Sorry I jumped in before reading the whole thread. I briefly, semi-looked into buying a windmill, a large one. The college in my home town put one up two summers ago with a cost of 1.1 mil. I looked at it purely as an investment opportunity being it has a 10 year return. But that is if you are the one using the electricity, vs just selling it back to the utility company. So it sorta relative, you need a really big electric bill to justify fronting that kind of capital to make the numbers work. As far as killing birds that is more of a problem with the older generation windmills, the smaller ones you see spinning really fast. I think the newer ones max out around 45 rpm... I think. I'm sure it varies on size, been a while since I checked into it. New generation ones are fairly quiet without too much of the WHOOSH as the blades turn. And when it is really really windy they shut em down. They just feather the props and turn them into the wind. I just know that had I actually gone forward with something like that, it would have been the least windy year on record. Like the first month I had my first boat. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Total guess here, but I would think that nuclear would be the cheapest, safest, cleanest, and efficient way to make electricity. OK the radioactive thing sucks but it is managable. I have a cousin that is a nuclear clean up tech. He's a project manager of some sort that does the clean up at nuclear sites. He told me that three mile island was blown out of proportion, that there wasn't any real danger. Had the proper steps not been taken like they had then, yes there would have been issues. Chernobyl, I mean come on, if anyone can screw something up in biblical proportions its the Russians. What year did three mile island incident happen? Has technology made it safer? Other than multihulls, and champagne its probably the only thing france has gotten right.