Pushing 500 ft. Wind Turbines Back - It's An Even Bigger Disaster!!!

BP is now talking about 500 ft. turbines.  That is bad enough up close, but what about from the water or and island shore view?  Many people come to Cape Vincent to be on the water.  One main tourist entrance to town is via a ferry over water from Wolfe Island and the town is trying to enhance the tourist trade via this route.

The mantra has always been to push the turbines back from the water.  You know, push them back and make them somebody else’s headache (literally).  But what are we actually accomplishing?  Or are we making this view issue worse for some people like island resident or people who recreate on the water. You know, like brings in tourist dollars to town!    

So if you take a USGS topographic map and look at the land elevation above sea level where this “push back” could occur, the land elevation is approximately 350 ft. above sea level.  Now if the Lake and River levels are about 245 ft above sea level that means we have a 105 ft. rise from the water for anyone viewing turbines inland say for example from the south shore of Carleton Is.or even Wolfe Is.     

Now your effective turbine height is 605 ft. not 500 ft.!  And what is worse is viewing from across flat water seems to exaggerate this effect.  I first noticed this when  I doing some visual camera research about the impact of large wind turbines from the water by looking at existing towers in CV.  It quickly became real clear what the impact was going to be and the push back theory was a lot of BS!!!!

                 Note that the illustartion above is only representational, and not to scale. 
                                               However, the numbers are correct.

 

In fact back in 2007 Acciona had taken NO photo simulations from the water, and now we know why.  The impact is tremendous, and they didn’t want people to see it.  Besides a photo simulation over water makes it harder for them to pull their typical BS trick of putting other objects in front of the turbines to make them look smaller.  I raised hell with Edsall on this point and he actually told Acciona to go back and take photos from various water locations. 

Here is an example.  I have blown the photo up so it more accurately represents the real eye impact but did not change any height relationships in the picture.  This is an Acciona FEIS photo simulation.

 This picture does not reperesent turbines pushed way back from the water. 

But they are well back from the shore and the impact is obvious.

Here are some photos of turbines on Wolfe Island from the water as well.

                        Large turbine viewed from the water.  The view is exaggerated and overwhelming.

Aaaahhh…If I were an CV island resident of even on Wolfe Island I would be paying damn close attention to what the new comp plan and zoning laws say about scenic protections  Especially since the new zoning attorney says we can’t defend the VIEW.  Wanna bet he doesn’t have a home under threat by 500 ft. industrial wind turbines?????

So pushing turbines back can actually add to the disaster for some people.