Earth Equity News

The U.S. Department of Defense Becoming a Formidable Opponent of Wind Projects. By Leora Broydo Vestel, NYTimes, August 27, 2010. "The Defense Department has emerged as a formidable opponent of wind projects in direct conflict with another branch of the federal government, the Energy Department, which is spending billions of dollars on wind projects as part of President Obama's broader effort to promote renewable energy... In 2009, about 9,000 megawatts of proposed wind projects were abandoned or delayed because of radar concerns raised by the military and the Federal Aviation Administration, according to a member survey by the American Wind Energy Association. That is nearly as much as the amount of wind capacity that was actually built in the same year, the trade group says... Collisions between the industry and the military have occurred in the Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon-Washington border and in the Great Lakes region. But the conflicts now appear to be most frequent in the in the vast emptiness of the Mojave Desert in California, where the Air Force, Navy and Army control 20,000 square miles of airspace that they use for bomb tests; low-altitude, high-speed air maneuvers; and radar testing and development."