[Whew! NY Times to the rescue! The blog was getting really heavy on the Theology category this morning. Here’s something a bit lighter… Loved the Cruella De Vil line! 😉 ]
BEACH HAVEN TERRACE, N.J.,
July 10 ”” Tired of paying as much as $340 per month for gas and electricity at the Cape Cod home here where he has lived for 18 months, Michael Mercurio erected a 35-foot windmill in his backyard last fall that helped reduce his bill to about $114 ”” a year.
“It just makes sense,” said Mr. Mercurio, who is 61 and runs a company selling and installing windmills. “This is a clean, renewable source of energy.”
Some of his neighbors say it is also annoying. They say it is too big. They say it is too noisy. And some residents in this middle-class borough on Long Beach Island have gone to court to try to make him take it down, while the township has stilled it since winter.
It is a collision between the ideals of alternative energy and the suburban reality of New Jersey’s notorious not-in-my-backyard culture, casting Mr. Mercurio in the role of a latter-day environmental knight errant and his neighbor and principal adversary as the ecological equivalent of Cruella De Vil.
What started as one man’s attempts to find a cheap, clean energy source has become a frequent topic of coffee conversation among the small community of year-round residents in this town, where Mr. Mercurio has lived since he was 4, and has galvanized some segments of the state’s environmental community. And, oh, how the Don Quixote jokes have flowed.
“I hear it all the time,” Mr. Mercurio said, standing in the shadow of his still windmill Tuesday afternoon. “I tell them, ”˜You’ve got it all wrong: I’m not fighting against the windmills, I’m fighting for the windmills.’ ”
This is the same rhetoric Ted Kennedy used to halt a windmill project off Nantucket. Although his main complaint was that it would ruin the view from his back deck.
It is so easy being green – you can replace your light bulbs, buy a Prius, but don’t put a windmill in my backyard or obstruct my view of the ocean.
It is so easy being green – you can replace your light bulbs, buy a Prius
Not really, going from 100W light blub to 17W will conserve 83W an hour, at ten that’s 830W, but your small sacrifice of your ocean view can generate 10KW an hour. Wind is a very mature alternative energy, much more efficient than solar which commercially is around 10% efficiency (some exciting DOE grant development from Boeing have reach 40% in the lab).
Here is the hypocrisies of the ‘green movement’ is that they desire to keep it convenient. Everything has trade off and to truly be ‘green’ takes actual radical life-style changes. Thus is the positive externalities of reduced CO2 emission (presuming coal, so no security issues) worth the trade-off of the negative externalities of a decrease view and some noise pollution?
I think there is a point to the suit. It is one thing to complain about windmill towers several miles off the coast, which is the case with the Cape Cod project, and another when the tower is next door and is producing an incessant sound and annoying shadows on your back yard. The latter, it would seem, meets a reasonable definition of a nuisance.
From Woman’s Day magazine August 1, 2007, p. 18. [blockquote]Living eco-friendly no longer means making big changes in your family’s routine–even the smallest actions can have impact. PULL THE PLUG When you disconnect your phone charger [i]or turn off a lamp,[/i] [b] also remove the cord from the outlet.[/b][/blockquote]
I’m doing extremely well to remember to turn the @#$% lights off when I’m not using them but I refuse to unplug lamps every time I turn them off. Will the Eco Police come and take me away?
Florida laws actually prohibit homeowners associations from banning windmills, but not many people know about it to challenge HOA covenants:
[blockquote]Florida Statute, Section 163.04
Energy devices based on renewable resources.-
(1) Notwithstanding any provision of this chapter or other provision of general or special law, [b]the adoption of an ordinance by a governing body, as those terms are defined in this chapter, which prohibits or has the effect of prohibiting the installation of solar collectors, clotheslines, or other energy devices based on renewable resources is expressly prohibited. [/b]
(2) No deed restrictions, covenants, or similar binding agreements running with the land shall prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting solar collectors, clotheslines, or other energy devices based on renewable resources from being installed on buildings erected on the lots or parcels covered by the deed restrictions, covenants, or binding agreements. A property owner may not be denied permission to install solar collectors or other energy devices based on renewable resources by any entity granted the power or right in any deed restriction, covenant, or similar binding agreement to approve, forbid, control, or direct alteration of property with respect to residential dwellings not exceeding three stories in height. For purposes of this subsection, such entity may determine the specific location where solar collectors may be installed on the roof within an orientation to the south or within 45 ° east or west of due south provided that such determination does not impair the effective operation of the solar collectors.
