The Wind Farm

On By Jennifer Mugrage

I live in the West, where you can see long distances. About twenty-five miles south of our house is wind farm perched on the foothills. At night, you can clearly see the windmills’ lights twinkling. This painting portrays a more close-up view, glimpsed as I started the drive home on a winter evening.

I never minded seeing wind farms, even in the daytime. I had a positive association with them, almost entirely because of the cover of a Petra album I had as a teenager:

I also believed what I was told, that these windmills would provide cleaner power than oil, coal, and natural gas.

Then, I started hearing about the downsides of wind farms. I heard that people who live near them develop health problems. I heard that, shockingly, it is not unusual for birds to get chopped up by them. The windmills have to be built in naturally windy areas, which are also migration routes for birds, which are apparently hard-wired in to the birds and can’t be changed.

Then, I found out that these turbines are expensive to build, last only about twenty years, and are difficult to dispose of:

https://www.prageru.com/video/whats-wrong-with-wind-and-solar

And that they are extremely inefficient, and the energy they do produce has to be stored in costly batteries:

https://www.prageru.com/video/can-we-rely-on-wind-and-solar-energy

Which can only be made with rare-earth minerals that are obtained using child labor:

https://www.prageru.com/video/green-energy-fueled-by-child-labor

Yikes!

Unfortunately, my aesthetic response to these windmills has already been locked in by Petra. I don’t think it’s going to change. Now, though, I no longer think of them as a good thing, a step in the right direction. I think of them as evidence that we are living in a sci-fi dystopia. Maybe some day, the wind farm in my part of the state will come down. But this little painting will remain as evidence that I lived in the Age of Man when we feared the imminent end of the world and thought we could forestall it by building these things.

9 thoughts on “The Wind Farm”

  1. Benjamin Ledford's avatar Benjamin Ledford

    Not long after those went up, I saw this comic, which is pretty perfect.

    https://xkcd.com/556/

    Now that I understand more about how the electrical grid works, it seems clear that wind and solar are objectively bad at a large scale, with no upside. If you can make it work for a little off-grid cabin, that’s pretty cool, but trying to incorporate them into the gird is just disruptive and wasteful – wasteful of the land they consume, wasteful of the resources used to build and maintain them, and wasteful of the capacity of the reliable power plants that still have to exist but have to be powered up and down more frequently to try to accommodate the unpredictable output from the wind and solar.

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  2. I totally agree with your concerns Jennifer. Added to all of these worries, it appears we pay the company who runs them millions each year in compensation when they have to be turned off. Not sure if that happens in the States too.

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  4. There been a lot of back and fore if the noise from the offshore wind farms are disrupting the whale’s senses.

    From what find there is no direct evidence that it causing whale to wash ashore. However, installing the wind turbines is altering the environment and bring in more boat traffic which leads to more whales being hit by boats and entangle in fishing gear.

    Also there is a lot of uncertainty of what effects the offshore wind farms are going to have on marine life.

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