Fay Wray?
Posted on 12/08/2009 7:47:25 AM PST by PilotDave
One of the projects touted as an example of green energy - supported by the purchase of carbon offsets from the Democratic National Convention - isn't working, according to an online report.
Face the State, a Web site that follows politics in Colorado, reported this week that a wind turbine in Wray has not been able to produce electricity since it was erected in February (2008) because of a faulty converter .
(Excerpt) Read more at rockymountainnews.com ...
Background- The Wray school district built a wind generator, which was funded in part by the State of Colorado and the DNC to tout/show off alternate energy solutions. It was going to pay for itself in the long run by selling the extra electricity.
In short, it's been a disaster. It has never produced any power. In fact, the district spent most of the fall trying to repair/replace the generator. When they turned it on this fall, it ran for a short period and burned up the new power head. It's still just sitting there - a dead money pit...
Of course I couldn't find a recent news story that covered this. I used a link from a previous story in the Rocky Mountain News, which has since gone out of business. Ironic.
These moronic wind generators never fail to make me laugh.
I recently took a month to tour Texas. I saw hundreds of wind generators out on the west Texas plains.
Having seen others in Wyoming and noting many were not operational, I purposely made a count. It is not too hard, even when driving at 70 mph.
It is very safe to say that 10 to 15% are inoperative. Given an array of 30 or so, 4 or 5 will be still. I made several counts over a three day period and the results were always there. Lots of the wind generators just don’t work.
Boone Pickens was on Cavuto recently. He was touting his bill being proposed to convert 18 wheelers to natural gas from diesel. he has abandoned his lofty wind power scheme.
Wind energy is a costly fraudulent joke
Just another illustration of something illustrated in Atlas Shrugged. The government and industrial looters just care about building stuff with public funds. They just want something to make them feel good about themselves. They don’t know how to make that stuff they build run or be profitable. And the evil part is that they don’t care.
Some part of Europe (can’t remember where) gave up on their wind energy because it took so much energy to manufacture the spinning of the turbine compared to the needed supplementing of other electricity sources, it became unsustainable.
Same thing in Northern Indiana.
I drive by a wind farm with over a hundred of the things just sitting there, taking up space.
See# 7
Whatever the shortcomings of windpower may be, wind turbines don’t provide baseline power. Being far more easily started and stopped than steam boilers, they are used for peak delivery.
I have driven by a forest of windmills in southwestern Minnesota many times and only rarely are all of the windmills turning. I have even seen times when not a single windmill from horizon to horizon was turning. Any notion that we can depend on wind power for even 10% of our electric needs is ludicrous.
“
In fact, the district spent most of the fall trying to repair/replace
the generator. When they turned it on this fall, it ran for a short period
and burned up the new power head.
“
I guess those “Green” SEIU workers need to go back to tech school to learn
the basics of electricity-generating equipment.
(/SARC)
They can be, but the other important piece to the puzzle is what we call in the grid management business dispatch-ability. That is, being able to deliver the juice where and when you need it. Wind generation is essentially non-dispatchable. You either have it or you don't. That means you may have it when you don't really need it or want to use it, or you may not have it when you need it.
And, BTW (as Rush would say), the latter point is why you have the greenies agitating for laws requiring that grid operators get some fraction of their supply from "green sources". That means, to meet that requirement, if your "green source" happens to be online, you HAVE to use it to meet your quota, even though you may not want to use it, for whatever reasons (technical, economic, whatever). Mandates and subsidies from the government (naturally) are the only way a lot of these schemes will have any penetration into the competitive market.
This is hardly typical.
In Iowa we use about 48,000,000 mwh/year. We have 3,000 mw worth of windpower which produces over 7,000,000 mwh of electricity/year and we are building lots more. Do the math.
I was driving to Portland a while back and passed a set of 18 wheelers. Three trucks drove by, each with one huge white cylinder. Another three went by, each with what looked like an airplane wing or huge propeller blade. It was huge. Two more trucks completed the ‘kit’. Eight big trucks came from Portland down the Columbia River Gorge, (Interstate 84), probably from foreign ships off loading in Portland. Does the energy generated from those windmills even equal the energy it takes to get them delivered?
Wind is still part of TB Pickens plan. He wants wind to help replace Natural Gas Electrical Power generation. This gives more Natural Gas freed up to compete with transportation fuel. Nat Gas from shale formations are now taking some pressure off this but we remain a Nat Gas importer.
Right now TBP’s competes with coal at a low $/BTU. I believe he wants a bigger piece of transportation market and move his Nat Gas more into that higher $/BTU market. But if we are just trading imported oil for imported LNG, the profit is not as high as producing domestic Nat Gas and only using pipelines.
Technology advances have made the Nat Gas from shale economic and greatly improved our reserves. But the daily production level still remains below our current consumption. Adding significant addition demand as transportation fuel will jack the price of Nat Gas and bring in too many foreign suppliers of LNG. Pickens doesn’t want that much completion before he develops his fueling infrastructure and captures a big market share.
My opinion, nothing more.
What does Iowa do when the wind stops for a while?
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