(3) In any litigation arising under the provisions of this section, the prevailing party shall be entitled to costs and reasonable attorney’s fees.
(4) The legislative intent in enacting these provisions is to protect the public health, safety, and welfare by encouraging the development and use of renewable resources in order to conserve and protect the value of land, buildings, and resources by preventing the adoption of measures which will have the ultimate effect, however unintended, of driving the costs of owning and operating commercial or residential property beyond the capacity of private owners to maintain. This section shall not apply to patio railings in condominiums, cooperatives, or apartments.
History.-s. 8, ch. 80-163; s. 1, ch. 92-89; s. 14, ch. 93-249.[/blockquote]
(Bold text added for emphasis)
Sorry I forgot to include the link:
[url=http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/consumer/solar_hot_water/q_and_a/rights.htm]Florida Solar Energy Center[/url].
By the way, section 2 above is the section I should have bolded! ah, too early to be thinking, anyway.
Peace
Jim Elliott
We had this controversy in my nearby hometown. Eventually, the town granted the variance over the neighbors’ objections. But they are now at work on crafting some appropriate regulations. Shortly after, the senior class of the local prep school decided their parting gift to the school would be a windmill. I say good for them!
#4 has a point, but not a terriby strong one, IMHO. Are shadows more annoying that a yard full of leaves, for example? Probably not, I don’t have to rake up my neighbor’s shadow. But would I have a right to cut down his tree if it’s shedding into my yard? Probably not, I just have to be a good neighbor and live with it.
Windmills are trendy, but besides the noise, when installed in numbers they are a disaster for migratory birds. There’s always a trade-off.
I have discovered that my county at home does have a once-a-month hazardous-waste recycling center for compact fluorescent bulbs, so that becomes practical. More efficient solar panels are an exciting development, and projects using methane from trash and waste are showing a lot of potential, too.
Tallahassee is going to be building a waste-incinerator power plant to suppliment our current natural gas plant. Bay County (Panama City) has had one for years.
Recycling is all well and good. But have you noticed that the greenest of the green are in truth black in their use of private jets, expensive cars, and overly large homes!
Bill,
And they said that the ecological damage from the Live Earth concerts is almost unimaginable with the private planes used by the artists, the trash at the concerts (by the few that attended), the power used for the concert themselves, etc. And practically no one tuned in! Quite a testimony to ‘saving the earth’ from us humans, eh?
What I’m about to say seemed to be off-topic yesterday, but the discussion has morphed to “environmental damage by the ‘greens.'”
An excerpt from
http://onemansblog.com/2007/03/27/prius-outdoes-hummer-in-environmental-damage/
[blockquote]Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.
The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.
“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,†said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper. [/blockquote]
The author then relates how refining the nickel and manufacturing the Prius battery causes even more damage.
I couldn’t find any data on the plant that was recent, so I hope that this wasteland has been cleaned up. It’s true, though, that Toyota can’t make enough Prius cars to keep up with the demand for them, and now that Al Gore, Jr. has proved that they can go at least 100 mph, they’ve lost their reputation as “wimpy.”
We looked into going solar when we moved to Tallahassee. However, the cost of converting an existing structure (the house — builder spec — was 80% completed when we bought it) would have added way too much to the purchase price of the house. If one is starting from scratch to build a house, it’s much easier to figure the cost into the plans. But not afterwards.
We did look into it again last year, when there were rumors of tax-rebates for water heating systems. However, the price had gone up, and the people we spoke to didn’t have much positive to say for the cost-recovery of post-building installation.
Our neighbors (not the crazy ones, but two houses down) put in a solar pool heater when they had the pool installed four years ago. That would definately be worth it.
[blockquote]When you disconnect your phone charger or turn off a lamp, also remove the cord from the outlet.[/blockquote]
The phone charger I can see — transformers always draw some power even when they are not connected to anything on the other end — but the lamp?? If your lamp is drawing electricity when it’s turned off, you need to replace the switch now; you’ve got more than wasted electricity to worry about! (i.e. short circuit = electrical fire)