Wind power has extremely little to do with energy security, and claims otherwise are specious and unscientific.

Jeffrey E. Anthony, American Wind Energy Association

Put bluntly - we need energy from any reasonable source. Our population and our energy needs are growing. At the same time, conventional energy sources are becoming less reliable or politically constrained. The billions of dollars invested in wind suggest there is nothing specious or unscientific about it. I doubt investors would fund these billions if the economics were unsound.

What is wrong with encouraging renewable energy like wind power? Wind power attacks the wrong problem. Electricity generation is a minor portion of our energy usage. Think about your electric bill compared to the cost of transportation or heating your home. Nationwide we spend about 50% of our energy dollar on transportation, 40% on heating, and only 10% on electricity.

To make a real difference in imported oil consumption we need to reduce gasoline and home heating oil usage, which make up 90% of our energy expenditures. How do we do this?

Step one. Conservation. Drive less. Turn down your thermostat and wear more clothes. Turn off the lights.

Step two. Insulation. Tighten up your house. Put at least 12" of insulation in the attic. Insulate basement walls from the inside to 4' below grade with 2" rigid. Make sure storm windows are tight fitting and in place. Seal up cracks with foam or caulking.

Step three. Efficiency. Replace the old steam boiler with a modern wall hung 95% efficient LP gas boiler that adjusts water temperature based on the outside temperature. 2 pieces of PEX tubing can be snaked through the 2" steam pipe that feeds each radiator turning the radiator into a hot water, rather than a steam radiator. LP gas is a domestic product, not imported, and it burns cleanly.

Step four. Keep it local. Support local agriculture, local energy production, biomass generators, wood pellet manufacturers. Make stuff at home. Reduce consumption of stuff made on the other side of the world, shipped across the ocean and trucked across the country even if it is dirt cheap. You get what you pay for and it all ends up in the garbage, or in the shed, anyway.

All of these things will make a much bigger difference to our reliance on foreign oil than wind power. If there is going to be a payment to encourage these things, that payment should go directly to help us pay for these changes. How about a tax credit equal to the amount you reduce your electric bill, or your home heating bill, or your purchases of gasoline from one year to the next? The double your money plan.

Take away the subsidies provided to energy generators and use that money to provide incentives to consumers to reduce consumption.

Step threeA: PHEVs.

Agree about most of the other stuff.

As to Ron's article, the example minimum property-line setback of 1,260 feet is not enough to protect neighbors from noise and flicker. If health and amenity of neighbors is protected by adequate setbacks (2 km [1.25 mi] is recommended by medical experts), interference with wind rights may not be such an issue.

"Who Owns the Wind?" Der Spiegel, May 4, 2007: "The parties in the dispute are the owner of a wind farm in Deliztsch in the eastern German state of Saxony and a businessman who wants to set up a bigger wind farm in the immediate vicinity. The crux of the case is earnings. When two wind turbines are located too close to one another, one often falls into a slipstream."

There are multiple glaring errors in your comment.

40% of our energy comes from petroleum, the remainder from natural gas (23%), coal (also 23%) and the remainder from nuclear electricity, hydroelectric and other renewable energy sources.

Only 28% of energy consumption goes into ALL forms of transportation, which besides automobiles, includes public transportation, trucking, airlines, etc. (transportation petroleum usage: 61% gasoline, 21% diesel, 12% aviation, then misc.) Another 21% is residential. So half of energy consumption is industrial and commercial.

Your "90%" figure is completely specious - check your sources.

Calculate your own energy consumption costs by comparing annual cost of gas (or heating oil) v. gasoline v. electricity. Even with three cars, I spend a lot more on heating with gas, plus electricity usage, than I do on gasoline.

You also forget to include carbon footprint into the picture. We are not charged for this in the U.S. up to now, but that will soon change, and all fuel-based means of energy production will become even more expensive. Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and tidal energy sources will reduce CO2 emissions, as will your suggested conservation measures - which are really efficiency improvements stated another way.

