each ocean wind turbine extracts would have gone into the sea at that spot, boosting along the currents that flow up and down our coasts and around the seven seas. Those currents of course are what virtually all of our seafood species and _their_ food species ride to get to each phase of their life cycles.  If the currents are slowed or diverted, what’s a poor larvae to do but adapt or die.

  Indeed, Maine scientists ruefully but quietly agree yet won’t publicly acknowledge, that energy which gets cabled ashore to serve as people power is no longer helping push along the lobster larvae,  clam & scallop spat and other living things in the coastal waters, from surface waters  to the depths. When this happens in 10 to 10 square mile  offshore windfarms, many young fish and shellfish never get the boost they need, right when they need it.

  In summary  the Laws of Physics apply as much to Ocean Windmills as everything else. There’s no free lunch. No magic energy that is magically birthed like Venus in the seafoam. No, rather the opposite: ocean windfarming steals energy from the ocean’s babies. We  as humans have to site them where they will do least harm. As Dr Dagher has tirelessly, endlessly repeated, the place for ocean windpower extraction is 30 and more miles offshore, not in the fertile crescent of  the Gulf of Maine’s shoal waters,  where it cannot help but bollix things up.

  Links
  Norwegian research on effect of ocean windmills on ocean energy budgets
  https://wiki.met.no/_media/windfarms/brostrom_jms_2008.pdf

  Gulf of Maine fishing grounds at risk
  http://penbay.org/wrich/gomgrounds.html

  Maine ocean windpower watch
  http://penbay.org/wind/mainewind.html

• http://profiles.google.com/billheller Bill Heller

  Wind turbines are not the Great Green Solution developers claim they are. In fact, INDUSTRIAL WIND TURBINES DO NOT PROVIDE RENEWABLE ENERGY! Not one coal or gas plant the world over has been decommissioned because of IWTs…and eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels is their raison d’etre. To quote an expert: “Because wind blows intermittently, electric utilities must either keep their conventional power plants running all the time to make sure the lights don’t go dark, or continually ramp up and down the output from conventional coal-or gas-fired generators (called “cycling”). But coal-fired and gas-fired generators are designed to run continuously, and if they don’t, fuel consumption and emissions generally increase.” This is happening worldwide, and in places like Colorado and Texas where CO2 and power plant pollution have increased since installing wind farms:
  1) http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_15081808
  2) http://www.forbes.com/2011/07/19/wind-energy-carbon.html
  3) http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/6310/Britains-Wind-Farms-are-No-Spin-Zones-When-Cold-Hits
  No matter where you site them, it is a failed technology that can never really work.

• Patten_Pete

  This project will fail. Its ivory tower grant seeking proponents claim it will produce electricity to heat homes and power electric cars. But they overlook three important facts:

  1. Recent mammoth natural gas and oil discoveries in the U.S. that assure the cost of wind powered electricity will remain stratospheric

  2. Thanks to $14 trillion in national debt and cracks in the foundation like Solyndra, the green subsidies for backward technologies like wind power are going to soon disappear and when they do, projects like this turn into eyesore embarrassments overnight

  3.  During the coming several hundred years of oil and gas abundance, REAL scientific breakthroughs that are today unimaginable will occur and these will provide for most of our energy needs – such is the history of science.

  A good read can be found at: “LePage administration questions feasibility of offshore wind power”

  http://bangordailynews.com/2011/05/31/politics/lepage-administration-questions-feasibility-of-offshore-wind-power/

• Anonymous

  Noticed the article did not mention Spain.. which is floundering in debt because their wind farms investments went bust.  Without out massive federal subsidies.. wind doesn’t pass the cost test. With massive subsidies .. wind triples the residential cost per KWH.  27 cents .vs. 4-8 for conventional power. Nuclear is the efficient, effective, safe, low-footprint environmental friendly vision for the future.

• Anonymous

  Informative……hmmmmm