Download Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects
Contents Electrical Engineering:
1- INTRODUCTION
2- CONTEXT FOR ANALYSIS OF EFFECTS OF WIND-POWERED ELECTRICITY GENERATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE MID-ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS
3- ECOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF WIND-ENERGY DEVELOPMENT
4- IMPACTS OF WIND-ENERGY DEVELOPMENT ON HUMANS
5- PLANNING FOR AND REGULATING WIND-ENERGY DEVELOPMENT
Preface Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects :
The generation of electricity from wind energy is surprisingly controversial. At first glance, obtaining belectricity from a free source of energy— the wind—seems to be an optimum contribution to the nation’s goal of energy independence and to solving the problem of climate warming due to greenhouse gas emissions.
As with many first glances, however, a deeper inspection results in a more complicated story. How wind turbines are viewed depends to some degree on the environment and people’s predilections, but not everyone considers them beautiful. Building wind-energy installations with large numbers of turbines can disrupt landscapes and habitats, and the rotating turbine blades sometimes kill birds and bats.
Calculating how much wind energy currently displaces other, presumably less-desirable, energy sources is complicated, and predicting future displacements is surrounded by uncertainties.
Although the use of wind energy has grown rapidly in the past 25 years, frequently subsidized by governments at various levels and in many countries eager to promote cleaner alternative energy sources, regulatory systems and planning processes for these projects are relatively immature in the United States.
At the national scale, regulation is minimal, unless the project receives federal funding, and the regulations are generic for construction and management projects or are promulgated as guidelines. Regulation at the state and local level is variable among jurisdictions, some with well developed policies and others with little or no framework, relying on local zoning ordinances. There are virtually no policy or regulatory frameworks at the multistate regional scale, although of course the impacts and benefits of wind-energy installations are not constrained by political boundaries.
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