WIND POWER NEWS
Wind Power News is all about the latest in turbine technology. As wind farms take on big oil and big coal for a large chunk of the country’s renewable energy market the opposition of fossil fuel lobbies, NIMBY neighbors, environmental impacts and turbine blade noise are making this a subject worth writing about.
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A rendering of Cape Wind, which likely wont get built without legislative help.
The headline above and the article it links to, are yet more examples of constitutional, commercial and collective interests colliding these days. Telling a power company where it’s allowed to buy its power from seems to fly directly in the face of the U.S. Constitution, and certainly half of the country and probably our Supreme Court would agree. But in a country screaming for absolutes and black and white arguments, our energy issues are always a shade of grey. Take for example the fact that forcing the power company to buy the wind energy will create hundreds of good paying, if temporary, constructions jobs. The wind farm will also will create a few dozen permanent maintenance jobs. Consider again the global warming issue. Letting the utilities operate according to free-market principles means we lose out on an opportunity to set set a superb legal precedent and reduce greenhouse gases in a very real way.
Consider also that the power utilities in question want to merge and are being forced by the State of Massachusetts to buy the wind power as a condition of that merger license. When they merge, a lot of jobs will doubtless be lost. Is it so unreasonable then to ask they restore those jobs as a condition of that merger? Particularly when some of the folks losing those jobs have no other place to buy their power than from these utilities. Unless, of course, they were to install solar panels on their homes. Another argument for decentralized power solutions? Hmmmmm. It would be nice if answers to such issues were as easy as folks in the Tea Party and their congressional acolytes want the rest of the country to believe. But these days the questions are hard and the answers ugly.
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