Use them for location shots for "some years after civilization fell" movies
Posted on 09/11/2011 6:52:10 PM PDT by george76
Wyoming
Pfftt!!! What they call wind, we call a gentle breeze!
The hundreds of windmills west of Minneapolis is pathetic. Each week a few less are functional. In five years they will all be abandoned. At least the raptors can nest on them.
The Feds guarantee loans to a well connected green energy firm than no lender would normally make. The execs pretend to build a company as they drain money from the firm in exorbitant salaries & perks. When sufficiently drained, the company declares bankruptcy, & the execs walk away with a bundle of cash, some of which they return to friends in Washington, as a way of saying thanks, keep up the good work, & let's do it again, real soon. Then the cycle repeats.
It is as obvious as the Sun, & has been going on as long as Congress has been allowed to allocate funds & the President spends it. It is also a BIG part with what is wrong with politics in this country, & a primary reason why we should have the absolute smallest gov’t budget possible, at all levels. The fewer dollars a politician controls, the fewer dollars will be stolen from the people.
The killer is its epic unreliability. That’s the reason for all this “smart grid” talk you see in TV ads, you know. They figure that if you could just cover the world with these things you could convert time averages to spatial averages, and let the “smart grid” figure it all out. I don’t think it works even on paper.
The fewer dollars a politician controls, the fewer dollars will be stolen from the people.
One could say that by virtue of the above we would be guaranteed more crooks in the private sector, but then that could be seen as a real benefit. They would be more likely to be prosecuted for their crimes than the average politician.
Each windmill produces, say, 10 kW. Every square yard of Texas generates 1 kW of heat from Sun. You need one windmill per 10 square yards to break even. I doubt that you have *that* many windmills and that much wind :-)
The climate of Texas won't be affected because it receives so much energy from the Sun. However it may well be that windmills placed in colder and more humid areas of the country, and especially at higher elevations, can nudge the temperature of the air below the dew point. In Texas you can't take enough energy out of wind to drop the air temperature from +100F to +65F (for 20% relative humidity.) However if the air is moist (say, 90% RH) then the same +100F air needs to be cooled only by 4 degrees for the dew to form. In other words, the effect will be seen only in areas of high relative humidity.
I don't know if this effect is negligible or not, but perhaps it should be looked into, along with the noise and with the danger to birds.
I personally prefer solar power because it can be produced without moving parts; it is more reliable this way. Windmills can work only in a narrow range of wind speeds, and they are complex mechanisms that are dangerous to install and service. There is a photo of a shorted generator earlier in this thread.
Every environmentalist group on the planet should be forced into paying for the removal of these eyesores once reality sets in that they are a fiasco. It should not be left up to the taxpayers to pay for these mistakes.
That's not really correct. Wind in Texas generally meets your three criteria.
Ugh. We had nearly 300.00 bills last winter.
Use them for location shots for "some years after civilization fell" movies
You are absolutely right. At least eventually nature will do her thing and correct any damage done.
wait til we start getting the pics of rusting broken down windmills.
As with all Enviro’s they never think about the future. Maintence and repairs? What’s THAT?
It is the poster child for their hypocracy. They have NEVER cared about the “natural” world. The frog and squirrels were used as a tool to attack Americans freedom and to take their land.
This sounds like it’s the Apple Brown Betty of infrastructure projects.
wait til we start getting the pics of rusting broken down windmills.
If I’m not mistaken, the original windmill farms in CA are exactly that.
I’m always stuck on the ultimate efficiency of 30 percent. It only gets worse not better. So in today’s world, what idiot would stick billions into a system that only gave you 30% efficiency on the best day. We both know the answer to that question. Government, spurred on by environmental midgets using OPM. I guess I need a disclaimer and an apology to little people everywhere.
Migraine inducing bird blenders
Windmills got people to move off their property because of the noise and the side-effects of massive headaches. No one cared about the thousands of birds who were and are being killed. I wonder what was/is the real reason for these windmills? It certainly wasn’t energy.
Don't ask. You don't want to know.
Strip or T-Bone?
Future civilizations may look at them the way we look at the Easter Island heads.
Wind turbine horror show
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKkE7KdjHEU
Trouw: Wind turbines unpopular thanks to environmentalists
http://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2011/04/trouw_wind_turbines_unpopular.php
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