Salon, why such a snide attitude towards the people on Cape Cod or Nantucket who do not want their beautiful seascape marred by wind turbines? To me that is a perfectly valid concern which has nothing to do with greed or insensitivity. Whether or not these people are wealthy, or bought their land when it was cheap, or inherited it, etc., they still have a very good point. Mankind has made a ruin of so much of nature's beauty, and now we're poised to do so once again?

Remember, even people who don't own property in these beautiful places still visit them for the joy of their natural beauty. Once those turbines go up, a little more has been taken from all of us.

Lastly, count me among those who demand greater protection for seabirds from those deadly blades. People are so nonchalant about the wanton killing of animals in pursuit of our own desires. Conservation could reduce a great deal of energy use, but that would be inconvenient, so better to let birds be ripped apart by giant whirring blades, right? No, not right at all.

We need to figure out a way to solve our energy needs without making the rest of the world pay for our unrelenting need for cars and video games and hi-tech refrigerators. We can't keep destroying everything around us, can we?

I suffer from COPD (alpha-antitrypsin deficiency emphyzema). Even though my illness is hereditary, I much prefer breathing air over smog. Bring on the wind farms and the solar power plants! As for the aesthetics, every day I see gigantic "look at me" houses that corrupt the ridges and hills in my city.

When I read statements like, "Deregulation had led to a 59 percent power rate increase." I cringe because it shows me how rampant the misunderstanding of the electricity industry is. I work in the industry, and there are many credible arguments to be made for why deregulation hasn't worked as well as it should have, however stating that prices have gone up is quite misleading. Electricity doesn't come from thin air. If anyone has looked at the price of Natural Gas or other precursors to electrcity production, all of sudden it might seem like the higher electricty prices may have other causes other than deregulation. I don't want to digress too much on deregulation and what needs to be done to fix it as this is an article on wind generation.

Currently Wind projects are effectively tax subsidies - that's the only way a project can be profitable in comparison to a conventional fossil fuel plant. Some people think this is a bad thing - I do not. Power plants produce pollution, and externality that has historically has not been priced into the cost of power plant. The country has come a long way since the 50s with regards to pollution, but we're still not where we need to be with regard to CO2. The tax subsidies on renewables such as wind offer a back door of pricing in greenhouse gases. By providing a tax subsidy to renewables, the govt is effectively taxing fossil fuel plant construction. This is not the most elegant solution, I'd much prefer a cap and trade system for CO2, but it's something at least. Forward thinking states are also requiring renewable energy credits which is another method for spurring renewable energy.

Given that I work indirectly for the coal industry, I want to take some time defend the broader power industry. It's easy to derride pollution spewing companies, but the first person we need to blame is the person in the mirror. Power companies could build any number of new coal plants, but they would sit idle if we the consumer were not so hungry for power. (that's actually not quite true since they would actually displace gas plants but anyways...) Blame them for not being forward thinking and not trying to do something different. Power is Power, and the more progressive companies will not care about the source of that power. For example my company, a major coal plant owner, is also a major wind developer. Wind is good step, but it hardly can be the only solution. The transmission system is not built for an uncontrollable supply such as Wind and Solar. Both of those power sources will always have to be augmented by more conventional power. IGCC might be part of that solution. More advanced IGCC system have coal entrapments systems that would create an IGCC plant with a zero carbon footprint. I think it's foolish to ignore a technology because it has the word coal in it.

As for NIMBY, I believe much of it could be resolved if consumers actually had incentive embedded in their power prices. If your going to have windmills in your backyard - shouldn't you at leas get cheaper electricty prices? As it is right now - you benefit equally with everyone else. That doesn't seem quite fair in itself. It's too bad the retail landscape for competitive consumer electricty is so piss poor. People just go about and get their bill and pay it, forgetting that there are choices. That's the biggest place that deregulation has failed us. Much of that can tied to limitations in old metering technology. It's time that we take a deeper look into having more price transparency when it comes to electricity, and making the market more competitive, not less.

We are told it is not about clean energy, it is about the developers getting rich. So what? One letter writer gave a figure of 70 million dollars of profit for the wind energy company. How much money are the polluters going to pocket? What will be the huge costs bequeathed to the future by their projects?

I am not convinced that the costs claimed are there for the clean energy. It sounds to me like lies to protect the status quo. But even if they are, so what?

If it is a choice between obscene profits and future costs for clean energy, and obscene profits and future costs for dirty energy, I still have to go with the clean energy.