The government, in conjunction with its electric company, The Barbados Light & Power (BL&P), is trying to gain planning permission to start a wind farm in the north of the island, in St Lucy.
The upside is that plenty of wind passes across Barbados, mostly provided from the Atlantic Ocean. The wind comes in way above the speed required to run a wind turbine efficiently. The good news here is that fossil fuels don’t have to be purchased, destroyed or imported.
The downside is that people have complained of illness and disorientation from low frequency noise when they live too close to the wind turbines. Some experts say that entire wind farms should be at least two miles form a person’s home, but the St Lucy project suggest that 500 yards is more suitable to the location.
It has been suggested that offshore wind turbines are used instead. However, in Copenhagen , after the wind turbines were installed the fish went away and haven’t come back yet.
On making enquiries as to whether I could have my very own wind turbine (after all, electric costs are high and will only rise in the future) I was informed that they are planning such an exercise, and if we have too much electricity we can sell it back to the electric company.
In theory this started to sound a good option for both the ‘green’ reasons and the needs of our financial planning. Nevertheless, there’s another stumbling block. BL&P won’t provide the equipment so it needs to be imported. It looks like it’ll cost around US$6000 to buy. We don’t know how much it will cost to ship (it’s not a book from Amazon) and we don’t know what the import charges will be in taxation to the government. Common sense tells us that it should be 0%, but that doesn’t feel like a governmental outcome.
It’s going to take a number of years to reap the rewards (if ever financially when you add in maintenance). It might prove to be an eyesore, especially to our neighbors. We’ll have to have a number of large batteries to hold the electric storage for use in our home. That doesn’t sound too ‘green’ to me and we all know that batteries are not good in the long run.
We currently use solar energy to heat our water. We’ll keep looking into this and see when it becomes a reality mixed with the right time and at the right cost.
I expect the future will see us all with wind turbines; we know we need to buy and use less oil, but the oil companies don’t appear to agree.
