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Wind Farms: What’s Your Position?
I’m against them, personally. There is a big push in my corner of the state to build wind farms — my county has one already and another being built. We tried to fight it, but when the editor of the paper at the county seat is gung-ho, we didn’t stand a chance, and none of the 30-some other people did either.
The county where I work is putting up a pretty good fight against them. A couple with a private airstrip (they’ve had it many years) will be severely impacted. The company involved came in and bought leases with ‘hush’ clauses in the contracts, and many of the people who sold leases don’t live where the farm will be. The number of towers planned has increased, as has the height.
When one of the company reps was asked if the towers would survive an F5 tornado, she said, “Show me the tornado.” I think that’s pretty flippant and dismissive, don’t you? When people brought up the number of bats, migratory birds, and birds of prey killed by wind turbines, the answer was ‘cats kill many times more birds’. How many bats have you seen your cat catch? Can they kill a swan, bald eagle, or snow goose? Why add something that kills, some say, over 500,000 birds a year?
What happens to old wind turbines? Do you know how far down in the ground they have to go for the base/foundation? What about emissions generated in mining the rare earths and ore to build and transport them?
Jobs? A few local cement contractors will have work, the road rebuilding will make a few temporary jobs, but permanent jobs? At most, 12 to 14, and they won’t be local people. Most won’t move to the area, so schools, etc., won’t see much impact.
Let’s “shoot the breeze” on this, shall we?
Published in General
Birds aren’t as high on the left’s hierarchy as Wall Street investors in “Green Energy” are.
It’s certainly an inconsistency. And when you point it out, the left responds by saying cats kill more.
Okay, so let’s round up all the cats! (But then the enviromentalist cat ladies would object.)
The Columbia basin is on the east side, and is very dry. The Grand Coulee dam and other parts of the system direct water throughout the area for irrigation. Here is more information on it.
The place that has the most wind farms in the nation is the Permian Basin in West Texas, which is scheduled to get another $600 million wind farm in the near future. And the area also is slated to get more new solar farms, where some of the power is to be bought by oil companies operating in the area, because conventional power sources on either the ERCOT Texas grid or the western portion of the National Grid can’t get lines out there fast enough to meet the companies’ energy needs to produce more fossil fuel energy.
You can get away with that in the Permian Basin in part because there’s a ton of empty land, so a wind farm can be stuck on a mesa or two without being in someone’s back yard — the biggest problem they had when the first wind farms were built in the Permian Basin wasn’t the people in the area — it was the environmentalist types down around Austin and San Antonio, who were fine with wind farms 250-300 miles away, but attempted to block the 765kv power lines that were needed to actually get the energy generated by the wind farms from West Texas (where it wasn’t needed) to Austin (where all the environmentalists clamoring from green energy apparently expected to get it to their homes via Scotty’s matter transporter). The state won the lawsuits, and the $1.6 billion high voltage line now runs for about 200 miles along Interstate 10.
So if companies find wind or solar are economically competitive, fine, there are still lots of places around where you can put them and not negatively impact nearby residents. But you still have to get the power to the cities, so if the urban virtue signalers want their green energy, they’re going to have to put up with some technology imposing on them, and not just people 250-300 miles away.
There’s lots of this faulty reasoning that goes on. Here’s a short story. So a family with children moves into the high foothills of the mountains. The mother, maybe the father too, worries about cougars showing up in their yard so she sets traps, big steel clamps. I have a feral mom cat show up on my porch nursing three kittens. After three months, I humanely trap each of the four cats and get them neutered. The alpha male of the kittens is a real bully and I guess he roams some and hunts, just looking for action. He gets caught in the cougar trap and loses his front paw getting loose. Also the neighbor’s dog gets caught in the trap. Now we have a three-legged feral alpha cat. I just thought maybe the family moved to the wrong neighborhood if they can’t find a different way to deal with perceived risk.
I went to my sophomore year in high school in Klamath Falls, Oregon, also on the east side of the mountains. There were irrigation canals everywhere. The way they irrigated was by flooding the fields. It was fun practicing football after they’d irrigated.
I’m thinking broadcast power. Seems expensive, though.
Because the EPA gives them an official government indulgence to kill a certain number of protected species.
Shut down the effing EPA!
Just like the EPA fast-tracked stupid, mercury-laden CFL bulbs. Which were then more-or-less mandated, and then it was my problem to dispose of them “properly.”
Uh, no. Government creates the problem, government can deal with the problem. Right into the trash with you.
I hate them with the intensity of a thousand massive solar array concentrators. Hate ’em! They’re a blight upon God’s creation and a monument to man’s arrogant ingratitude for God’s gift of fossil fuels.
Travel through the bread basket (which also happens to be the migratory path for millions of birds) and you’ll find the rest areas punctuated with a massive
middle fingerblade (not a functioning turbine) signalling the virtue of some a-hole bureaucrat who thinks he’s “saving the planet.”Did I mention I hate them? I hate solar arrays, too. And solar generally (sorry Spin). Same deal.
