Why is wind energy bad?

Question

Why are people against wind energy. It has been talked for so long for us being a independent counry producing our own energy. It would solve some of our energy needs. Not that i am agaist drilling for oil, we should. But what ever we can get from the envioment to reduce some of our carbon needs is a good thing. The wind producing turbines require emision lines to connect them to the homes and other establishments that use them. Why is this bad? Do the emision lines pollute the envioment, Or is this the goverments way of sayng yea we have a new sorce of energy but it it is not going to be as profitable as being slaves to the middle east and using their resources.

Answer 1

Several major concerns regarding wind energy:

Aesthetics: Wind farms are generally not considered pleasing to the eye. At this point, environmental concerns are still remote enough that this is an important point.

Animals: There are a number of claims that wind turbines are a threat to migratory birds. Whether they really are or not is unclear.

Space: Wind farms do take a lot of space.

Cost: Wind turbines are fairly expensive to manufacture and assemble and each one does not provide a huge amount of power, thus the cost/power ratio for oil and fossil fuels is still much lower.

Wind depletion: I don't know much about this, but there is a theory that taking energy out of the wind could be detrimental in some way. Just like damming a river takes energy from the river, "damming" the wind takes energy from the wind.

Answer 2

People fear change, they think the wind turbines will be ugly or ruin their view, I wonder how nice their veiw will be when we have so much particulate matter in the air you can't see the sunset.

Answer 3

in order to give enough energy for all of the U.S, there would have to be billions of windmills covering the entire north America, plus only a few areas can create enough wind to make it move. so we would basically be destroying all towns and habitats just to heat the state of Rhode Island

Answer 4

A drawback is we don't have a good way to send the available wind energy we have in the midwest to where its most needed to the coastal cities.   Until there are more high voltage transmission lines available it won't be a viable energy source for much of the country.

Answer 5

Wind energy is great, but the problem with it is it takes up a lot of space. Other wise is is great

Answer 6

People dont think long term and while it is expensive to build turbines now, the cost will make up for itself in the future.  Also, oil companies can block any legislation by lobbying, and at this moment turbines are usually built from federal grants because they are so expensive to build.

Answer 7

Because it's entirely clean, entirely renewable, cheaper than most forms of energy including nuclear....

oh wait, you asked why it was bad.  That's easy - it's not!  The only problem with wind is that it can't provide baseload power.  It only produces power when the wind is blowing.  But there are other renewable sources that can provide baseload power, like geothermal and solar thermal.

Answer 8

The worst thing about wind power is that it is locally intermittent, even though the wind is almost always blowing somewhere if you measure across a wide enough area.  This lets its detractors claim that it's unreliable, and the public doesn't know enough to tell fact from fiction.

The second-worst thing about wind power is that it's highly visible.  This lets NIMBYs say they want it to be Somewhere Else, even when that Somewhere Else is on a ranch someone else owns or over a shoal area that's too shallow for their precious sailing hobby anyway.

The third worst thing about wind power is that it requires investment in new transmission lines to bring the power from remote windy areas to the population and industry, and tie the areas which get wind at different times together to reduce variability.  That's another technical detail that's hard to chop into sound-bites for an intellectually lazy public.

Answer 9

Wind energy is very bad, if we as a nation moved off of a national power grid. The control would be divided and might even possibly be taken over by state possibly even local governments.

Imagine a nation that was living under energy supplied by its citizens. Federal officails, and corporations would have less effect on our daily lives. It would also bring a negitive effect on the thin line of oil tankers that depend on the U.S. for their finacial gain.

Answer 10

There is nothing wrong with wind power really.  It is a non-renewable and non-polluting power production.

On the other hand, energy storage for large scale power production is decades aways and  it all requires a lot of area.

Answer 11

1 land used. It takes a lot of land to put up 500 wind mills and trees are bad for wind so they must go.

2 The wind does not always blow so what do you do then and not at the speed you need to make power. Most wind mills need 20mph winds to get full out put.

3 What happens in very high winds? They happen all the time.