Posted on 11/05/2011 12:54:18 PM PDT by Hunton Peck
This one's really off the radar.
Wind farms, along with solar power and other alternative energy sources, are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow. Evidence indicates that their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: "blank spots" that distort radar readings.
Now government agencies that depend on radar -- such as the Department of Defense and the National Weather Service -- are spending millions in a scramble to preserve their detection capabilities. A four-star Air Force general recently spelled out the problem to Dave Beloite, the director of the Department of Defense’s Energy Siting Clearinghouse.
"Look there’s a radar here -- one of our network of Homeland surveillance radars -- and [if you build this wind farm] you essentially are going to put my eyes out in the Northwestern corner of the United States,” Beloite related during a web conference in April.
Spinning wind turbines make it hard to detect incoming planes. To avoid that problem, military officials have blocked wind farm construction near their radars -- and in some cases later allowed them after politicians protested.
Shepherd’s Flat, a wind farm under construction in Oregon, was initially held up by a government notice that the farm would “seriously impair the ability of the (DoD) to detect, monitor and safely conduct air operations."
Then Oregon’s senators got involved.
“The Department of Defense's earlier decision threatened to drop a bomb on job creation in Central Oregon,” democratic Senator Ron Wyden noted in a press release.
Beloite told FoxNews.com that the project was given the green light by the military only after scientists at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory assured the Department of Defense “that there were algorithms and processors they could design for not too much money that would mitigate the problem.”
Beloite said that the MIT technology has proven successful...
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
BP kills a few birds in an oil spill and they get sued for millions.
Go figure....
That’s ok. For just a few billion dollars I could build a (single) stealth windmill. Of course I’d also need many millions of dollars a year to guard it to keep the technology from falling into our adversary’s hands, and also a few six packs to pay the locals to shoot migrating songbirds so they don’t accidentally damage the stealth coating on the blades. Seems entirely reasonable in an effort to get a few thousand dollars per year worth of electricity, don’t you think?
The wind farms very definitely screw up the NEXRAD weather radars around here. Creates an entirely false doppler pattern which apparently isn’t consistent and hard to filter out with software.
Confucius say USA man should build windfarm in Iran.
Shhhhh...songbird blood IS the stealth coating!
How do we get the Chinese to put GPS locators on their warplanes so we can track them? Same with smugglers...
DOD radar is looking for threats.
For that matter, how does GPS allow us to forcast tornadoes?
The wind farms very definitely screw up the NEXRAD weather radars around here. Creates an entirely false doppler pattern which apparently isn’t consistent and hard to filter out with software.
+++++++++++++++++
That is precisely the reason for the problem. Those big wind turbines will definitely create a Doppler signature that should vary with their rotational speed. And that speed varies from turbine to turbine as well as varying throughout the day.
Such a small price to pay, along with a few birds, for the privilege of over paying for our electricity on our way to a green Nirvana.
The wind farms very definitely screw up the NEXRAD weather radars around here. Creates an entirely false doppler pattern which apparently isn’t consistent and hard to filter out with software.
+++++++++++++++++
That is precisely the reason for the problem. Those big wind turbines will definitely create a Doppler signature that should vary with their rotational speed. And that speed varies from turbine to turbine as well as varying throughout the day.
Such a small price to pay, along with a few birds, for the privilege of over paying for our electricity on our way to a green Nirvana.
Yeah, what happened with that BP oil spill? I thought the spill was going to destroy the Gulf Coast for the next 30 years. I'm sure there's significant cleanup still going on, but where did all the dire predictions turn out?
Meanwhile, you'd think if there really were half a million bird carcasses per year rotting at the bases of wind towers, the anti-wind-power folks would would have scads of pictures by now. Bird bodies wouldn't be hard to find, just go to the towers then look around for carcasses within a few hundred feet of the base. Given inexpensive modern pic/vid technologies, it wouldn't even be that hard/costly to set up automated monitoring.
Yet there are almost no such pictures or vids. Why? Well, frankly those estimates are fabricated. In fact, there is very little hard data, and in fact, few actual carcasses have ever been found, even when searched for by the most dedicated anti-wind advocates. Despite what we read on the internet, it just doesn't hold up to even the simplest examination.
A more interesting figure would be the number of birds killed by cars each year. I believe it's a lot higher than even the worse estimate for the wind machines. And cars also kill thousands of people every year, which wind machines don't. Anybody proposing to ban cars?
The economic arguments against wind machines are much more potent than anything having to do with birds. The argument based on bird collisions is what's known as a "canard", if you'll excuse the weak pun. :)
And BTW, full-disclosure: I'm a bird watcher and bird lover from way back, and if there were really good data to support wind-power bird kills, I'm sure the various bird-related publications and sites would be all over it. So far, it's mighty flimsy.
Back on thread topic, I imagine the effect on radar is indeed significant. They say there's software to compensate... but I'm skeptical.
The two have almost Nothing in common with one another.
Your lack of understanding of the two types of systems is amazing in this day and age.
LOL, you have no ideal on earh where our defense radar systems are, maybe you should stick with something you know about. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
Lol, too funny! I love it, thanks for a good laugh.
Please try to refrain from embarrassing yourself further.
Radar and GPS work on COMPLETELY different principals and their applications have little in common. GPS is a passive system which requires multiple satellite signals received,decoded and displayed locally at the point of reception. RADAR is a non-co-operative system that relies upon the reception of the reflection of a transmitted signal.
Your link to a defunct “over the horizon” NORAD type installation just confirms your lack of appreciation of the differences...
BTW....No airborne RADAR system has EVER been able to read the license plate of a car. That would be a relatively low level OPTICAL system. Again ...NOTHING to due with RADAR or GPS. ...study up a bit
A wind farm in the hills southeast of Buffalo shows up as a permanent blip on weather radar. It really annoys me — I want my radar clean, dammit!
The next time you drive down the road, look at the front of a big trucks trailer, at the front close to the top, that little gray box is a gps tracking system, another smaller one is hide somewhere. But then why would a company want to know where that trailer was twenty four seven. Maybe they are tracking it with 1950 radar. Good thing we only have a few hundred trailers in this country.
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