T.Boone Pickens says the wind farm is on hold, but still going to happen.

No Doubt, they are expensive, and the jury is still out if they will pay off in a reasonable time frame. I'm sure he also is getting a lot of negativity from the NIMBY crowd.

 

We have a NIMBY thing going on in our area. There are lot of environmentally conscious people in this county, but now that two major studies have shown this area well suited for wind turbines, zoning laws are popping up like dandelions. No one wants them in *their* back yard. Oh no, the scenery is too good, the view too nice...put them somewhere else. It drives me nuts.

Tom

 

its really sad that NIMBY's are simply uneducated "to the environmental and financial" issues that surround us moving to alternative forms of energy. in most cases, they are the more educated, more affluent members of the community but still unaware as to the true impact of what could happen if we dont immediately move to renewables as quickly as possible.

right now oil is cheap. that will not last. even with full implementation of solar, wind and wave ASAP we are still looking only reducing our oil bill by 20% in 4 years, 50% in 10. so as you see, time is a-wasting.

its like a runaway freight train. putting on the brakes at the first real sign of a collision only means we hit the obstacle at 55 mph instead of 70 mph...

as far as the "ugliness" of a wind farm... i used to drive past one that was situated on the slopes between Riverside and Palm Springs, CA back in the early 80's. heck, we used to park on the side of the road and take pictures. it was a serene awesome sight!. not really sure of the details since there was no signs and i simply wasn't into it...(more into air pollution and simply did not connect the dots back then) so thinking it was some sort of experiemental station (US_Riverside had all kinds of field experiemental stations in the area, mostly argicultural)

but there were several different sizes and when sitting next to them, they made a very gentle whooshing sound at several different frequencies that created a peaceful relaxing sound. its too bad NIMBY's arent given a tour of such places

 

A wind farm's a heck of a lot prettier than an oil derrick or coal-fired power plant is!

 

I drove past one in north central IL off of I39, what a site to see, and wouldn't mind having at least one tower in my back yard, I like the sound they make, very relaxing. As long as they are well maintained they are very safe, its only when the blade brake breaks that a problem happens. There was video recently of one that the brake failed on and it oversped tearing it apart. That is really the only danger from the towers.

 

amen brother!@!

 

No true, the oil derrick can be covered up with a fake building like those in down town Long Beach California. You don't even know its there if you are not a local.

An coal firing power plant may be bad but it it only a few buildings occupying
coupling hundreds of acres, a wind farm will occupy thousands of acres.
You can drive by the power plant in 30 second but the wind farm takes more than 10 minutes.

 

u eat steak?? drink milk?? is your only concern how much space something takes up??

here is a 25,000 acre farm, guess it needs to go


quick FYI; its estimated if just 1.5% of currently available AND unused land were used for wind and solar, we could cut our oil dependency by more than a third. thats 100 billion in the bank. PER YEAR

 

Hi Bedrock...,

Your really cannot drive past the emissions from a coal fired power plant in 30 seconds. At least that is my memory of driving to my grand-ma's house, where we drove past the Crawford Avenue Station on the west side of Chicago when I was a kid some 40 years ago....

 

Mr. Pickens' problem isn't with NIMBYism. It's the cost of transmission lines to get the electricity to the consumer. And no one believes in risking money on something real. Better to buy a derivative.

 

The wind is a powerful force to be respected, not made fun of

Oh, on the topic of what NOT to do with a semi truck

In theory, the blades should "feather" if speed is too high for safety. Like how a propeller on a turboprop airplane is double acting, so if overspeed happens, the governor and propeller pistons react in such a way as to force the blade angle to change

That's how "reverse thrust" works on a turboprop, the blade pitch is changed to negative, so instead of the propeller "pulling" in air, it blows air forward

There have been documented cases of double acting/variable pitch propellers failing, that is the control and governor failing. The powerplant can wildly and quickly overspeed. The propeller can also wildly and quickly overspeed, which usually results in the centrifugal forces exceeding 20 TONS per blade: the blade departs the hub

Huh, a Cow Carousel. They seemed to enjoy using it. So, that farm appears to use digesters to break down the manure into methane, to generate their own power.

If more farms did that, not only would there be dramatically lower agricultural demand for electricity, but the stinky problem of what to do with the manure would be solved as well

We could do the same thing with human manure (Sewage) as well

 

I remember when I first saw the windmills we have on Hwy 580 leaving Livermore and how grand they looked. Everytime I drive out on 580 towards the valley, I look forward to seeing the windmills.

When I drive down hwy 5 south, I can't necessarily say the same about the oil derricks I see in the Bakersfield area. Novel the first time, but that is it.

 

good question, i think its a volume to mass production not scaling well. i also think there would be a collection issue as well.

as far as more cattle farms doing the methane thing, that would be nice. this farm is completely self-sustaining in summer with methane providing more than 25% of their power needs (which is massive) in winter.

another thing to consider, normally cattle raising is the 3rd largest greenhouse gas producer (methane is several times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2 which causes even a greater impact not to mention poorly managed farms causing groundwater pollution if the poop gets "out of hand")

the waste water treatment plant we have here siphons methane as well to help reducesits power needs which are very large. with the discharge going straight into Puget Sound, high pressure filtering is required to get it to a proper level of de-comtamination (that is under decent weather conditions....at least half a dozen times in the past, excessive storm water runoff cause the plant to send untreated water that had only been "screened" into the sound to keep from overflowing the system)

 

I am responding to the poster who is talking about eye pollution, not emission.

 

I used to drive an 18, I know all about that mess you posted, not fun at all, especially if the bridge is icy and has a strong cross wind.

The towers incorporate the feather tech you referred to, but they also have a brake mechanism that holds the blades still in high wind conditions. Even if the blades are feathered, they can still be moved by the winds as winds shift constantly, unlike in an aircraft where the plane is moving into the wind. The one in particular I was referring to was a tower that the brake failed on, and even though the blades were feathered, the wind still drove them and caused the blades to hit the tower itself, bringing it down in an instant. There were pieces of blade found 1/2 mile away.

 

The transmission lines are going ahead. My company is waiting to know if we got the contract on hardware for some of the new transmission lines.

Oncor - Transmission Projects Underway

 

Another good reason to locate the windfarm in BFE. The way the winds have acted around here the past year, I would assume SE Manitoba could meet the power needs of all of Canada

 

The beauty of wind farms is that they don't preclude many other uses for the land around them, including farming or solar...

A wind farm or ANY energy project (saving or producing) is less attractive during a massive economic downturn with falling energy prices and tightening capital. The most successful investors are ones who correctly anticipate cyclical patterns...and that means investing in an out-of-phase/counter cyclical way.

 

Good luck.