A fellow I worked with back in the early Eighties lived in the south end of Seattle. He was unhappy with the size of his electric bills, so he put up a wind turbine in his back yard. It was nowhere near as large as the ones you see standing around in open fields with their rotors turning in a stately, dignified fashion, but it did the job.

He soon discovered that his electric meter was running backwards. This meant that he was putting electricity back into the grid—and that Seattle City Light owed him money!

City Light came to his house, looked the turbine over, and had a wall-eyed fit! There was nothing they could do, but they called in the Federal Aviation Administration. Randy's house was near the north end of the Seattle-Tacoma International airport and under the landing approach. Hazard to incoming aircraft, City Light claimed. The FAA took a look and said that any airliner on its landing approach that would come close to hitting the turbine was in deep trouble already. There were telephone poles in the neighborhood that were taller than Randy's wind turbine. No problem.

So City Light tried to incite his neighbors, telling them that the turbine was "unsightly!" Many of them dropped by to look at it, and started asking Randy questions about it. The result was that many of them installed similar wind turbines of their own!

No sweat!

Now, every two months Seattle City Light has to cut all of them checks for the surplus electricity they put back into the grid!

(Snicker snicker!!)

Don Firth

P. S. It occurs to me that given the slow and stately way the wind turbines' rotors turn, any bird dumb and slow enough to get smacked by one is not long for this world anyway. And the flights of migratory birds I've seen flying overhead are far, far above the reach of the rotors.

P. P. S. I'd rather see a field full of wind turbines than a forest of smoke stacks.