Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/10/2008 6:32:15 AM PST by St. Louis Conservative
I subscribe to an Internet newsletter called Energy Central and the news is getting more depressing every week. Every time I scan the headlines I realize I'm looking at another piece of a gathering energy debacle.
Take last Thursday's edition. Right at the top of the page was the story, "Xcel Energy, eXco Join in Major Wind Farm Developments in Minnesota, North Dakota." It's like this every day. Wind farms of sprouting up all over the country like 65-story mushrooms. The North American Reliability Council estimates we will have 175,000 megawatts of new capacity by 2017 (that's the equivalent of 175 major coal or nuclear plants). Unfortunately, it admits, "only approximately 23,000 MW…is projected to be available on peak." That means these windmills will be idle most of the time. Coal plants operate at 65 percent capacity, nuclear rims at 90 percent. But at best windmills produce only 30 percent of their "nameplate capacity" and they are almost useless on torpid summer days. California has found its windmills running at only 3 percent capacity on hot summer days.
Never mind, we are forging ahead anyway. Right under the Minnesota story is a report that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has laid down a "wind farm code of ethics" governing dealings between wind companies and municipal officials. It seems that several windmill manufacturers are following the tried-and-true pattern of bribing municipal officials by hiring them as "consultants" in seeking zoning and other approvals. Although you'd never know it, there are actually folks out there in the hinterland that don't like the idea of littering the landscape with these nearly useless monstrosities. However, those folks are being steamrolled in the march toward alternate energy utopia.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Political equivalent of "Hold ma beer and watch this!"
When we get to the stage where brownouts are a daily fact of life the old line energy companies will be blamed. However, no one should be under any illusion that the lack of energy will trouble the Dems and environmentalists in the least. That is actually their goal.
These supporters think he is lower gasoline taxes and prices
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2128724/posts
I guess they think the government creates everything and just gives it to the rich
Find later
Americans deserve wind power. It appeals to the fantasies that are presently shaping their political decisions.
They are paying dearly for it. In states which mandate a fixed percentage of windmills (or alternatives) as generation, the utilities are fast-tracking them. It doesn’t matter whether they are overpriced and underperforming - the utilities are glad to add them to their rate base, and let the ratepayers pay goldplated prices for the duds.
I swear that Obama and the liberals are forging ahead to the middle ages.
When I say drill, I don't mean every last drop under there that is nonrenewable. But enough to tide us over until we can look into other alternatives.
Maybe a better solution are the smaller ones people buy themselves, pay for themselves in up to 5 years or less. Any excess is sold to the grid at market value.
Isn't it odd that those old windmills (we got rid of them on 2 farms) are now in vogue? I've tried to photograph a few, but haven't gotten very good ones yet. I remember climbing halfway up a very tall one when I was a kid, then got scared and climbed back down. My father's cousin was afraid to climb all the way to the top to change the light bulb. So my father did it for him, and he wasn't even a farmer any more but a civil engineer who had welded water towers and such just before WWII, so he was used to heights. Those older ones probably didn't generate as much power as the newer ones.
The Progressives are looking ahead to a bright future filled with serfs and tax collectors.
They succeeded because the water tank was a classic shallow depth “pump storage” unit - you could run the single water pump automatically whenever and for as long as the wind was high enough (but not too high to damage the propeller); then you didn't get any power for the many hours and days when the wind speed was too high, or too low.
The tank didn't care. It filled up, then gradually went down through evaporation, animal use - too small for irrigation! - , and for the farm kitchen. Then it filled up again. No electricity, no farm tools or belt-driven utilities could be reliably driven.
Wind farms are NOT economically driven - they are emotional TAXES on the already-stressed energy demands from conventional and nuclear plants.
Germany, Denmark, other parts of Europe have already idled many dozen wind generators because their grid has been forced sown regularly by their unreliability.
Here is to wishing a plague on the aristocratic Progressives. Cheers! Salute! Prost!
Why no one seems to gasp the significance of what happened in Texas on February 28, 2008. On that day doldrum weather conditions idled most of Texas windmills and lead to a power crisis that narrowly averted rolling blackouts. While the upper Midwest has been touted as the Saudi Arabia of wind energy, its windmills can be idled by both a lack of wind and too windy conditions which cause windmills to shut down least the strain destroy them. If 20% of our electricity is to come from windmills such situations could become common place given the fickle weather conditions in the Midwest.
Who needs reliable 24/7 electricity anyway? Some foreign governments and eco-maniacs might look favorably upon the USA if we cut the power off a few hours each day.
Vero Possumus!
The shadows and noise these windmills caused were driving thee siblings insane as they were built close to their homes. It was also causing problems in the small town because of all the birds the windmills were killing.
The worse part was the digg comments from the liberals. They were horrible. They called the children of this man all kinds of names from being selfish to ignorant. Many stated they would love to see windmills on the top of skyscrapers in the city where they lived.
Speaking of all the birds that are being killed, where are the Sierra Club and the environmentalist who are concerned about the rising number of birds that victims of these windmills? I work with an environut who thinks it is the birds fault when they fly into one of the blades and think the birds will learn to fly around them
I didn't know that they weren't used for electricity but only for pumping water. Thanks for the lesson. We city folk weren't taught about those things in school even any of my science classes, and I took more than average including a couple of courses in physics and chemistry in college.
And I didn't learn the simplest, most practical things until I picked up a copy of Mother Earth News and was intrigued with the problems with pumping water uphill out of a pond, not that I understood it all, but it was more than I'd ever been exposed to before.
Those weren't girl things either, and farmers were marginalized although they contributed so much to our way of life.
Energy cannot be stored in generators.
You can run generators below their maximum output so that they can quickly be used to deliver more power. But that means normally running a 1,000 MW generator at something like 800 MW. Typically their efficiency is at fully loaded conditions so this spare capacity comes with extra cost during normal operations.
In time you can get used to things, but noise can make you crazy. There are some houses right under a high interstate approach to a bridge. I don't know how the occupants can stand hearing the traffic overhead, mere yards away, 24/7, be worse than living too close to an airport.
Late at night, I can hear the traffic humming on the interstate about 3/4 mile from my house. We all have a certain tolerance for noise, and living in the city, I'm used to the sounds of traffic.
But I spent a couple of nights in our farmhouse, all alone, didn't bother to lock the doors and nearest neighbors on either side were 1/4 mile or more away. I wasn't afraid. Then, about 1989. But it was eerie. All I could hear sometimes was the wind. An occasional car went by on the road. Once I heard the call of what I thought was a rooster and looked at one of the outbuildings wondering how on earth there could be chickens in there because there hadn't been chickens on that farm for years.
I asked, and the neighbor told me it was probably a pheasant. Now those have disappeared because of coyotes.
I didn’t know that either. So much I don’t know. How is solar energy stored then?
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