The U.S. Marine Corps garnered little public notice when it trumpeted the startup of the first wind turbine on one of its installations, a 300-foot structure whose three blades were supposed to generate enough electricity to save the base dollar493,000 annually. The literal warmth generated by the turbine was not matched by a warm embrace within the Pentagon when the Marines announced the project in March 2009. In a report issued three years earlier, U.S. Defense Department engineers had described how radar signals can be scattered by whirring windmill or turbine blades, distorting the return signals and making it hard to discriminate the windmills from aircraft flying above them.
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