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Wind farm opponents try to find every possible objection they can to stop a nearby project from going ahead.
Claiming that they divide a community or cause social disruption is one ploy that they use, and it can be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy if they are successful.
The local people around most of the wind farms in my region have accepted construction of a wind farm quite happily, welcoming it as a source of additional income and employment for the community. I remember working on a Lions barbecue in Clare with a lady from Snowtown who told me that the Snowtown Wind Farm was the best thing that ever happened to the town.
The fact is that there are a very few very weak reasons to object to a proposed wind farm:
Just one example of a lie the locals have used in Crystal Brook: "Complaints about wind farm noise is (sic) increasing across South Australia, but these are rarely addressed or resolved".This was written anonymously (as is very common in lies about wind farms) and was distributed to households in Crystal Brook; it was obviously intended to frighten people; it is quite false. In fact the Wind Farm Commissioner, running an office set up specifically to look into complaints about wind farms, has only received a total of about 163 complaints from the whole of Australia, on all matters, not just noise, in two and a half years (October 2015 to May 2018); further, some 145 of the complaints have been resolved. Wind farm opponents are desperate for arguments in support of their opposition; they do their best to create social conflict by spreading lies and distorting evidence in an attempt to frighten people at the same time as using social conflict as an argument against a proposed wind farm. They have failed in my town of Crystal Brook. Much was written and spoken on radio about the 'contentious' Crystal Brook Energy Park, but by the time it received government approval, August 2019, two polls in a local newspaper had shown 83% and 74% support for it. Wind farms don't divide communities, but wind farm opponents try to. |
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