I LOVE the idea of windmills. Birds have been sh.tting on my vehicles and
waking my a.s up way too early in the morning for TOO LONG!! I want my
house surrounded on all sides by windmills so all day there is nothing but
bird parts raining from the sky around the perimeter of my home. What
stupid hollow bones they have. Better yet, I'd like to move near a
windmill farm, a coal plant, and a nuclear plant. That way we could choke
them from the smoke, irradiate them, and then chop them into little bits.

Correct.  They don't want coal, nuke, oil, or any plants beyond what
exists.  Should demand exceed capacity, they only want YOUR power cut.

You see, the attitude among these elitist prigs is that resources are
to benefit those whose lives, in their opinion, justify the use of
dwindling supplies.  You are of no consequence and should be
restricted.  You're not important enough to drive, heat your home, for
that matter BUILD your home out of lumber.  You should be happy with a
smaller residence, using more expensive steel framing.  Since that's
more expensive, make sure you build one even smaller.  After all, these
morons need wood to burn in their monstrously large fireplaces, sitting
around discussing how the rest of the world contributes to global
warming, and how continued pressure on weak-minded politicians (but I
repeat myself), to further inhibit your life, will ensure the continued
availability of our resources to those who really matter in this world.

I don't need to name names.  You know who they are.

 Where does the power to turn a wind generator actually come from? When we

Planet X.  It still doesn't have an official name, to the best of my knowledge.

[snip - redundant because of link]

I hear you...   Some people are concerned only with their own land values.
We've got an overwhelming group of homeowners here that adamantly opposes
efforts to get reasonably priced housing into the community.  Not
subsidized, not welfar-oriented, just reasonably priced.  They jam city
council meetings to oppose reasonably priced housing and they badger their
council membes about it.  They think reasonably priced housing units will
erode the "exclusivity" of the town.  They're known as Home Owners Requiring
Exlusivity: HOREs.

[snip - see link]

Apparently, they come from Western Massachusetts.  Say, aren't you from
Western Massachusetts?

However, their concern is a legitimate one.  This is another one of those
things that we just don't know much about.  To use a wind turbine is to
remove kinetic energy from the atmosphere and replace it with heat.  Is it a
big deal?  Probably not but we don't know and, if we're going to do this on
an industrial scale, people should ask the question and start digging for
answers.  We probably shouldn't worry too much about it today but we should
look into it.  Nature never gives you something for nothing.  Never.  We
should have learned that by now.  There's still some lingering concern over
bird migrations but I think this turns out not to be as big a problem as
feared (but not sure - haven't time to look that up today).

The thing that I find curious about wind turbines is that energy companies
seem to like them and I would think they wouldn't.  In Massachusetts, a
unique hydro project, Bear Swamp, was constructed to handle peak power
demands.  It's a raised holding pond - during the night, cheap electricity
is used to pump water up to it and during peak power demand, the water is
allowed to run back down through generators to meet peak demand needs;
overall it's like 66% efficient but it's cheaper than gas and diesel plants
which NEPSCo would otherwise have had to build to meet demand peaks.  But
Bear Swamp was built in 1979 on so, when the only other power on the grid
was power with predictable generation characteristics and Bear Swamp was
built to meet certain peak needs, not to deal with uncertain generation.

Energy producers are very capital-intensive businesses and they desire a
high degree of predictability in everything.  Electric load is highly
predictable (at least, if you can forecast the weather fairly well) but if
you switch to wind, the generation becomes less predictable.  And there's
the problem.

Let's say you, the power company chief, have to decide what to build to meet
200mw of peak demand.  If you have 210mw of peak capacity but 20mw is in
wind, you run the risk of being 10mw short at peak because you can't rely on
the wind.  Consequently, you have to come up with a way of generating 200mw
of predictably available power or you have to have ironclad contracts for
backup supply - which you will be buying at peak rates.  Or you have to have
some way of banking wind power (Bear Swamp) to meet demand when the wind
lets you down.  If you build another 10mw of conventional capacity, so that
you can meet your 200mw demand whether or not the wind is blowing without
buying at peak rates, that's another 10mw worth of capital you must put up
and it's redundant capital because you've already got that 10mw invested in
wind production.

Still, the electric companies do seem to like wind well enough.  Here, as in
other places, you can contract for green energy (which, ultimately, brings
more green energy on-line) and what's mostly provided is wind but without a
cheap way to store peak energy (Bear Swamp is a big capital investment and I
don't think it's easily expanded), a power company runs the risk of being
unable to meet peak demand, which will make customers angry and spark
investigations from the legislature (nobody wants that).

Of course, another aspect of this is load management.  A friend runs a
business that requires a LOT of electricity (almost as much as Al Gore's
house!!!) and his contract with Excel allows them to basically shut him down
when they can't afford to supply electricity to him.  He saves a bundle on
electricity but runs the risk of having to pay people to sit on their hands
(the savings do make this a win although they shut him off a few times last
year).  There's lots of variations on this theme (off-peak electric heating
storage schemes, etc), so the power companies are actively working both
sides of the issue.  Maybe they're having enough success with load
management that they can affort to have a potential shortfall in wind
production and still keep operations normal.

And, it's also possible that if you consider a large enough area with enough
good wind sites, you  are extremely unlikely to run into a situation where
all your turbines are becalmed.

Personally, I don't see any problem with expanding wind production.  For the
MW involved, it's cheaper than solar photovoltaic but it's going to make far
more sense if we can, someday, build a cheap way of storing electricity
generated when we don't need it and kept for later use.  I believe Bear
Swamp is one of the cheapest ways to do that but it's also a huge capital
investment and it's hard to find suitable sites to build a project like
that.

Also, one of the attractions of shoreline wind power is that the onshore and
offshore daily wind cycles are, as far as I know, very predictable.
However, Hachi has pointed this out as yet another COVE issue in the past.
On the one hand, it's understandable that people investing a lot of money in
a vacation home are going to be sensitive to the property values but, on the
other hand, maybe that's just  TFB (Too Bad) for them.  It's clean (as far
as we know), reasonably priced and, at the shore, the dependability is
probably enhanced.  Build some of it and see how it goes.

By the way, you should not characterize all of these people as k00ks.  It's
likely that some of those involved in this very much walk the walk of
conservation.  I know people who get by with very small amounts of energy.
They use clotheslines, drive very little, live in small, easily heated
houses, don't have or don't use air-conditioning, compost, recycle
everything, grown some of their own food and have a small carbon footprint.
That's not k00kery, that's commitment.  And every erg of energy use they
avoid drives down the price for you (or helps to keep it lower than it
otherwise would be).

Awhile back I read an article about floating wind turbines that use part of
the energy it makes to stay up 100's of feet in the air. Supposedly these
turbines would be more efficient than ones on the ground because the wind
blows almost constantly.

As far as disrupting air patterns, that's a joke. Wind is nothing more than
high pressure drawn to low pressure. Wind is equilibrium.