PAUATAHANUI FUTURES SOCIETY INC.
Battle Hill Submissions
On Monday 2 March submissions close on the Battle Hill Farm Forest Park Management Plan and it is important that if you feel strongly about the Puketiro Wind Farm that you put in a submission.
Fog of Battle Hill
A Clarifying Update by Diane Strugnell
Many of you will have read in the Dominion Post or on the internet the article with the headline "Council calls halt to Belmont wind farm"
It has been very pleasing to know that a lot of people care enough to contact us with congratulatory phone calls. The disappointing thing is to have to let people know that the article is misleading and in places entirely incorrect.
Wind may Conflict with Water!
An address by Diane Strugnell to the Parks, Forests & Utilities Committee - Greater Wellington Regional Council on 23 October 2008
Whitby Receives Some Bad News
Leaflets describing the impacts of the Puketiro windfarm have been delivered to houses in the Whitby area.
Are you prepared...
for the huge windfarm which is planned to be sited a few kilometres from your home and the noise, blade-glint and low frequency vibrations that may affect you?
Can you tolerate...
the reduced desirability of your property and the consequent devaluation due to the proximity to these industrial structures that will be seen from your street?
Landscape Vandalism
The above image of Stirling Castle in Scotland provides an unusually clear understanding of the scale of modern wind turbines and their potential to visually desecrate the landscape. It is difficult to reconcile the thinking that permitted such vandalism to be perpetrated on such an historic place.
And there's more:
Windfarms don't ease power peak
From Taranki Daily News - 11 June 2008
Taranaki’s first wind farm, planned to be built on the coast at Waverley, will probably contribute nothing to meeting the country’s peak winter power demand.
Shadow Flicker
Shadow flicker occurs when the blades of a wind turbine move through the sunlight and cast a moving shadow. The taller the turbine the further the shadow can be projected. Turbines sited on hills can cast shadows up to a kilometre or more away. The effect is similar to a stroboscopic light. It can last for several hours and when cast on homes is intrusive and stressful.
Wants Hard Evidence
Letter from the Hutt News, June 2008
Turbines: give me hard evidence, not opinions
Ken Mosley's viewpoint article ''living in the shadow of the wind turbines" (Hutt News, 22 April) is right up there with your coverage last year about the search for Noah's Ark. Three important points leap from the article. First, despite an open invitation to over 1,000 households in the Ashhurst area to have their say about the Te Apiti windfarm, no more than 2.6% chose to provide any opinion at all. That means that the 32% who reported sleep disturbance actually represents less than 1% of the population of Ashhurst and Woodville. Every other negative' impact was less than 0.5%!
Puketiro Fly Over
Click on the image to see a simulated flyover of the Puketiro windfarm created in Google Earth (opens a new browser window). The turbines are scale models positioned at co-ordinates from a map which was made available containing proposed turbines siting. The simulation was thrown together quickly and the quality is rather poor but it provides some idea of how the windfarm will appear from many locations, other than that the real thing would have a much greater visual impact. (Note that the video is about 20 MBytes)
