Attitudes and Platitudes

I fondly remember the feeling I had when I first visited Norfolk eleven years ago. Having lived in big cities, suburban neighborhoods and small rural towns, my perspective then was based on seeing what Norfolk is—a lovely small town with amazing cultural offerings, overwhelming natural beauty and a tight-knit community where people truly care about one another. In my experience, that is a rare combination, and it is a big part of why I love living here. Norfolk is a town that has a real story to tell, one that sells itself. I still feel that way, and I am at once proud of and amazed at our little town.

I find it sad and perplexing that a growing chorus of Norfolk’s voices have embraced a point of view of Norfolk that is overwhelmingly negative. In recent years, this perspective has come to control the tone of the discussion in our town. This wholesale promotion of negative platitudes has become a real stumbling block in enabling our town to move forward in a constructive and healthy direction. It seems that too many people have seemingly lost the ability to see what is wonderful about our town, and it has poisoned our ability to provide an honest, if not positive, perspective that will draw more people to Norfolk (which would help to solve some of these alleged problems). We must cease embracing the lie that Norfolk’s fortunes cannot be changed, that we need to prepare our town for its march into decay and irrelevance.

If we are going to grow our town, we need to promote it by focusing on our distinctives—what makes Norfolk vital and special. We have several world-class art and music facilities. We have a well-defined town center (which many small towns lack) that features many significant businesses and lovely, unique spaces (both of which will be improved through recent grant awards). We have three outstanding state parks, beautiful land trust hiking trails, and hundreds of acres of unspoiled open space. We have a strong school system the recently produced what is likely the top robotics program in the Northeast. We have a world-class library that puts on wonderful cultural events. We have a first-rate Farmers Market that weekly attracts a large number of people to our downtown area. We have a Curling Club that has pulled itself out of the ashes through the support of its community. We have dozens of people who give of their time and talents to man our volunteer Fire Department and Ambulance services. We have all this, and much more.

It is time for us to fall in love with Norfolk again, to drop the inaccurate and unconstructive complaining that has poisoned our town discourse, and to come together to work toward improving our town where and when we can, while appreciating what we have. This is our call—this is our charge. If you wish to join me in working toward enacting positive change in Norfolk, please contact me at celebratenorfolk@gmail.com. Together, we can change the climate in our town and help move Norfolk forward.

Josh DeCerbo

Too Rosy a Picture of Wind Energy

The article by Martha Klein in the September issue of Norfolk Now presents far too rosy a picture of the prospects for wind energy in Connecticut. Klein might have added that she is on the communications committee of the Sierra Club, which supports the wind industry.

At their meeting on April 22, 2014, the Regulations Review Committee (RRC) of the state legislature approved the Connecticut Siting Council’s (CSC’s) proposed regulations for industrial wind turbines. It was the fourth time the CSC had submitted proposed regulations to the RCC.

Many citizens and stakeholders, including the Council of Small Towns, Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, FairWindCT, Save Prospect, Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council and land trusts, worked to get regulations specific to industrial wind turbines written and passed. The approved regulations fall short of the best siting practices in use around the world, but they are an important start.

Experience has shown that larger setbacks are the only way to decrease the effects of noise (including low-frequency noise and infrasound) and so-called shadow flicker. The CSC refused to increase the setback distance above 1.5 times the height of the wind turbine. As a result, Connecticut’s regulations would allow 492-feet-tall turbines a mere 738 feet from a property line.

In most states, counties or towns have control over the siting of industrial wind turbines. In Maine, each town can pass wind regulations; some small towns there require a mile setback from homes. County commissioners in Mason, Kentucky, recently passed an ordinance limiting large-scale industrial wind turbines to already designated industrial zones. Connecticut’s new regulations, on the contrary, allow industrial wind turbines to be sited anywhere, even in residential neighborhoods.

Klein is correct that man has used wind for power for centuries. However, wind has repeatedly been abandoned as more reliable energy sources became available.

Recently, Texas State Comptroller Susan Combs called for a stop to that state’s expensive subsidies to the wind power industry, saying that wind power is not reliable enough to be a solid part of the state’s energy grid. Combs said that even the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, has essentially scratched wind power off the list owing to its unreliability.

John Constable, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation (UK), agrees that “wind power output is highly variable over all timescales, minutes, hours, months, and even from year to year. These variabilities are . . . manageable but they have highly significant negative impacts on the rest of the power generation fleet.”

Given Connecticut’s low wind resources, the present lack of storage, and the high cost of building new transmission lines over long distances, don’t count on in-state wind power to be a significant contributor to our energy mix, or a way to lower energy bills.

Joyce Hemingson
President, FairWindCT
www.fairwindct.com

Wind Power Not the Answer

I was disappointed, for a number of reasons, to read Martha Klein’s article “Clean Energy Can Be Generated in Connecticut” in the September 2014 issue of Norfolk Now.

First and foremost, the article is not journalism. It is an opinion piece. Second, there are errors and inconsistencies throughout. A quick Google search would have revealed such basic facts as that commercial wind power was first used in the 1930s in Balaklava on the Crimean Peninsula (50 years before the 1980s when the author suggests commercial wind turbines began operating).

Klein states that one of the more green power options is wind. This is confusing because the author uses two undefined terms: “green power” and “renewable energy.” Compounding this issue is her incorrect statements that these types of energy are somehow beneficial compared with other types of energy. A recent article from The Economist, published in July 2014, reveals that nuclear, which is a zero emission “green power,” is far more cost effective in reducing emissions than solar and wind, and that wind is actually a very expensive way of reducing emissions. Wind is not, in fact, “competitive with fossil fuels” on a cost basis, as Klein believes.

Klein’s description of the proposed wind installation in Union, Conn., uses phrases such as “a lot of interest in the town” and “years of testing.” These can only leave the reader asking, How does the author measure “a lot”? And, How many years of testing?
As someone who has looked at the investment potential of wind power, and repeatedly passed on those investment opportunities, I believe that if wind turbines are built in Colebrook and Norfolk it will be bad. It will be bad because these are large-scale industrial energy projects that don’t belong in rural Connecticut. They are huge and disruptive to the environment; just because they make low-emission electricity doesn’t mean they don’t have a huge environmental footprint.

Not only are these projects disruptive, but once they are put up, they will never be taken down. In my business, we own several thousand cell phone towers and have looked at what it would cost to return a cell tower site, which is basically a very small version of a wind turbine installation, to its original condition. Our analysis regularly shows that it will cost at least as much to remove a wind installation as it does to install one. Who will pay for that? It won’t be the developer once the wind turbines have stopped making money, because there will be no income to pay for decommissioning.

Our kids and grandkids will be stuck with the remnants of our ideology. Fifty years from now, people will be visiting the site of the wind turbine remains in Norfolk and Colebrook much the way locals visit the Beckley Blast Furnace in East Canaan. Remember when people believed clear-cutting the forests for charcoal was a good idea?

Jon Rotolo
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21608646-wind-and-solar-power-are-even-more-expensive-commonly-thought-sun-wind-and

Thank You, Norfolk

I want to thank the citizens, parents, Botelle School staff and Board of Education for 12 years of support, trust and confidence, which you extended to me while I served as your school superintendent. I will cherish my time and the friendships I made during my tenure in Norfolk.

A special thank you to all those who made the September 21 pig roast such a success.

George Counter and family