Amherst Island Wind Info
CPAI
|
|
Amherst Island Wind Info |
|
CPAI (the Coalition to Protect Amherst Island) is against any industrial-sized development of wind power on Amherst Island. The group consists of about 200 people most of whom live on the periphery of the Island, typically along the shoreline. It was formed mid-2007 as a non-profit group. They have a web site, www.protectai.ca.
I certainly threw enough rocks at the information on CAIRE's web site, at www.whywind.org, but at least they attempted to argue their version of the facts. The facts on CPAI's web site are much harder to evaluate because there's relatively few of them. The first half of the site contains typical anti-wind appeals with pictures of lovely nature and ugly turbines and it's not until you get to the "health" section that any references to any papers appear. As you peruse the anti-wind literature, one thing you notice is there's lots of anecdotal commentary, but only relatively few primary sources. Everybody, and there's scores of anti-wind sites, mentions Drs. Harry, Pierpont and Pereira and their papers, all of which can be read in an hour or so. Given the large number of turbines in production I would assume thousands of people would be suffering, but only three doctors have noticed? At least noticed enough to investigate and publish? OK, so it might be more than three, but whatever the number is, it isn't as large as I would have thought. Of course it could be argued that there's no money to be made in fighting against wind power, and lots of money to be made fighting for it. UPDATE - I came across an English anti-wind-power activist's letter that guesses 90% of the projects don't cause any complaints. This may explain why the complaints are not systematic. I'll be doing more research on this and posting it under "the gory issues" on the home page.
It also seems that CPAI is taking the tactic of mentioning every possible objection, perhaps hoping something, anything, will stick. Some of the objections are quite conjectural (i.e. extra maintenance). Some are based on current problems that likely will be fixed (i.e. grid integration). Some are based on mechanical failures that could happen (i.e. turbine fires) but aren't likely to, and probably won't cause much damage when they do. There's so many objections that the important objections get lost in the barrage.
I've read all of the articles referenced on the site, and many of the articles subsequently referenced. The bulk of these articles are anecdotal horror stories from people who live close to projects, and it's hard to critique this sort of study, except in general. While I have no doubt that many of these are true stories, there never seems to be a systematic effort to study just how widespread the problems are. What I'd love to see is more surveys where they ask every resident within a certain distance of a project what problems they have with it. I'd also like to see more measurement of sound, if that's the problem. There are a handful of such attempts which are freely quoted, but you never seem able to get to the primary source.
Like I've mentioned elsewhere, I get the sense from both sides that their goal is to convince, not to educate.
As a practical matter, the links on the CPAI web site are hard to find and sometimes hard to follow. As a service to my hoards of viewers, I've copied the important papers to this site and you can link to them right here. Most of these are pdf's, and you'll need the Adobe reader, which almost everyone has anyway. Just hit your "return" or "back" button to get back here. Be aware, most of these are large, and if you are on dial-up, it will be awhile.