Frank Miniter has a good piece on wind farms in the latest issue of American Hunter:

Walk onto a modern wind farm and you’ll feel like an ant in a field of sunflowers. Modern wind turbines stand 30-50 stories tall. Their blades swinging high above can be more than 130 feet long. Their steel towers are anchored in platforms of more than a thousand tons of cement and steel rebar, which are typically 30 to 50 feet across and anywhere from 6 to 30 feet deep.
Mountaintops have to be blasted flat to bear them. As you stand under one you’ll realize Don Quixote couldn’t have jousted with these giants, and then you’ll wonder if such leviathans are really all “green.”
Ken Salazar, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, thinks so. He recently declared that the federal government’s goal is to generate 20 percent of U.S. electricity from the wind. Achieving this goal would require an estimated 186,000 giant wind turbines that would collectively cover an area the size of West Virginia. Those turbines would also require around 20,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines to carry the electricity from windswept landscapes to distant cities.
I began to wonder if there was a downside to wind development while hunting antelope on a ranch north of Casper, Wyo., last fall. I hadn’t been in this area of Wyoming for four years. In that time the landscape had sprouted forests of gigantic wind turbines. Sure, Western cattle ranchers and farmers have long since figured out that maintaining healthy game populations is a smart economic thing to do, as hunters pay well to roam where the deer and the antelope play. Such ranchers also rely on monies from oil and gas. In fact, a look around the ranch I was hunting on revealed methane wells and, not far away, oil derricks were pumping up crude. Wyoming is also the nation’s largest coal producer, with over 400 million tons of coal produced in the state each year. So taken together with newfound wind power, Wyoming encapsulates America’s multi-faceted quest for energy. But is this latest federally fostered craze all green?
My guide, Kelly Glause, owner of Cole Creek Outfitters, saw me looking at the wind turbines with bewilderment and joked, “Some say deer don’t like the high-pitched noise these monsters make. They say the windmills make a sound like the Save-A-Deer Whistle, you know that product that’s marketed to drivers to stop deer from crossing in front of their autos.”
He didn’t buy the silly theory, of course. And I later shot a mule deer within sight of churning wind turbines. What bothered Glause was that when the ranch he outfits on signed the deal to put up the turbines, the California company, which benefits from federal “stimulus” money and tax breaks, wanted the hunting on the ranch stopped. The wind company’s bureaucracy thought hunters would pass the time between stalking antelope by blasting away at the wind turbines. “They just had no idea what hunters really do for the environment,” said Glause. “I told them they’d have to compensate me for what I’d leased the ranch for as well as what I make in an average year from outfitting, and they backed off.”
So then, if politically correct wind farms get contracts to build on large tracts of federal lands, could public areas become de facto no-hunting areas at the ignorant insistence of wind-turbine companies?
Impacts of Wind TurbinesA dip in the Continental Divide in central Wyoming gives the Cowboy State nearly half of the country’s top-quality (class 5, 6 and 7) winds. So the good people of Wyoming get to make money from what used to be only a nuisance. But property rights, as well as state and federal land uses, are always hot topics out where hunting is a way of life. Even in the least-populated state, thousands upon thousands of 30-50 story turbines and all their miles of transmission lines generate heated debate. Rocky Mountain Power President Richard Walje told a congressional subcommittee on natural resources as much: “I have not met one person who has welcomed a transmission line on his property, and I doubt I would find anyone who would say, ‘Oh, the transmission line is only for renewable energy; in that case I’ll take two.’”
In fact, last spring, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission acknowledged the impacts wind farms can have on wildlife habitat by approving new guidelines for wind-energy developers. The 70-page report includes a color-coordinated map of Wyoming that outlines where it thinks wind development should be curtailed, as well as where oil and gas development is and isn’t permissible.

The rest here.