Don’t judge a turbine by its cover 

Don’t judge a turbine by its cover: When you look at a wind turbine what do you see? They look like an innocent turbine with blades turning producing electricity; and that’s where your thought process stops.

You don’t ever think they will be forced into your backyard without your consent and you will never have to deal with them. Think again, because that’s what we thought. And now we are fighting for our health, quality of life, land, and our families.

What you don’t see is these white turbines have a dark side to them and until you start reading between the blades, you wouldn’t know it. I admit they had me fooled until two years ago when I started doing my own research on wind energy.

If there were no subsidies to support wind energy, there wouldn’t be wind energy. Wind energy companies can’t make it on their own without our tax dollars. They have proven that themselves by still needing our money to keep the industry afloat. If wind energy was financially effective why would they still be using billions of taxpayer dollars?

When an industry cannot operate on its own after starting up and without getting continuous handouts of our hard earned money because they can’t admit the industry was set up for failure is very disturbing. It sounds to me like the government is bailing the wind energy companies out. They have just done a very good job at covering that up with the phrase we all know so well: “Go Green.”

Business owners out there, would you be in business if you ran out of money, had no business plan, no loan from a bank and didn’t even have an estimate of how much profit your company would turn? Wouldn’t it be nice to get handouts when you started running low on money and know the money would be handed to you when you needed it?

The energy companies are getting our money to take risks like this on wind energy that has proven not to be a reliable source of alternative energy.

At the Cylon town board meeting last Wednesday night Emerging Energies couldn’t answer one of the town board questions. They asked how much the project is going to cost. EE said between $225 and $250 million and used a calculator to figure out it is $5 million a turbine. EE could not answer when asked what kind of a profit the turbines would bring. Now shouldn’t a company who has done only one wind project have some idea of how much money would be coming in? Why is it such a secret?

Emerging Energies said they don’t even have investors interested in this project. They said they plan to put up a meteorological tower (wind test tower) in Cylon Township, but they did not have a straight answer for the Cylon town board if their future plans were to add more towers to the project in Cylon.

All 41 turbines so far are set up to be in Forest which currently has two test towers, why would they need one in Cylon? You can do the math on that one. Cylon residents, I really encourage you to start going to your town board meetings and start asking questions. Your families and your land are included in this wind farm.

They have included you as secretly as they included all of the Forest residents by not disclosing to you any information about the wind farm project. What gives them the right to blow into our township and think they can take away our constitutional rights and beautiful scenic landscape with absolutely no answers to any questions citizens who are not hosting a turbines have and no intention of ever answering them? From what I can see they have already started to ruin our quality of life by us having to fight for our constitutional rights, worry every day if and when we would have to move, wonder how our health is going to be affected, and do we risk our health by staying here or take the loss on our homes the majority of Forest residents have worked their whole lives for and move.

The government and WI Renewable Portfolio Standard are allowing them to do this. It’s giving them permission to take our land rights away from us and they call it eminent domain. There was a bill made to keep subsidizing wind energy for another four years. It has been denied three times down in Madison. People are seeing the real side of wind energy.

Do you really think energy companies care where or what they have to do to get turbines up? Of course not, as long as they get them up, they get their money, and they’re gone; while the people they mislead into putting turbines up and those living around them have to suffer the health and financial consequences for years to come.

Please start doing research before you decide one way or another on wind energy. Start by going to theforestvoice.org, youtube, Shirley Wind Project, and Google how many lawsuits and litigations there are on Emerging Energies, LLC of WI or how many lawsuits they have filed against other townships and counties in Wisconsin. They are far from environmental stewards.

Nicole Miller

Forest Township