What we can agree on is this: Efficiency has to improve, on an ongoing basis. Transferring combustion-based energy production to more benign methods will also improve our overall energy efficiency. Eventually, these benign methods will hold energy costs down, believe it or not - as our technical ability to harness these sources will yield power from sources free of fuel costs.

As for the main article - managing access to renewable sources - I would probably favor the unified approach, with some regulation as to the degree to which any available resource can be utilized within a specific area, to avoid overdevelopment and underutilization, which we should anticipate as a general economic nightmare in the making.

Regards, RWVesel

In Minnesota setbacks of 5 rotor diameters are part of the state's regulatory system. Also, draft bills have been tentatively floated and submitted in the North Dakota legislature and discussed in the South Dakota legislature within the last two years.

One of the more recent legislative proposals stemmed from a conflict between a landowner's group developing a wind project and a commercial wind developer - the projects were adjacent to each other and wind shadow interference was the main concern. Also, a year or so ago, a ND township passed an ordinance establishing very large setbacks.

I wish I could agree that the problem is theoretical, but unfortunately, it is very real.

The turbine to turbine distance is well known and it is up to the turbine manufacturer and the wind farm developer to decide what is the most optimum layout. Common practice is 5-10 times the diameter. There are some techniques that can artificially influence this.

The spill over to one's neighbor land is another issue. This has been addressed by legislation for other shared resources. Same thinking process can be applied to wind. Common sense suggests that disturbing the quality of wind going into your neighbor's land is similar to any other natural resource sharing between neighbors, water, minerals, oil, to name few. Placing wind turbines too close to your neighbor's land is similar to contaminating water stream that pass through your yard to your neighbor's.

Arie

Wind energy is a public resource. No landowner can claim that his/her land has actually produced the wind - thus it is up to society to allocate this resource. How that is done will greatly affect the development (or inhibition) of wind generation. The second segment will expand a bit on a couple options.

One of the reasons that I drafted this article is to stimulate public debate on the best path forward for wind development. I see wind rights as a potential legal morass and believe our policy makers need to give early and serious consideration to proper allocation of this resource, rather than a belated knee-jerk reaction to lobbying by pressure groups.

Otherwise, small plots will be unavailable for wind power development even if the plot owners would wish to develop them.

Similarly, even for large plots, if a single developer is building on adjacent large plots, the spacing along the border is best determined by microsite wind resource details and not forcing a 2 x set-back empty strip along the property line.

However, absent a prior agreement, any landowner could have veto power over his heighbors - and a strong monetary incentive to use that veto power. For instance, if a developer offers Landowner A an annual lease of $5,000 to place a turbine near the property boundary, adjacent Landowner B is in a position to veto the deal, and demand (extort) most of that $5000 payment - up to the level at which Landowner A will walk away.

One option is a 2 component payment, wherein both Landowners share part of the payment and Landowner A receives a separate payment for a surface disturbance lease. However, Landowner B still has veto power and the monetary incentive to use that leverage to extract a disproportionate share of the lease payments.

You don't have to be a cynic to recognize that it is naive to expect neighborly goodwill to prevail.

First, the cost of a nuclear plant is currently estimated at about $8,000/kW, vs gas at $600 to $1200/kW, depending on simple vs combined cycle, and conventional coal somewhere around $3000-$4000/kW depending on who you talk to.

Second, storage of nuclear waste has not been resolved and Yucca Mountain has yet again been set back.

Third: Risk. Investors are cautious at committing billions to: --- an uncertain licensing process, subject to political whims, --- long construction schedules, subject to dramatic commodity swings (witness the last 12 months), --- uncertain regulatory recovery and; --- cautious commercial terms from vendors.

My philosophy is "never bet against technology". Nuclear should be an important part of our future, but today's uncertainties for nuclear power make it a challenge for even the most optimistic investor. Not many CEOs are willing to bet the company on nuclear if they can find options. Wind, combined with gas, is one of those options available today, not 10 years from now.