The Air Up There Powers Our Lives Down Here

In rural eastern Oregon, people are being paid to keep quiet about noise they're not making.

Seems wind turbines are proliferating in that part of the country at a rapid (some would say a

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larming) pace. Long known as windswept and rural, these regions are now being recognized as potentially advantageous for clean energy companies looking to harness natural power to run ever-increasing electricity grids. In fact, many wind turbines are already in place, quietly (or not so quietly, depending on your point of view and your hearing level) rumbling away. Many people who live in the area aren't too happy about the noise that they hear from the wind machines or about what they see as some sort of blight on the natural landscape.

And the energy company, out of New York, has sent a representative round the area with some cash, to entice residents to keep their complaints to a minimum — meaning none. After enough people had registered the same behavior, the company did, in fact, confirm that the energy company representative had paid several people $5,000 each in return for a promise not to make a loud noise about the wind turbines. Other people had refused the money, preferring to retain their right to complain. Technically, the people who have taken the money still have a right to complain. They have merely entered into a verbal contract with the energy company to do otherwise.

But the more pressing juxtaposition is this: In an age when electricity needs are far and furiously outstripping the nation's capacity to adequately fill those needs, these people are protesting a natural solution that would solve a lot of problems. The wind is so fierce in that part of the country that residents have often had to shout to make themselves heard anyway, and that was before the windmills went up; so it's not as if these people are having to deal with a whole lot more noise than normal, since the turbines don't really turn nearly as much when the wind isn't blowing. (Some people have requested that the machines be turned off at night, which is fair enough, as far as it goes. Theoretically, the demand for electricity is lower in the middle of the night, anyway — except for all of those television programs being recorded using digital hard drive technology.)

The main point here, though, is that it won't be too many more generations until those wind turbines will be an absolute necessity, as fossil fuels run out or become so hideously expensive as to create the same result. It is entirely possible that an energy crisis is looming in the next few decades.

Energy generation always has a cost and a by-product. We don't tend to see or experience what occurred in the production of oil, gas, and other "traditional" forms of energy because we just buy it and consume it. In fact, most of us probably give no more than a passing flight of thought to how actually electricity is actually made, transmitted, and transferred.

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The more diverse the power sources, the more stable the production of electricity becomes. In the same way, the closer to home the energy is generated in the first place, the lower the cost that the electricity company has to pass on to its customers.

Wind turbines do make noise, but that's nothing compared to the noise that electricity consumers would make if their power went out — for a long period of time.