Clean Energy Splits France—…Environmental Battle Over Plan for Windmills Near Coastal Shrine

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/10/AR2009101001901.html

Clean Energy Splits France

It's Carbon vs. Countryside in Environmental Battle Over Plan for Windmills Near Coastal Shrine

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 11, 2009

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL, France -- Over the centuries, this iconic shrine on the Normandy coast has seen more than its share of battles. The latest skirmish involves not knights in shining armor, but opposing camps of environmentalists, jousting over the wisdom of installing windmill farms on nearby hillsides to turn sea breezes into clean energy.

Although played out in a medieval setting, it is a conflict of the times -- and in many ways a struggle between two good causes. On one side are those who want to reduce carbon emissions by drawing electricity out of wind. On the other stand equally dedicated ecologists who say the sight of 21st-century windmills churning above the tidal flats around Mont-Saint-Michel would detract from one of the world's most striking and best-known monuments.

"Mont-Saint-Michel represents 13 centuries of history," said Corinne Gressier, a nurse who lives in the ridge-top village of Argouges, where some of the disputed windmills would rise. "Excuse me, but if we can't prevent this site from being ruined, I don't know what to tell you."

The project has the support of local officials and President Nicolas Sarkozy's government. For these advocates of the environment, it would be a worthy contribution to France's program to expand its 2,500 windmills producing 4,500 megawatts a year to 8,500 producing 25,000 megawatts by 2020.

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[FreakinDJ]

1. Love Clean Energy - just not in my back yard

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. Not as big, but even more uibiquitous....

...would have been the windmills of the same landscape pre-steam.

[pscot]

3. Very strange, the French

They have a nuclear plant on every street corner, yet they balk at windmills.

[NNadir]

4. The nuclear plants are much cleaner, safer and use less land.

It is stupid to build wind plants in France on the coast. They don't need them.