WMOD00469

• Title: Environmental Impact of Large Windpower Farms
• Weather Modification - Doc Type: Report

enough to send its signal over the top of the windfarm, or the
signal sent in the direction of the windfarm may be suppressed.
The receiving antenna may be made directional and set so as to
reject the reflected signal from the windfarm. If these measures
do not suffice, the few households still affected may be furnished
upgraded television reception by either a cable or relay station
system from antennas outside the region of interference.

Mi cro\"/ave systems have narrow-beam transmi tti ng and recei vi ng
antennas and are engineered to be robust in the face of such
disturbances as attenuation in heavy rain and interference from
low-flying aircraft. It is conce"ivable that somewhere a windfalrln
might necessitate minor relocation of a part of a microwave path,
but no more serious interference is anticipated.

e. Land Use. - Windfarms when fully developed according to
present prospects will be extensive, covering anywhere from a few
thousand to several hundred thousand hectares. However, this use
of the land will be nonpreemptive except for the 1 to 5 percent
of the area actually occupied by tower footings, guy-wire attaclhments,
etc., and most other uses of the land could proceed without
appreciable interference.

The most wi despread use of 1 and l-j ke ly to be occupi ed by wi ndfarms
is stockraising. Impact on this activity would be slight and
probably beneficial, since winter storms constitute a major
danger to livestock and the windfarm would tend to mitigate the
severi ty of wi nd exposure to some degree and its structures wou.l d
provide some small amount of shelter.

It is possible that some areas under cultivation would also be
found desirable for windfarms. The windfarm structures would
interfere to some degree with operation of farm machinery and
especially with cropduster aircraft, and center-pivot irrigation
would require careful planning of the pattern of placement for
wind and irrigation systems in order to minimize interference.
These circumstances might cause some change in the particular
crops favored for windfarm locations. Windfarms would to some
extent mitigate the severity of w.indstorms at ground level and so
might reduce the incidence of wind erosion on cultivated ground.

f. Aesthetics. - ERDA (1977) has reported the voicing of some
concern over "visual pollution" of an unaesthetic sort if large
numbers of windpowered generators were to be erected. It also
reported that persons shown pictures of various styles of wind
machine expressed a preference for the "old Dutch" style. The
relevance of these data to the aesthetic acceptability of large
windfarms is dubious, partly because the likelihood that modern

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