Military says wind turbines are threat to radar systems

Wind energy advocates may have a new unlikely opponent: the U.S. military. "Moving turbine blades can be indistinguishable from airplanes on many radar systems, and they can even cause blackout zones in which planes disappear from radar entirely," Leora Broydo Vestel reports for The New York Times. Dr. Dorothy Robyn, deputy undersecretary of defense, recently told a House Armed Services subcommittee, "Although the military says no serious incidents have yet occurred because of the interference, the wind turbines pose an unacceptable risk to training, testing and national security in certain regions," Vestel writes.
(Wind turbines, Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)

Because of its concerns, the Defense Department has emerged as a serious opponent to the Energy Department in its attempts to foster wind power development. "I call it the train wreck of the 2000s," Gary Seifert, who has been studying the radar-wind energy clash at the Idaho National Laboratory, an Energy Department research facility. "The train wreck is the competing resources for two national needs: energy security and national security." Last year about 9,000 megawatts of proposed wind projects were abandoned following complaints from the military and Federal Aviation Administration.

"Collisions between the industry and the military have occurred in the Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon-Washington border and in the Great Lakes region," Vestel writes. "But the conflicts now appear to be most frequent in the Mojave [Desert], where the Air Force, Navy and Army control 20,000 square miles of airspace and associated land in California and Nevada that they use for bomb tests; low-altitude, high-speed air maneuvers; and radar testing and development." The Energy Department hopes updating radar software can fix the problem, others say more help is needed. "I can’t imagine a better example of everyone wanting to do the right thing and nobody doing it," Howard Swancy, an aviation consultant and former FAA official, told Vestel. "We need an infrastructure-size development plan." (Read more)