Thank you Anne Murray for your support!
Thank you to the hundreds of others who have also voiced their support in trying to preserve this beautiful, peaceful area.
Maybe some of the media interest spurred by Ms Murray's comments will help AWPC (and their subsidiary Cobequid Area Wind Farms [CAWF]) to finally understand that there is considerable opposition to this proposed project. There is no small voice of just a few people here, the entire Shore is in opposition.
I will say this again until I am blue in the face - we are NOT OPPOSED TO GREEN ENERGY!!
However, these projects have to be located in a responsible manner. They have to go where the local people will not be disturbed or made sick by these behemoths.
On Elmira, PEI two homes have just been abandoned by their owners because they were being made sick by the new turbines that went up earlier this year. These turbines are the same Vestas turbines used in Pubnico and proposed for the Gulf Shore. Their doctor recommended that they spend as little time as possible at home. They were experiencing headaches, ringing in their ears, dizziness and disturbed sleep. This has happened to people who were 1km from the turbines. This is a farm of currently 10 turbines. There are more planned. They were able to move away because they could afford to do it. Their neighbours are not able to afford to move away.
As we know, the d'Entremonts abandoned their home in Pubnico for the same reasons some time ago.
And AWPC/CAWP wants to bring 27 of the same industrial sized machines to within 500m of our homes (or 0m from a property line)!
The idea of someone coming into my neighbourhood, uninvited and unwanted, deliberately erecting industrial sized (400') machines that will make us sick is unconscionable!! We will not be railroaded.
As one comment on an earlier posting says: this opposition will not end. There will just be more and more of us.
The longer this project is proposed, the more difficult questions for the industry in general are being raised - this is bad media for the industry. The sooner the plug is pulled on this particular project the better it will be for for the wind energy industry in general.
It is all very well to suggest going to Pubnico to view the turbines (which some of our group has done and agree they are noisy) - what about coming up here to the Shore and admire it for its beauty and tranquility?
It would be a very inefficient use of gasoline to drive 5 hours one way just to look at some turbines in Pubnico when we could drive 1.5 hours to Elmira and look at the same machines! Let's be energy efficient here!
Charles told us himself at the Pugwash Chamber of Commerce meeting, NS Power can only use the power from about 200 turbines. This is because wind energy cannot, currently, be stored. When the wind dies there is thus a chance of power brown (or even black) outs. This can be mitigated somewhat by spreading the turbines around the province. There are 41 turbines of various sizes producing nearly 60 MW. Seems to me there are remote, unpopulated spots on the Cobequids and Cape Breton not far from transmission lines that could easily accommodate the turbines we need.
The Request For Proposals made March 12th for 130 MW power is not just for wind energy projects but for all renewable energy including biomass, land fill gas, tidal and hydro.
There is a queue for wind energy projects. This project is currently 9th in the queue, behind at least three 100MW proposals. AWPC can jump the queue if they are "ready" before their competition. Being ninth just means that eight other projects put their applications in earlier.
To be "ready" they have to have a project that will satisfy NS Power that there is public support for it.
Ha!
12 comments:
May the roar of opposition grow louder!
and louder and louder!!!!!! Thank you Anne Murray!!!! Let's fight this until Charles goes away!!!!!
Can you read Charles - YOU ARE NOT WANTED ON THE GULF SHORE - YOU SAID
IF YOU WERE NOT WANTED - YOU WOULD NOT PUT IN THE FARM - YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE - PLEASE GO AWAY!!!!!!! I hope you hear Anne, she is a voice for all of us, and many thanks to you Lisa for all of your hard work. We have a cottage on Matheson Cove Road, and want to retire here without a wind farm.
Yes Charles, we are not opposed to wind energy, just put it elsewhere where it does not bother residents.
Shadow flicker, noise, property value
decreases, other health concerns are
reality - EVEN THOUGH YOU DON'T WANT TO ADMIT IT!!!! We know that you know better, but wind energy puts a nice fat wallet in your pocket at our expense. How would you like to live beside all these turbines. My bet is that you wouldn't do that to YOUR family.
Check out Information Morning on Island Radio CBC FM 96.1 tomorrow, Wednesday morning between 6:45 am to 8 am to hear Pugwash opposition and Dwayne Bailey of Elmira, PEI who has just abandoned his home because of health problems caused by a new local wind farm.
