Wow, people have very short memories if they think this is the biggest oil spill ever. Or even the biggest oil spill in the gulf of mexico.
I support this wind farm, btw. The structure and constant shredding of birds will help make for some outstanding fishing in the area. Well, that is if the harmonic hum doesn’t drive them away.
Yee haw lets take this opportunity to scam the taxpayers some more.
a wind farm couldn’t have prevented that. But at least it will take a tiny step or two in the right direction.
Hmmmm? Tiny indeed, so tiny it shouldn’t be taken in the first place. Farm indicates produce or product to sustain the farm activity. When you need a microscope to see the product, it isn’t worth it, unless you are producing life saving legal drugs.
Keep in mind that sometimes the wind blows slowly or not at all, and windmills don't produce any power until the wind reaches about 8 MPH. A location for a windmill is not considered viable unless wind speeds average 14 MPH.
The percentage of its rated power that a windmill can actually produce, given the variation of wind speeds at the installation site, is called its capacity factor. A realistic capacity factor is 25%. That means that over time, the windmill actually delivers 25% of its rated power.
(Electrical energy is measured in units called watts. A kilowatt (KW) is 1,000 watts, a megawatt (MW) is a million watts. )
A typical large wind-driven turbine is rated at about 1,500 kilowatts. It's 350 feet tall and has a fan blade of about 240 feet in diameter. It will actually deliver about 375 kilowatts. It can power about 375 microwave ovens, or 6250 60-watt light bulbs simultaneously (only when the wind is blowing at about 25 miles per hour, which is a very strong wind). An average (1 gigawatt) power plant can power nearly a million microwaves, or 16 million light bulbs at the same time.
A power plant near me produces 1,100,000 kilowatts (1.1 gigawatts) of power. At a 25% capacity factor it would take nearly 2600 large wind turbines to produce the same power as this nuclear power plant. And this is not a particularly large plant.
If you placed these 2600 wind turbines the recommended 5 rotor-blade diameters apart, they would stretch for 600 miles. That's as far as the distance from Michigan to Georgia. In practice wind turbines are not placed single file, they are placed in several rows, like crops, in what are called wind farms, but you get the idea.
The amount of electricity generated by a wind turbine is proportional to the wind speed to the 3rd power (a 20 MPH wind will produce 8 times as much energy as a 10 MPH wind). Therefore wind turbines often produce energy in bursts; when the wind gusts, the energy output spikes, when the wind dies down, energy output dips.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to store these bursts of energy for later use. There are no batteries large enough that are also practical, and pumped-storage systems, which use unwanted energy to pump water into an aboveground reservoir for later use in turning a water-driven generator, require a large body of water.
And when there is no wind, windmills produce no power, so a traditional power plant must be operational at all times to provide power during those in-between times.
Can you eat the shredded birds? So what cost per KWH does your windfarm, which obscures the pristine views in ways no power plant could possibly do, cost us?
The illiterate gibberish from the eco-nuts is getting really funny.
All the Gulf oil spill proves is what happens when eco-nuts set policy and when massive regulatory failure occurs what happens. Ask yourselves why they were drilling at 5000 feet underwater, when you could sit on land and drill in ANWR. And well fires, leaks and other hazards, did you see how it was done in Kuwait?
But don’t worry, we assigned the Katrina recovery experts to your healthcare. Afterall, all nuts are interchangeable in the magic world of gubbermint.
Read Wind Energy’s Ghosts By Andrew Walden. Wind is not the answer. Europe’s wind power failed why would we want to follow. The wind farm in Hawaii failed. Wind is not the answer.
Wind Farms are a waste of time and money.
They are ineffecient as demonstrated by the lack ROI data that never includes the subsidies.
Frankly, there’s a little too much ‘hot air’ in wind farms. Many have already been abandoned here in the US. Drill, baby, drill.
Small pebble bed nuclear reactors are the answer. Solar and wind are pipe dreams.