It’s a terrible shame to ruin our landscape with those monstrosities. Years down the road, we’ll look back and wonder, “WTF were we thinking?”.
I hate the windmills and the damn solar farms. Big fan of our natural resources and landscape. And yes, I realize that farms aren’t part of the natural landscape, but still. They’re better than F-ing windmills.
I'm not sure how much landscape is actually being ruined TBH. I have driven through nearly every high concentration of of wind farms in the lower 48 (sans California and new England) over the last 4-5 years and very little is getting ruined.
West Texas up through Oklahoma and Kansas along with eastern CO and WY are some of the ugliest, most desolate places on earth.
Possibly the most attractive place, which is still pretty damn desolate, I have seen wind farms is a long the Columbia River along the Eastern Oregon/Washington border.
This also happens to be one of the windiest places I have ever driven. So they have to be productive. And I hope they put 100,000 more along the Columbia River and Lower Snake River... Here's why:
These windmills are capable of replacing hydroelectric damns that have decimated the salmon population and are threatening an entire ecosystem, including Orca populations in the PNW. Read about Lonesome Larry... In 1992 only 1 Sockeye made it back to his breeding grounds in Redfish Lake. 30 years earlier that number was 30,000. And since 1991, Sockeye Salmon are still on the endangered species act. In 2015, 250,000+ Sockeye died in the Columbia and Snake river drainage.
Lonesome Larry
So, as an outdoorsman and nature lover who lives 30 miles off the main Salmon River that these fish use to get back to Redfish Lake, give me the windmills in this scenario. While that's not always the case, and plenty of times where hydro is great, not in the rivers that fish need to travel back to spawning grounds.