North Carolinians Taking a Hard Look at Wind Energy

December 3, 2005

While public utility companies have been considering energy options including new nuclear and coal-fired power plants in North Carolina to meet projected future demands, another energy technology is drawing serious attention and turning heads. Large-scale wind energy is now the fastest growing energy source in the world and has become economically competitive with both coal and nuclear power. A study done at Appalachian State University indicates that western North Carolina has an abundance of sites that rate in the upper five percent for the entire country in wind energy potential.

The Canary Coalition has been conducting a series of tours over the past three years to the TVA pilot wind project at Buffalo Mountain, Tennessee, in an effort to showcase the practicality and benefits of modern large-scale wind technology. State legislators, county commissioners, local government officials, DAQ officials, political candidates and community activists have been among those who have participated in past tours. On Friday, December 2, a group of nine people took the one-day trip in a carpool van from North Carolina rented by the Canary Coalition.

The tour stops at the Moran Baptist Church parking lot to view the windmills at a distance of approximately 10 miles

The windmills are just to the left of the middle of this picture on the furthest ridge. Can you spot them?

"In the late seventies and early eighties there was a pilot wind project at Howard Knob near Boone, NC, that left a negative impression still persisting today for many people," explains Avram Friedman of the Canary Coalition. "The much older technology used in that experiment was big, bulky and noisy. The rapid speed of the metallic blades interfered with local radio and television signals. It was viewed as a nuisance by some of those living close by. But, all that has changed with the steady and dramatic technological advancement of wind technology over the past twenty years. State-of-the-art wind turbines, like those at Buffalo Mountain, are sleek and silent. The gracefully slow-moving blades are made of non-metallic space-age composite materials that cause no interference with radio or television signals."

The new wind technology has also become dramatically less expensive at a time when the costs associated with more conventional technologies are increasing. The cost of fossil fuels has been steadily rising, while awareness of the negative health, environmental and economic impacts of burning coal has been growing. Concerns are also growing about the climate-changing affects of greenhouse gases emitted by fossil-fuel burning processes. No new nuclear power plants have been licensed in the United States since the 1979 accident at Three-Mile Island and disturbing questions persist about the safety of nuclear power and the challenge of confining deadly nuclear waste products that have half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years. Wind turbines burn no fuels and generate no emissions or waste products. They generate large quantities of electricity without producing greenhouse gases or contributing to global warming. All these factors are contributing to new interest in large-scale wind energy throughout America, around the world and, now, especially in North Carolina, the home of the Clean Smokestacks Act and the Green Power program.

"It's very encouraging that such a diverse group of people is showing enough interest to join the tour," says Friedman. "There were environmental groups, a North Carolina public utility company, the medical profession and others represented this time.  It seems as though many are beginning to take a hard look at wind technology ."