Family enjoys wind turbines

From an article by Rick Vanderlinde in The Alliston Hearld(central Ontario, Canada):

SHELBURNE — As Andria Hutchinson watched the giant wind turbines being erected around her home two years ago, she grew uneasy.

The windmills, with their massive concrete columns and large fiberglass blades, were beginning to dominate the flat farmland of Melancthon Township, just west of Shelburne.

“We didn’t know what to think when they were going up,” she says, gazing at the blades of a turbine spinning in the brisk breeze last Thursday. “They sat there all winter and we thought, ‘Gee how loud are these things going to be?’”

Two summers later, Hutchinson and her young family have grown to enjoy the 45 windmills built by Canadian Hydro in this Dufferin County township.

“We don’t mind them at all. There’s no real noise from what we can tell,” she says. “You basically have to stop walking along the gravel to hear them because your footsteps are louder than they are.”

Hutchinson, who lives on a farmstead but doesn’t have any of the windmills on her land, even enjoys the striking display of the white windmills.

“I found they actually relax you. They have a calming effect as the blades spin around,” she says. “It’s kind of nice.”

Posted in: Wind