Is Green OK in Your Back Yard?

Back in the days before complete electrification of the rural and small towns it was normal to have a private wind generator or two mounted to your house or at least on your property.

At least around here a few of the older house from the pre 1940's and 50's era still have the old windco or wincharger towers still attached to the roof but now serving as antenna towers. In town or out of town back then it was a common and normal thing to have these"eyesores on your roof so that you could have the conveniences of basic electrical service.

And don't forget the that oh so terrible toxic collection of deep cycle battery's and that clunkity one cylinder hit and miss gen set that was in the basement that went with them! Oh the horror!

Out here in the boondocks, we have quite a few decorative windmills. There are working models of the popular well pumper of the 30s, as well as the classic Dutch design. I've seen a restaurant that duplicates a complete Greek windmill. People also love sailboats, old and new. It won't take long to learn to love the machines that let us live without fearing for our children's future.

Wind power generation may soon become much less visible, when the kite-based systems reach maturity. They are potentially cheaper and much more constant.

It's just like the new cell towers disguised as trees. What were are seeing now are just the preliminary designs. I'm sure in time they will be much better dressed and more athetically pleasing. Well, er, I think that they are things of beauty anyway but, there are some (closed minded?) people who don't.

If you accept overhead power lines going through beautiful landscape and cell towers in many buildings ruining our beautiful skies why can't you accept windmills or solar panels generating power locally called distributed generation which has very low transmission loss and avoid cost of transmission lines.

Build more nuclear plants and use the existing grid/distribution system. It is the lowest cost per kw of any technologies that exist at the moment. Let's use what we know works well. They also use up much less space than anything else.

No technology is perfect and each has drawbacks and risks but there are some that are certainly better than others. Nuclear is one of them.

I'd be more upset about the noise factor. I can avert my eyes.

Well, it does rather depend on which country one is talking about. The Netherlands, for example, has been milling grain and moving water with wind for centuries.

The country could hardly be in the same category as the "boondocks".