Imagine all around your house on a sunny day, a shadow sprints by every window at once, slightly less than one second apart. As a blade from a wind turbine spins, its shadow can be followed on along the ground until it breezes over a house. This is called 'shadow flickering' and wind companies have called this a small price to pay for the use of a free resource. This has now been traced to headaches, especially in small children (Gray, 2011). Despite this, there are many environmentalists who will agree that wind power is by far the most progressive, efficient, and environmentally friendly way to obtain renewable energy. They usually do not have all of the facts, which is what leads them to make that conclusion. Wind farms, despite harnessing a renewable resource, have many flaws, few of which have been worked out since the development of the industrial wind turbine in 1941. The expansion of wind energy should slow and ultimately be stopped due dangers to flying animals, increasing unemployment in the vast oil industry, rising costs of wind-generated electricity, and continual landscape defacement. .
A wind farm is a collection of wind turbines, which are essentially giant reverse fans- instead of using electricity to generate wind, they use wind to generate electricity. They are often placed around coastlines and on mountains or hills, as that is where wind is most uniform in direction, speed, and strength. Some of the taller turbines stand 400 feet tall with blades of 230 feet, capable of spinning upwards of a hundred miles an hour. An industrial wind turbine consists of a rotor with three blades that faces into the wind, and is upwind of the tower (Leithead, 2007). Despite new innovations that allow wind turbines to be more effective in gathering energy than solar panels and hydroelectric dams, there are very significant cons to wind energy. The large turbines for mass energy-generation are always loud and on average kill millions of flying animals ever year (Walrath, 2011).