Great Lakes Residents Tell Wind Industry to Get Sunk

(MoneyWatch)  The latest NIMBY (not in my backyard) energy battle is shaping up in the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada. Several wind power developers want to erect thousands of offshore wind turbines in the lakes; but some locals are doing their best to find ways to kill the plans.

At right, you can see a typical day's wind on the Great Lakes. Across most of the lakes, the wind blows at least 30 miles per hour, and in others wind speeds are well over 50mph (a knot is 1.15 miles). Those winds makes for a great resource, and a quick explanation of why companies like SouthPoint Wind and Trillium Power Wind are itching to build.

The trick for these companies is to put the turbines in just the right place: not too far from shore, but not too close. The wind is fine anywhere on the lake, but offshore turbines that float aren't ready yet, technologically. So the companies have planned to built a couple miles offshore, far enough that noise wouldn't carry but close enough that residents could see the turbines.

But for many people, that's not good enough. The Detroit Free Press crossed the border into Canada to report on how the small-town residents on the shores felt about the turbines:

"There's already a groundswell of opposition," said Rick Fryer, a councillor in Amherstburg, just north of one of the 13 proposed wind farms. "People are already unhappy with these on land, let alone what the sunset will look like through these in the lake."...

Gord Meuser is a member of Citizens against Lake Erie Wind Turbines, which has fought SouthPoint's plans for turbines near Point Pelee since 2006. The group has consulted experts who have said wind farms could harm birds, waterfowl, bats and fish and the noise from them would disturb humans. The group is also concerned that building turbine bases on the lake bottom will kick up sediment contaminated with toxins... "From everything we've seen, the government is plowing ahead without those concerns being answered," Meuser said.

There are a lot of parallels between the Great Lakes cases and Cape Wind, the first major offshore wind project planned for the U.S. Cape Wind has been fighting to put up 130 wind turbines near Cape Cod for a decade, but local towns opposed the project based on the area's unspoiled natural beauty.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will make a final decision on Cape Wind this month, but his decision may not set as much of a precedent as the Great Lakes developers might hope. The opposition to wind turbines is better-informed and more organized today, and questions about how many avians (and in this case, fish) are directly killed by wind turbines, and how much those deaths matter, still aren't settled.

One thing is certain: lake-shore residents aren't doing the greater region, with its high unemployment rates, any favors. New wind turbines in the Lakes wouldn't have far to travel -- they could be made in nearby factories. And that would mean a lot of jobs. See the Department of Energy graphic below; the red and dark red states are the ones that could gain over 20,000 and 30,000 wind-industry jobs, respectively.