Windmills and envirostupidity
Driving through Ontario in the middle of the night, I didn’t get to sightsee much, but on the way back, man, are there a bunch of damned wind farms. Seems eevry farmer has a couple on his property- there must be soem huge tax breaks or something.
One way or another, I am happy to see something alternative being developed, but I’m all too painfully aware of the environmental impact this causes. Dumbasses. Tip speed on those rotors can be a couple hundred miles an hour, and they shred any bird unwary enough to wander into range.
For scale, each of those blades is about 100 feet long- in other words, an over length flatbed semi, for each blade.
hey, I like alternatives, but as DenBeste shows, this is a meaningless thing that will do more harm, overall, than good, and it’s expensive to build.
IL has some major farms too. really is quite amaizing to see hundreds, all spinning.
Hell, if I had the land/money/skill/materials, I would build one myself, government kickbacks or not.
Yeah, T. Boone Pickens wants to build enough of them to have 20% of the US power grid supply. Problem with that is that the grid frequently can’t take the few that are online already.
We almost had a grid disaster here in OR a few weeks back when the wind began to blow REALLY hard out in Central OR where all the wind farms are, and the farm managers put all that power (6,000 megawatts) on the grid, which COULDN’T HANDLE IT! If power managers at Bonneville dam hadn’t been johnny-on-the-spot and dumped water from their turbine emergency valving (scramming the turbines and dumping 2,800 megawatts), the NW system would have overloaded and crashed, maybe for days to weeks. The wind parks are NOT hooked up to any sort of computer which could control overloads.
T. Boonie is wrong: if we don’t spend the FIRST “alternative energy” money on increasing the capacity of the grid, we will keep flirting with danger like this until one day we DO fry an entire regional grid.
There were some good tax breaks from the feds, I don’t know if they ever extended the 1.9c/kw/hr tax credit when it came due for renewal in 2004.
The 43unit windfarm in Waymart, PA had been smacked with 347K in real estate taxes, that the owners(FPL Energy) claimed didn’t apply to them – it wound up going to court… linky
A neighbor back out in Rockwall had two of them, though smaller versions. Not only did he never get an electric bill, but the things made him about 1K every month selling power back to the grid. I want one.
Seeing as how we here in SD have wind 95% of the time, they are starting to build and talk of building even more. The lines taking the power somewhere they are needed at a huge cost to build, is where we have problems.
Not sure I want to look at one of these on my ranch, but if it pays enough, I suppose I could get used to it. Used to be windmills to pump water all over this country. Now I have some of the last few left.