Wind farms in Italy threaten to wipe out the Golden Eagle, farmers` organisation Coldiretti and national environmental organisations declared recently. As concern about climate change and sustainable, eco-friendly alternative energy grows, it‘s surprising that an industry with so much potential – the wind industry – is under fire from environmental groups.
“Wind farm building continues unchecked and within a few years we will witness the almost total disappearance from the Apennine mountains and from Sicily of the Golden Eagle, the Bonelli’s Eagle, the Griffon Vulture, the Red Kite and many others”, Italian groups said. They raised the alarm especially for the Abruzzo region, especially in the mountains around its capital, L’Aquila (that, the irony of fate, in Italian means “eagle”…), where wind farms threaten to result in the disappearance of the Golden Eagle and the Griffon Vulture “in a very short time”.
Coldiretti warned that wind farms have increased by 35% in the last year, with more than 3,600 towers transforming around 10,000 km of land into a “desert” as long as a motorway. Most of Italy’s existing wind farms are concentrated in southern regions and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Already common in Spain and parts of northern Europe, wind farms have started to catch on in Italy in recent years, especially in the wake of government incentives aimed at encouraging power production from renewable sources. But their spread has sparked a reaction from the anti-wind power lobby which says that wind stations require new roads and electricity lines, which further disturb the countryside; lower the value of land and make it useless for tourist purposes; and regularly mangle birds.
It’s is not about throwing out the industry, but using the correct technology. There is a much safer and more efficient alternative to those guillotine-like propeller turbines which mangle wildlife: the vertical shaft turbine, already available. Producing twice the energy, they have a smaller profile and no spinning blades. The biggest obstacle to switching to this superior technology is greed. There is a lot of money at stake for the manufacturers of the archaic and lethal prop-style turbines. When there are large investments involved, business people can turn a blind eye to ethical or moral considerations.
Image of turbine comparison courtesy of Environmental Technologies LLC:
Image courtesy of Cotton Jeni on Flickr under creative commons
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Yes, “Windfarming” CAN work, but to do so it needs to be about 40 times (not twice) as effective as current “technology” which returns only a SMALL fraction of One percent off its cost – i.e. the energy required to replace it – each year.
You may be aware that I have been trying not to rant, too ravingly, about this for some years now. Maybe the message is getting through at last. A Vestas factory is closing, and the workforce are “sitting-in” I read.
According to some, it seems that getting energy from the wind is simple once you have made the huge decision “Shall we have it Vertical or Horizontal”.
The rest they appear to think is just “une fait accomplie”. It isn’t !
If you email me an address I can send my “wind info” to which I refered, with photo of Turbine-Alternator device – TAD ? – which shows a return of around 5% p.a. and is therefore capable of providing the energy to replace it long before it needs to be rerplaced. Growth is therefore possible from WIND energy – not other sources !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As you will see it presents absolutely no threat to any wildlife save that bent on self-destruction.
(Like mankind ?)
Kind regards
G. bert Vaughan
That worries me because Texas has the most windpower and the largest number of bird species. I think wind farms are pretty icky and we should shift to localized energy production. You can have solar, a small wind turbine like in the olden days, biodiesel or bio gas digesters. Large industrial power facilities are the problem. I bet we’ll be hearing about those large solar panels in the desert real soon. They create large scale problems and require that much more energy just to get it to the consumer.