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Beauty is clearly in the eye of the beholder.  As I look from my home in La Grande to Telecasette Wind Farm I see big, ugly dark, menacing one eyed monsters making my neighbors sick, our community a battleground and threatening the natural landscape that drew most of us to live here.  At least with the other forms of energy like coal, they are required to return the relatively small area of the earth they damage to it's pre-activity condition.  They say the cost of decommissioning these wind farms is roughly 1/4 of the cost to build them.  Because of the large amounts of oil they contain (850 gallons per wind tower), they are in effect creating huge hazardous waste sites that noone has the money to remove.  These LLC designations increase the likelyhood that many of these wind farms will be rusting away 30 or 50 years from now, just like they are in California.  By the way, those of us in Eastern Oregon may not have the money of these huge foreign companies, but we truly love the land and will fight to the death to protect it one windmill at a time!

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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You must be kidding about low cost.  Us taxpayers are supporting huge write offs for this wind power as well as paying higher electric bills.  How can you say it is so great when it is so unpredictable that you have to have constant traditional backup power resulting in no reduction in traditional electrical power costs.  You are just adding on a second expensive power source while still paying for the original. At it's best wind energy costs twice as much as other energy.  The wind companies just want to get these things up before the money goes away (it will with the changing political landscape).  If in doubt, look at the 14,000 wind towers built in the early 1980 in California.  The subsidies dried up and by 1985 the towers were abandoned.  They still stand, rusting, and producing nothing.    Wind towers take huge amounts of land that ends up being criss crossed with pavement, cement platforms and towers rising as much as 520 feet (the height of a 52 story building.(in the case of the proposed Antelope Ridge Wind Farm it will cover 47,000 acres of land that will no longer be scenic, safe for man or animal, and in an area where there are those who don't even want motorized vehicles in the areas.  I  can't understand why anyone supporting protection of the environment could believe these are a good thing.  By the way, the Department of Fish and Wildlife is not a supporter of Wind Farms, at least in this area.  They are bad, bad, bad for wildlife.  One other little caviate--they are setting these wind farms up as Limited Liability Companies.  Any lawsuits in the future and there are sure to be many, can only go back on the small LLC while leaving the huge international company, which in our case is Horizon Wind completely safe from having to face the health and environmental consequences of the wind farms.  Gosh, isn't that convenient ????

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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I live in Union County.  A majority of voters do not want these monsters being built in our beautiful valley.  They take huge amounts of land, kill wildlife, take large quantitie of steel, cement and oil (yes, oil--at least 850 gallons per wind tower).  We already have one wind farm in the area, and in spite of the few people living close by, there have been multiple health problems.  Ask yourself "Would you want to live under these when wind farm developers have  paid people off and even bought their property because of health effects and made them sign agreements that they won't tell what the problem was?  There is nothing "green" about wind power.  At it's best it costs 20% more than other energy.  We are having it crammed down our unwilling throats and a lot of us are in a fighting mood about it.  In spite of a public vote against them, Horizon has gone so far as to offer food and little paper windmills to get people to come to meetings and make it look like a majority are for them.  Now they are trying to ramrod a SIP agreement through our county commissioners to add to the faulty perception that we want windmills.  Hopefully our county commissioners will look to the future and see that in 10 or 15 years the real winners will be the ones that protected the land for future generations, instead of destroying it for perceived short term financial gain.   

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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