Middlefield, Dorset. Today.
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20 comments to Indeed not |
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Well, as far as I know Britain already has about 3500 monsters and plans to build 6000 more, onshore. The sign won’t prevent it.
Jacob, I think your figures sound about right. It will be interesting to see who pays for the removal of these machines as and when they fail too much or the subsidies end. Some may never be removed, as in Hawaii where abandoned windfarms can be found. Owners and operators may well be in limited companies that can happily go bankrupt when times change. How many local authorities have insisted on escrow funds to cover removal – not just of the turbines, but for reinstatement of the landscape? The turbine rush is only due to the subsidies – who would otherwise build such inefficient and disruptive (grid, landscape, seascape, eco-system, domestic budgets, industrial competitiveness) machines? They are monuments to government stupidity and private greed.
Perhaps we should encourage signs not unlike the “nuclear free zone” of the 1980’s (showing my age there), the symbol already looks like a little windmill, and it’ll be recycling something too.
“government stupidity”
The understatement of the year.
I remember when Teddy Kennedy was such a huge proponent of windfarms in the days before he took that dirt nap. Then one day he found out they were going to build one out by his family home in Cape Cod. Yeah, that got shut down fast. Those eyesores may be alright for us plebs to be forced to look at, but heaven forfend one of our betters be forced to look at them while surveying their kingdoms…
Just a tiny spot of Semtex applied to the base; light blue touch paper and stand well back. Sorted. Steptoe and Son can deal with the scrap.
Prime farmland diverted to windfarms, corn for ethanol, and paving-over for new and unnecessary subdivisions and highways that no one wants… GGGGRRRRRRR!!!
However, I love the photo per se (absent the signs, which are not in themselves so lovely). But then, I’m a sucker for rain-and-mist-o’er-woods-and-fields photos.
RAB…that’s true…but who’s going to pay Steptoe & Son to come across the wide water (even with sound, in this case probably of jet engines) to remove the detritus? Believe me, we have plenty of these accursed things around here.
(Although if I have to be absolutely honest–do I really HAVE to? Sigh…oh well then…–judged on purely æsthetic grounds the windmills are less unattractive, and quieter, than the oil rigs. On the other hand, I’ve never objected to the occasional sound of the tractor or the combine….)
Julie: and you still hear people talking about global warming causing food shortages.
“the windmills are less unattractive, and quieter [than oil rigs]”
A couple of windmills might be tolerable (but then – little enrgy), but it’s their quantities that makes them apalling. 10,000 windmills, or 22,000 windmills as in Germany, the whole country full of them.
I think I may be the odd one here: I love the look of oil rigs and windmills. I also like the look of a landscape without them – a different aesthetic, that’s all. That’s as far as looks go. I also like the looks of certain Hollywood actors – does not mean I’d like to be friends with some of them.
I like industrial landscapes. I like great works of engineering. However, the function is central to their beauty. (It is one of the intriguing things about engineering that often if you get the function exactly right, the resulting construction looks spectacular. Get it wrong, and it looks ugly). The fact that wind turbines are about politics and not function ruins them for me. Whether I would still feel this way if I knew nothing about their economics, I do not know.
I kind of hope that the construction of these things will stop *because the money has run out*. However, I fear that money will keep being spent on stupid things rather than actually useful things right up to the moment everything collapses, precisely because the actual problem is that all links between what is seen as important and what is actually important (or even useful) has been completely lost.
The wind farms should stand in perpetuity. Like the Easter Island statues, they’ll be really cool looking monuments to another forgotten civilization that energetically followed its leaders and institutions into oblivion.
“Just a tiny spot of Semtex applied to the base; light blue touch paper and stand well back. Sorted. Steptoe and Son can deal with the scrap”
The only sensible suggestion made on the subject in a long while. An extensive sabotage campaign, especially whilst the things were being installed, would be highly effective. The cost of mounting extensive security operations at ever isolated site would make the whole thing economically unsustainable. And yes, I do mean extensive. Believe it or not, a request by a couple of Group4 flatcaps to cease & desist does not have to be politely obeyed.
Alisa: “I also like the look of a landscape without them”
Enjoy it then, while it’s still available. It is an endagered species “a landscape without them”
The sad thing is that spending on these things will continue for a while as it would represent too much of a humiliation for certain vested interests to admit that wind power has been an expensive mistake. And of course it is not really about electricity – but what I might call “environmental theatre”.
Doesn’t mentioning semtex and windmills in the same sentence constitute thought-crime these days? I hope you guys are hiding your IPAs.
Let’s play Special Interest MadLibs.
Clearly, [INSERT SCHEME HERE] did not work and that only means that we did not go far enough to effectively impliment [INSERT SCHEME HERE] to get the results we expected. We need more government run regulatory control and taxpayer funding to make sure that [INSERT SCHEME HERE] will eventually work at some point in the future. This failure is all the fault of [INSERT GROUP TO BE VILLIFIED HERE].
They can have my Indian Pale Ale when it pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I have to say that I’m not entirely clear on the meaning of that sign. Is it simply informing passers-by that there are none of those monstrosities in the area, or is it a demand that they be kept out? (And why is it on the non-driver’s side of the road? Is it aimed at pedestrians?)
Just to be clear–there are “industrial landscapes” that I think are quite beautiful. A few of the oil refineries on the expressways south of Chicago are positive fairlylands at night when all of their lights are lit. And in places, the flaming smokestacks are eerie and awesome. Bridges can be stunning, and expressway interchanges as seen from above. And much more.
Even an occasional windfarm. Or, as Alisa remarks, a field of oil wells–on land that’s good for nothing else.
But having spent time next door to a single oil well (I mean the pump, of course) in one of just two houses in the flats of eastern Montana, I can tell you that it’s (a) an eyesore and (b) irritatingly non-stop noisy, 24/7.
(It has a lot to do with the physical makeup of the person, and also what he grew up with, I think. When my mother-in-law, a virtually life-long Chicagoan, stayed at the country motel near our farm for a couple of nights before my wedding, she finally said, “How do you stand the never-ending SILENCE!”)
But to my mind, all that stuff is beautiful because of the contrast with woods and farm-fields. Imagine if there were no way to get away from any of it and into the Green that is our native home. Some of us, at least, would literally go bonkers.
Some Objectivist on one of the O’ist boards remarked that the unobstructed horizontals of productive farmland as far as the eye can see had the same effect on him as the verticals of skyscrapers and city buildings and so forth did on so many O’ists.
Exactly.