How Wind Farms May Really Replace Coal Mining

By Peter Slavin, AlterNet
Posted on August 19, 2008, Printed on August 19, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/95535/

The late John Flynn, an environmentalist raised in West Virginia's Big Coal River Valley, was a farsighted man. In 1995, Flynn met a Catholic sister fighting poverty there. They talked about the abuses that Massey Coal Company's operations had inflicted on the valley. There were the mining jobs denied to local people and an economy on its knees, people forced out of their homes to accommodate mining in hollows, and front porches blanketed by coal dust. Flynn wondered aloud about placing windmills on top of the mountains surrounding them to produce power. Why, he suggested, couldn't an array of windmills replace the giant coal mines that dominated the valley?