Posted on 10/04/2012 11:20:33 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
BRIGHTLINGSEA, ENGLAND — As our boat rocked on the sandy-colored sea, the turbines of the Gunfleet Sands offshore wind project loomed high overhead with whirling, silent blades.
An offshore wind farm is an awesome sight that needs to be visited up close to be fully appreciated. Gunfleet, which is thought to derive from Viking words meaning Gunna’s Harbor, has 48 identical, white steel towers, each more than 200 feet, or 61 meters, high. They are planted in neat rows over 5.8 square miles, or 15 square kilometers, on a shoal so shallow that some of the foundations are out of the water at low tide. The three fiberglass blades of each turbine have a span of 150 feet and spin at close to 155 miles an hour, or 250 kilometers an hour, under the best wind conditions.
Already the sandbars off places like Brightlingsea, a seaside town with pastel-shaded bath houses northeast of London, bristle with massive turbines. On this crisp autumn day we could pick out three other wind farms in the distance from our vessel...................."
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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 3, 2012
An earlier version of this article stated that the wind turbine blades at Gunfleet Sands spin at close to 400 miles an hour, or 645 kilometers an hour, in optimal conditions. The figure should have been 155 miles an hour, or 250 kilometers an hour.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
we;’ve been hearing this since the 60’s.
And the Lions have finally turned the corner to become Super Bowl contenders.
Well if Hussein is backing it, then it's a sure fire failure -
"I have a friend who said, ‘you don’t just the pick the winners and losers – you pick the losers,’” Mitt Romney, Oct 3, 2012
And under less than optimal conditions, they spin at 0 mph.
Until the day ever comes where power can be stored and retrieved efficiently, wind and solar just can’t do the job of supplying the base load with the dependability of fossil-fuel and nuclear.
Let me get this straight: 5.8 square miles of 200 foot high spinning windmills is an almost magical site to behold, yet a single proposed offshore oil platform is a heinous eyesore? Nope, I just can’t think like a liberal.
Yeah, but what about the birdies??? PETA won’t be happy!
The numbers, the corrected numbers, are still not relevant. The relevant and correct measure is RPM, revolutions per minute.
The speed of rotation varies with the radial distance. The tip moves faster than the hub. The turbine output is a function of the number of revolutions per minute within the limits of governors that prevent it from flying apart.
Also unmentioned was how many were out of service. Having seen wind farms in many states, I can say from personal wittness, at a minimum, 10% of the turbines are not functioning. At a wind farm near Palm Springs, the down factor was 0 % in one of the old farms.
——At a wind farm near Palm Springs, the down factor was 0 % in one of the old farms-——
The number is 30% down, not working, for this old wind farm.
And because “optimal wind conditions” occur so seldom, my guess is that these monstrosities achieve maybe 10-20% of nameplate capacity over time.
And I think I’m too generous by half in that estimation.
Thank you for clarifying that.
The problem with putting these offshore is that it’s not possible to harvest the shredded poultry from the bird kills.
How will the starving masses of the Baraqqi Depression be fed?
When they don’t spin at all, they are just pieces of junk!
To repair these things out in the ocean, the cost is astronomical.
Ted Kennedy, who is 3 years sober as of last August, would have disagreed.
We are spending trillions around the globe -- trillions that people got up every morning to work hard for -- on the equivalent of the perpetual-motion machine. Green energy is wasteful of resources, inefficient, undependable, and ultimately ruinous to our once-comfortable 21st century lives.
But we let them get away with it.
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