Joanne M.'s referral to Charles as a whiner in her last identified posting is unfounded. This whole blog is one big whiner rag. The way that I read the article in the Chronicle Herald this week, was that Mr. Demond was telling Anne Murray to stick to what she knows best. Like everything he was most likely taken out of proper context. She lives 2.4 km's away from the proposed site, which is well within your proposed boundaries and plus she has quoted shadow flicker as a concern from this wind farm, which is also an unfounded judgement. Her reference to this project as one that would be disastrous for this community echoes that she is speaking on your behalf as a figurehead of dismay. You have lead a celebrity to voice the lies and unproven facts surrounding this projects opposition. I would also say that yes you are all opponents to green energy, because the squashing of this project will mean the death of hundreds of other projects all over Atlantic Canada, because you will stall development of sound projects on the basis of unproven and miscalculated judgements that will force municpalities to go back to the drawing board, unnecessarily, on future wind farm developments. Also the remote areas that you talk about are not as good as you would think and in fact are rated as red and yellow by NSPI's transmission standards.
Also your comments relative to NSPI not being able to handle more than 200 turbines are also unfounded. A study has not been done to estimate how much the current grid infrastructure can handle. The curent bench mark is about 400 Mw, which I am sure will be surpassed once the study is completed. Also all of the current turbines located around our province are not all in remote areas. There are other turbines that are considered to be louder than Vestas machines close to their neighbours and they have not received this same opposition.
This project should go ahead and if it doesn't than I will watch for you all, from my family's cottage down the road, in your dingy's when the waters rise 10 feet or more.
Charles Demond and now Alex Dunlup have pointed out to us that the wind development industry is very fragile and can't withstand public opposition. Concerns expressed about health and safety are met with whines of foul play. How dare you complain, they say, when your complaining will kill the entire wind development industry. If you force us to setbacks of 2 kms, which our experts have already told us in writing is the optimum distance for a project to succeed with no residential complaints, but we've decided that is just not profitable enough for us, if you force these setbacks on us, the entire industry will pack up and move elsewhere. And where will that leave you? Drowned under rising sea levels, shivering in the cold when the oil is cut off, depressed economically, as if wind developments line more than the pockets of the leasing land owners and the investors. Above all, they say, just put up and shut up. You can't voice an opinion, they say, because you are not a scientist or an engineer or smart enough to have an opinion. Leave the opinions to our paid experts, they say. Trust us, they say, nobody is complaining. Don't go looking for people complaining either, they gripe, nervously eyeballing that diminished trough, as more and more developers rush into the field for the big grants. And like pigs, they are smart enough not to foul their own backyard.
The "health" problems experienced those living next to these farms have a high probability as being the result of very low frequency infrasonic sound which these large "fans" generate from the motion of their blades.
You can't "hear" this sound but your body "feels" it!
Put The windmills in the strait, that would solve all issues concerning health and unsightly windmills around cottages etc. The worst a windmill in the strait will do is give a would-be drowning victim something to hold on to until help arrives.
I think it is slanderous of Clair Peers to tell the media the Gulf Shore Association recruited Anne Murray to speak out against the windfarm project. This really should be investigated by the association's lawyer.
the "health" problems experienced around these windfarms may also be related to the low frequency electromagnetic fields created by these elevated generators and the interferance effects from a grid slightly out of
"tune" with each other.
this can interfere with the natural biological-electromagnetic systems required for mental and physiological balance and heath.
You should have all gone out to Pubnico Point yesterday for the "fire up the grid" hour at 7:11 AM to see if you would have been more in tune or out of tune with the "grid" of this planet. I think you would probably find that all of you are seriously out of tune with the planet!
I am very impressed wih the depth of understanding about non fossil fuel energy expresses by Ms. Murray. She is almost as well informed as your own Lisa Betts. If I didn't know better I might even think that Lisa wrote the material for Ann to deliver.
Because she expresses her environmental concern, I have made a few assumptions about Ms. Murray's vacation habits. We all know she doesn't live in Nova Scotia so I have to think she walks here from her home for the holidays: do you know how much energy airplanes use. I am sure that a concerned environmentalist has a small unheated cottage by the sea and, of course , is not hooked up for electricity. No need for TV - just sing,No need for heat just put on an old sweater. No need to cool the sodas - no cans, no bottles, no environmental footprint.
I am a bit puzzled, however, about the golf. It seems the hike to NS is just to bash Mr. Spauldings balls around and windmills get in your mind and put you off your stroke. Or maybe its the shadow flicker of the sun shining on the monotanous constant swishing of the long polished shaft of the club causing migranes and epileptic episodes and missed puts.
This site is getting sillier and sillier, spreading misinformation from the tinfoil hat brigade, repeating as fact things proven false years ago and shrilly disseminating fear amongst an unsuspecting public. So, I guess I can be silly to.
John McManus
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