Generating Wind Power

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

Wind power is the most immediately applicable alternate energy for Canada, and it is important that children’s books on the subject be well researched, accurate, and balanced.

Niki Walker is clearly a supporter of wind energy and writes extensively about its benefits. Regrettably, she also gives its drawbacks short shrift and uses comparative data to minimize their importance. For example, after discussing the fact that thousands of bats are killed by flying into turbine blades, her caption for a picture of a bat reads: “More birds and bats are killed each year by house cats, pesticides, and crashing into windows and power lines than are killed by wind turbines.” The fact that many more birds and bats die of other causes does not mitigate the bat-killed-by-wind-turbines situation.

While Walker does briefly address the problems of noise and visual pollution, she says nothing about the fact that turbine installations wear out. There is a large cost to decommissioning them, so some are now standing as decrepit eyesores.

Though the text does contain some overgeneralizations, “most” of it appears to be accurate in the broadest sense. One inaccuracy, however, is the picture of the fossil-fuel generating station shown on page 7—it’s clearly a section of the image captioned as a nuclear power plant on page 7 in Biomass, the first book of this series. Recommended with reservations.