Challenges of Wind Power

Good wind sites are often located in remote locations, far from cities where the electricity is needed. Transmission lines must be built to bring the electricity from the wind farm to the city. Wind resource development might not be the most profitable use of the land. Land suitable for wind-turbine installation must compete with alternative uses for the land, which might be more highly valued than electricity generation.


1. Ongoing Threats to Wildlife: Since most wind farm locations are in rural areas the thriving population of wildlife in the area will be negatively affected. It is true that these imposing structures may not necessarily affect the grazing wildlife that is co-located with the turbines, it’s the birds and burrowing animals are the unfortunate victims. Birds in these areas, including migratory birds and golden eagles and hawks have a tendency to fly into the blades. Recent studies indicate that about 45,000 +birds having perished over the last 20 years due to collisions with the turbine blades. Burrowing animals tend to lose habitats during the construction phase and remember this includes the roads, culverts tower base, trenches for power lines, pads for transformers etc.

2. Wind is Unpredictable: Once these wind turbines are installed, the wind must flow in order to effectively generate electricity, and the wind can be completely unpredictable, although in the Western US most wind farms are well sited and have almost continual wind flow. Granted, a lot of research is completed before the installation to ensure that the turbines are put into high wind areas, this still doesn’t guarantee continual wind flow, and therefore other energy sources must be available to take up the slack. In effect what this means is that if you have a 100 MW capacity wind farm that is producing 70 MW for 3 days straight then the wind dies down to the point that all turbines are "offline" then the local utility must have an available standee source of at least 70 MW to make up for the lost "Green Energy" almost always using fossil fuel and here in California that usually boils down to Natural Gas driven turbines.

3. Noise Pollution: If you’ve ever noticed that wind turbines are usually located in places where there’s not a lot of people, this is not because there’s more wind in those places (because wind found everywhere but not always in useable amounts for power generation); but because the machinery inside the turbine is loud when operating and so are the turning blades. Although while at the Pine Tree Wind Farm I could be as close as 300 feet from a working wind turbine and not hear and noise from the turbine (but again the noise from the wind at ground level most likely attenuated the turbine/blade noise).

4. Limited Resource: While the solar energy source can be found in every part of the globe, useable wind energy is only able to be harnessed only when there is wind available, and this useable wind source is not as widely found as one might have first expected. This fact, along with the desire to put them in unpopulated/rural regions (mostly due to the populated areas refusing to have the wind turbines their backyard!), severely limits the potential areas where the wind turbine farms can be constructed.

5. Degraded Television Reception: So in some areas Wind Turbines have been accused of ruining television reception. Who cares! Most of broadcast and cable TV is simply crap, why waste your time watching anyway. Would you setup a folding chair out in a field and stare at a pile of cattle dung for 4 hours? Didn't think so.

5. Aesthetic Pollution: While only a scant few people would actually consider a wind turbine to be attractive, some people actually think they are majestic and beautiful to look at but those people usually don’t live in the areas of the wind turbine farms themselves. Yes, in almost all cases wind farms are less attractive than a natural landscape without the turbines but in comparison to a smokestack a wind turbine is not so ugly. But consider that most wind farms have hundreds of these tall turbines! Some communities have even taken to starting petition drives to remove the turbines in their community.

6. Inefficient: Ok so wind energy is clean, but is it efficient? On average a wind turbine converting the wind energy into usable electric energy is only able to extract about 59% of the wind’s power. This is one of the major issues of as the cost per kilowatt when using wind energy is still higher than other form of electric generation, and this inefficiency appears to have remained static for many years now. Wind power must still compete with conventional generation sources on a cost basis. Depending on how energetic a wind site is, the wind farm might not be cost competitive. Even though the cost of wind power has decreased dramatically in the past 10 years, the technology requires a higher initial investment than fossil-fueled generators. New improvements to the wind turbine architecture may change this defect in the near future.

8. Land Use and Occupation: As I have mentioned before, that while one single turbine doesn’t occupy that large tract of land, a wind farm has many turbines on an large track of land which is necessary for them to be as effective and efficient as possible – in other words, you will seldom see just one or two wind turbines installed in one place (Although both the cities of Palmdale & Lancaster each now have 1 large wind turbine mounted solo). Pine Tree is set on 8,000 acres and the adjacent North Sky River Wind Energy and Jawbone Wind Energy Projects are set to eat up over 13,000 acres!

10. Infrastructure Costs: Everyone must understand that installing a group of these 400 feet high huge turbines can rack up a large amount of money. Installing just one 1.7 MW turbines can be as pricey as $2 to $3 million, with additional costs coming for yearly maintenance. Another unseen cost in installing a wind turbine is less about a money issue then it is about as environmental issue. Let us NOT forget that the production, transport, and installation along with the infrastructure of just one these wind turbine farms has a large sizable “carbon footprint”, which in turns defeats some of whole idea behind the wind farm in the first place as this is suppose to be "clean power" (Green Energy).