Golden Turkey Nominee: $261,000 to Train Eagles to Avoid Windmills
We return to one of our favorite silly spending funding sources, the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) for another Golden Turkey nominee. This one is for a $261,000 grant to the University of Minnesota to design and implement “an acoustic deterrence protocol to discourage bald eagles from entering hazardous air space near wind energy installations.” In other words, we need to discover a noise annoying enough to scare bald eagles from their untimely demise at the hands of wind turbine blades moving up to 100 miles per hour.
Don’t get us wrong, the Golden Turkey award committee is full of bird lovers – we named our award after one after all. We also love America and believe in protecting bald eagles. But this approach is backward. The problem of bald eagles running into windmills is largely created by governments subsidizing the proliferation of windmills. Their application for grant funding begins with the claim: “Wind energy is a cost-competitive, clean energy source that offers benefits for Minnesota.” No, it isn’t.
No one has written more about the folly of alternative energy than American Experiment. Without government subsidies, the industry would still consist of a few scattered windmills on small hobby farms run by hippies. Xcel Energy’s recent announcement of a 22% rate hike is largely needed to build out the costly infrastructure necessary to connect these anti-American, bald eagle-killing machines to the grid.
For these obvious reasons, this project is nominated for a Golden Turkey Award.