I think they’re nice to look at, kind of stately and majestic. When they become cost-effective in a free market — including the rather challenging externalities posed by their deleterious impact on the power grid — I’ll have no problem with them.
But we aren’t there yet, and so they strike me as mostly boondoggle. Along with some others here, I’m much more enthusiastic about nuclear.
My position on wind farms?
Upwind. So I can fart in Their general direction.
I have never bought a CFL or LED bulb. Still working off my stockpiles of good old incandescents. Don’t worry, we can afford the electric bill.
I have been slowly switching over to LEDs where possible. But I hate those CFLs. And I also have quite a stockpile of incandescents.
They’ll never become cost-effective in a free market. Wind turbines and solar panels are both trying to convert a diffuse energy source into a concentrated form that can be transmitted long distances. That requires vast areas of collectors to produce a relatively small amount of electric energy. Operation and maintenance costs are always underestimated for both solar and wind power generation. Wind turbines are a maintenance nightmare – they must be constantly moving in order to be productive, and ask anyone who knows anything about machinery: the more things move, the more they fail.
Fossil fuels by contrast are highly concentrated energy sources, and thus a huge amount of electricity can be produced by a single power plant. We hurt our ourselves when we waste so much money on expensive electricity production such as wind and solar.
the only positive thing that I can add is that we get a ton of notifications about solar farms and the lands that they are using are generally pretty poor areas from a farming perspective. I guess I am ok with that. There was a fuss about the panels being high enough so the cows could walk under them.
Well i guess that is just a first world problem.
I’m in favor of them where neighbors’ interests are protected. I’m totally against government subsidies for them. I don’t worry about the birds, except where particular endangered bird species populations are threatened by them, e.g. in the case of condors.
I sort of like the LED’s.
So… “Never”, then.
I live in that breadbasket, and I agree with you (but you knew that!) A farmer wanted to build a large machine shed a couple years after the 1st wind farm went up in my county; he was told he couldn’t, because of the setback. Will he be able to build after the farm shuts down? I bet not.
In practice, incandescent light bulbs can be 100% efficient. (!!!)
For a light bulb, any energy not converted into light gets converted to heat. And if that heat is put to use, the bulb becomes 100% efficient. And there is an unexpected organic synergy; we use more lighting at night when it’s colder, and nights are longer in the winter when we need more light.
That said, I’ve noticed that the lifespan of recently manufactured incandescent lights is a fraction of what it used to be.
As much as I’d like to blame the EPA, this particular situation is most likely due to something called the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 introduced by congressman Nick Rahal (D-WV).
I like them for highly specified uses, not for mass electricity production. For example, you can buy small windmills (and solar panels) for sailboats. Also, wind and solar make sense for locations where the grid doesn’t go.
What prompted my post was an encounter yesterday. I go to the bank and post office every morning for work. When I topped the overpass, I was greeted by many red and blue lights. A Hwy patrol car, a sheriff, and a couple city cops had stopped 2 semis hauling lowboys with huge (maybe 40′ dia.) cylinders wrapped in blue plastic. I saw Genrac stamped on one, it was wrinkled, so could be wrong. I detoured to the bank, then stopped at the p.office. Four guys with hard hats were watching. (OH, the semis had 4 or 5 escort vehicles and a big bucket truck with them, also.) I asked if there had been an accident, and 1 guy (they were with the city and they’d been there at least 30 min.) said the semis had been stopped to check for the proper permits—clearance, road width, etc. He also said several semis had gone thru before without getting stopped. I said a cop must have seen them this time. The cylinders were part of the towers for the 2nd wind farm in my county. Because of road construction, they were going thru town to go east 25 miles, then north at least 30 miles. They came from west of town. I got the story about the farmer’s shed from the city guy; he lives in my county. Of course, if the proper permits are bought (ka-ching!) who cares how disruption is caused for us plebes?
LEDs are the way to go. 100%.
(I’ve suggested in another conversation…)
I think this would be an excellent application of high speed flywheel energy storage. Build a flywheel unit at the base of each windmill. Not only would it smooth out the erratic nature of… weather… but it could also predict the energy the unit could supply over the short term future.
I’ve never heard of a combination wind and solar installation. Windmills have to be so far apart, might as well use the space for solar panels. I can’t be the only person to have thought of this.
We had a demo of this running on our site up until the last few months, but we had to remove it because we are expanding our business. It incorporated wind, PV, hydrogen power cells, a natural gas generator as well as utility power, and provided a smidgen of our buildings power requirements. You can read more about it here.
Oh, I know. Sorry for the implication that it was the EPA mandating them.
But they surely shouldn’t have even been allowed, were the EPA doing its actual job.