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Posted on 09/14/2014 2:44:47 PM PDT by dennisw
If I remember correctly King while governor initiated the MREP (Maine renewable energy portfolio). After exiting the office he for some unknown reason ended up tied into the ‘WIND’ business and ended up profiting when the federal subsidies came rolling in. Baldacci did some more enforcing with the numbers for MREP which has bolstered the wind farms now running in Maine. Even though it is mandated by the law the groups running the farms have never put forth the actual output (actual generation)...these operations are grinding to a halt because of the fact the subsidies were not renewed. The bird kills,and cost of tearing up the land and construction along with maintenance make these endeavors a black hole for money let alone the wind is usually at its lowest speed during peak demand early morning and late evening. The only thing I see farmed are the subsidies ...once they are gone so is the “private” investor and we the public will be saddled with very high KWH price and deteriorating pieces of junk just as Spain is now. Disgusting man senator King is ...but the Mainers elected him anyway. Can I mention also that HE King voted along with Vermont senator Sanders for the U.N. small arms treaty bill??? My disdain for this man is growing daily.
\”... anybody know why they would put them so far out over the water?”
This is a guess, was a view issue. Those on shore did not want to see the damn thins.
Put another out of sight , out of mind.
When you have major failures like this, it's rarely the engineering that's the problem, it's the project management. And that problem is compounded when the driving force behind the project is politics rather than need.
Ask any engineer who's had to deliver bad news to their managers on a failing project.
I’m sure you’re right. No engineer, after all, would even propose switchng to wind power from a consistent energy source. But of course that decision was not made on engineering criteria, it was for political and ideological reasons.
P@ Dolan September 13, 2014 at 6:57 am
While I agree that nothing is a TOTAL waste (after all, it makes a good “bad example” for others to avoid), yes, wind farms are every bit as bad as the article makes out, and worse. Do you realize that while they’re not generating power, the turbines are using it? People drive by and see the blades spinning, even in light airs, and think that they’re generating power, but the truth is, power is required to keep them spinning at all times, because if you let them stop altogether, the weight damages bearings by creating flat spots, and you need much higher wind pressure to get them to spin then you do to keep them spinning, overcoming inertia. So at times when the wind isn’t strong enough to propel them fast enough to generate, they consume power.
It’s always feast or famine with a wind farm, and the other, thus-far insurmountable problem, is storage of power generated in excess of an immediate load requirement, and peak surge supply—which means that wind farms must always be tied to some other form of power generation both to keep them spinning, and to provide for the load during those peak hours when the wind is inconveniently absent.
The environmental toll on birds is shocking as well.
Given the current total lack of suitable power storage, the building of any wind-powered electrical generation sites on a commercial scale is a horrible waste of money better spent on other projects. This is a classic case of government/politics distorting the marketplace such that wealth is mis-allocated. And on an incredibly large scale. Projects of this sort, and the incredible waste they represent, is only the tip of the iceberg: by building all these “renewable” power generation stations without having engineered solutions to all the questions which MUST be answered before they can scaled to commercial use, governments have deliberately and/or inadvertently driven the costs of energy up to the point that it has real-world consequences. If the middle-class is feeling the strain of all that cost, what does it do to the worlds’ poor, who could little afford the expense, even a small one?
Increased poverty and the misery it brings, famine, sickness, and death are the real consequences, but little spoken of in government circles, of pursuing madness like these large-scale wind farms, trying to run before they can even crawl.
If history is any example, “renewable” power generation pursued for political reasons and subsidized by tax dollars will never work, and will continue to fail until a profit can be made from it without any government assistance at all.
Wind simply isn’t there yet. None of the “renewables” is, yet. As of this moment, if they require government subsidies, they’re all just so much phogiston and perpetual motion machinery, no matter how hopeful they appear.
They don’t work if the wind is too high or too low.
All they’re good at generating is liberal self-righteousness.
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