Opposition to Wind Farms

Near where I live, one of the major electricity companies, Meridian, is planning to build the largest wind farm yet seen in New Zealand. But once more it has run into environmental issues, and a strong lobby of people who don’t wish to see yet another beautiful part of the country ruined by ‘progress.’

This part of the world has seen strong opposition to a number of planned projects over the years, and has beaten down the big guns more than once.

A History of Opposition

A couple of decades or more ago, Comalco, a smelter company, intended building a smelter at the entrance to the Otago Harbour, one of Nature’s grand beauty spots, where a narrow shipping lane is framed by a sweeping beach and a peninsula that is home to one of the few mainland albatross colonies in the world.

This was a furious fight, which left Comalco battered and bruised, and defeated.

Last year, Meridian Energy backed down on a electricity hydro scheme called Project Aqua, which would have changed the course of a river, flooded certain villages and prevented people from fishing.

Now their plans for a wind farm have met similar opposition.

What is a Wind Farm?

A wind farm sounds like a pleasant kind of imposition on the land, until you realise the towers are some 44 storeys high. And there will be 176 of them. Each tower has three blades, and each blade is 60 metres long.

The towers require 650 cubic metres of concrete each; in other words hundreds of truckloads. To deliver all this concrete, new roads will have to be built, some 150 kilometres of them. And to deliver the blades, a truck and trailer, measuring some 65 metres in length altogether, will be required to travel these new roads.

The other side of the coin

Does that put you off? It should, yet there is another side to the question.

New Zealanders, like nearly every other country, are using an increasing amount of electricity. The electricity has to be generated somehow, and the old fossil fuels like coal are being phased out due to emissions.

Water is a renewable resource, but the various hydro dams scattered around the country are already proving to be only just sufficient to keep the electricity flowing, especially in a dry winter.

Some people suggest wave power, which is certainly effective, when harnessed. But to harness is also going to cause deterioration to the beauty of the land, which sounds like the basis for yet another fight.

Solar heating is another possibility, but it’s inefficient, especially on a large scale, at least as far as it’s presently being delivered.

21st century people are in a quandrary. Almost everything they use is now powered by electricity, and every day we find more uses for this extraordinary power source.

Can we balance up our desire for more power with our desire to keep the land natural? Are we willing to give up using as much power in order to keep the world beautiful for our children?