Maine news, sports, weather | Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine

OUR OPINION: If wind power not ‘green’ enough, then what is?

Rejecting all alternative energy sources leaves us with oil, coal, nuclear

The business of producing energy in all its forms creates controversies by its very nature.

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Anything that’s extracted and burns can produce land, water and air pollution; hydropower dams flood lands and block fish migration; nuclear plants need radioactive fuel that, once depleted, sits in dozens of sites awaiting a disposal policy that’s been tied up in politics for decades.

When wind power was first proposed, it seemed an ideal venture, lacking the extraction, pollution and fuel-disposal issues that bedevil other forms of energy production.

Yet, once they started to be built, these “greenest of the green” projects were fought because they offended environmentalists.

Such “green-on-green” conflicts may seem counterproductive, but they could easily have been forseen.

Wind turbines have to be built where wind is to be found, and the strongest and most reliable currents aren’t often at already-industrialized sites, but at pristine ones such as mountaintops, open plains, farmland, deserts and the ocean.

That’s why protests against them have cited their harmful effects on birds, which run afoul of the turbines’ spinning blades, and decry “viewshed” violations where 400-foot-tall turbines detract from the scenery. Their site footprints, service roads and power lines also are offensive to natural locations.

Thus, when 60 Earth First! activists blocked a road this week to protest a wind farm project on Kibby Mountain, resulting in four arrests, they were asserting green values against a green project, which they call “industrial wind.”

Regardless of whether Kibby Mountain is approved, it remains true that if every similar plan is rejected, then most of our power will continue to be provided by those old standbys — nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas.

Considering all the options, wind power, in amounts substantial enough to be economically viable, can’t fall victim to those for whom some shades of green just aren’t green enough.