{"id":988,"date":"2006-07-15T16:13:43","date_gmt":"2006-07-15T20:13:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=988"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:53:33","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:53:33","slug":"the-aesthetics-of-wind-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2006\/07\/15\/the-aesthetics-of-wind-power\/","title":{"rendered":"The aesthetics of wind power"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.bright.nl\/upload\/06\/06\/060627-flowerpower4.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I recently read an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.designobserver.com\/archives\/014344.html\">interesting article<\/a> on the aesthetics of wind turbines. I&#8217;m going to come out and plead ignorance &#8212; I had no idea people could actually get worked up into a huff about the beauty\/non-beauty of a wind turbine (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.grist.org\/news\/powers\/2002\/12\/19\/griscom-windmill\/\">which seems to be going on<\/a> in Cape Cod, Mass.). When I lived on the top floor of a 13-floor high-rise at Bathurst and St. Clair, I woke up one morning and walked out on to my balcony to see an altered skyline &#8212; the wind turbine at the CNE had been erected while I was away on a three-day vacation. I was in awe &#8212; I found the turbine hypnotizing, graceful, elegant. It was the best thing I could imagine being added to our landscape. When I drove through the deserts in California in the winter of 2000 I came across a few wind farms that had anywhere from 20 to 75 turbines. Me and my travel-mate would stop at clearings and watch these things spin at different RPMs. That day is one of the few &#8220;religious&#8221; experiences of my life.<\/p>\n<p>All of this is to say I think Toronto&#8217;s skyline needs about 1,000 more of these. Instead of investing $700 million on the power plant down in the Portlands, we could spend it on solar and wind energy. And I&#8217;m not talking out of my ass here &#8212; the  U.S. Department of Energy, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, and General Electric recently released a report called &#8220;A Framework for Offshore Wind Energy Development in the United States&#8221; [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&#038;ct=res&#038;cd=2&#038;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mtpc.org%2Foffshore%2Ffinal_09_20.pdf&#038;ei=weKzROr4L4fOwALws4TzCQ&#038;sig2=o65CAuILPIMGD39EBz-Ilg\">download<\/a> PDF 908k] that suggests that there is as much wind power potential (900,000 megawatts) off America&#8217;s coasts as the current capacity of all power plants in the United States combined.<\/p>\n<p>And the next generation of turbines could act (and look) a little more like trees (photo above, a project by a Dutch-based architecture firm).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m interested what Spacing Wire readers think about turbines in urban settings.<\/p>\n<p><em>photo from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bright.nl\/\">Bright<\/a> magazine <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently read an interesting article on the aesthetics of wind turbines. I&#8217;m going to come out and plead ignorance &#8212; I had no idea people could actually get worked up into a huff about the beauty\/non-beauty of a wind turbine (which seems to be going on in Cape Cod, Mass.). When I lived on<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2006\/07\/15\/the-aesthetics-of-wind-power\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;The aesthetics of wind power&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1022,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[810,1153,2909,23,2912,1164,21,416,19,2910,2913,506,391,2911],"class_list":["post-988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-green-space","tag-america","tag-california","tag-cape-cod","tag-environment","tag-general-electric","tag-massachusetts","tag-other-cities","tag-pdf","tag-toronto","tag-travel-mate","tag-u-s-department-of-energy","tag-united-states","tag-usd","tag-wind-energy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The aesthetics of wind power - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2006\/07\/15\/the-aesthetics-of-wind-power\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The aesthetics of wind power - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I recently read an interesting article on the aesthetics of wind turbines. 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