Posted on 11/22/2024 10:51:45 AM PST by CFW
Casper — For the past 14 years they have loomed over the landscape of northeastern Casper, once the symbol of the county’s first step into green energy. Now some say they are just an eyesore.
The blades of the 11 240-feet high, 450,000-pound turbines haven’t caught the wind for a few years.
Casper resident Terry Wingerter said he was one of the Natrona County commissioners who approved the initial project in 2009. He wishes now he would have voted differently on the wind farm.
“They were the first towers in this area, and we had several neighborhood meetings out there,” he said. “Some of the neighbors were terribly against it and some of the others just didn’t care. It was the first one in this area so we voted for them.”
[snip]
Chevron’s President Greg Vesey in 2009 called the project “an excellent opportunity and location for the company’s first wholly owned wind facility, but the Casper Wind Farm also brings the former refinery site back into energy production with renewable energy.”
Wingerter said the initial pitch to the community was that the wind farm would send its electricity to the Dave Johnston Power Plant between Glenrock and Douglas.
“Now they haven’t been used for I don’t know how long, I am guessing three years,” he said. “Now it’s an eyesore, if you ask me.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cowboystatedaily.com ...
If wind and solar power were actually more efficient and less costly than fossil fuels, then there would not be any need for subsidies and more people would be switching to those sources for power. They are not. And those such as these counties in Wyoming are finding that promises were made but the promised product was not delivered. Not exactly a great reference for the wind power supporters to put on their resume.
kinda like the ones outside Palm Springs-very few of them turn, pretty much for tax writeoffs.
I'm all for decentralized solar and wind: getting it for your own home if you want to from a free market perspective. But even then there should be no tax credits or subsidies (again, free market is better than the government intruding into it).
I read Lynn Cheneys book. Casper is very windy.
Somebody made good money on that.
Btw-I feel sand for Linda. She’s kept quiet while her husband and daughter make asses of themselves. If I had to be in that family I’d choose to be the lesbian.
very little real information in the article?
The era of “green energy” is DEAD
it was created and born of many trends which have already reversed, or are going to soon collapse/reverse
- Massive growth of Govt debt
- Cheap money and zero interest rates
- blind public acceptance of “climate change” narrative
- US hegemony in trade and control of key mineral resources
Government plans never make any mistakes. /sarc
I drove on I-80 through Iowa some years ago, and I was astonished at the gigantic wind farm that went on and on for miles on both sides of the highway. Seemed like there were hundreds of the blasted eyesores, and none of them were moving that I saw.
Mid American energy owns those, and to be fair they are used. MidAm also seems to maintain them.
On the highway 30 corridor, not so much.
The problem is that even if you remove the turbine and pay to bury the blades in the ground(not recyclable). Then recycle the steel and oil inside the actual turbine. You still have this huge concrete foundation in the ground that will be there FOREVER.
It is not a pretty concrete structure like the Pantheon in Rome. Just a huge chuck of concrete in the ground.
Maybe it was a non-windy day...
I’m afraid that people don’t understand the true purpose of wind farms.
The purpose isn’t to generate useful power.
It’s purpose is to launder taxpayer money.
“Government plans never make any mistakes. /sarc”
This really wasn’t the government, this was Chevron a private company that sold these people a bill of goods. Perhaps these things actually made a profit for Chevron but now the locals who bought into the scheme (and those who didn’t) are left with the results.
This is why you always look at every proposal whether liberal or Conservative, right or left, with a very, very critical eye. Every plan looks great until it actually gets implemented.
Where’s Don Quixote when you need him
We drive through the wind farms in eastern Washington (”the Palouse”), down the Columbia River Gorge, and through the California Delta. We see thousands of these abominations and hardly ever do you see them generating power. What a waste of money.
The average “capacity factor” of wind turbines is about 28%. That means they produce only 28% of their nameplate rating. Nobody in their right mind would invest in such a poorly performing asset...unless the government was skewing the economics with OUR tax money.
I have hope for solar...the windmills are just eyesore in some of the most beautiful areas.
I have hope for solar...the windmills are just eyesore in some of the most beautiful areas.
Then you have blades failing and spraying glass fibers all over farmland. Nobody knows how to clean up that mess or if the land is ruined forever.
I'm for someone installing pico wind turbines for his home if he thinks he'll got a good ROI. I have home solar for the same reason. But
A) we should get rid of the solar tax credit, and
B) my solar doesn't provide all of the power I need all the time. Even I depend on the grid.
Because I have the grid as a fall-back, I don't have to engineer my solar to provide all of my power. Doing that would be a huge waste of money by me having to fight the law of diminishing returns. I'm quite happy with my past 12 power bills totaling $997 (call it $83/month on average). Most of the power I buy is in the 4 coldest months in Alabama. I'd have to spend another $30K or $40K to make my solar system so good that I don't have to buy any power from the grid any time of year, but it wouldn't be worth it.
The engineers who try to use solar or wind to power the grid don't have the luxury of a backup plan like I do. If I understand it correctly, there are a few natural gas fueled power plants that some utilities have on standby for reserve power if extra power is needed. Here in the south that would be during a summer heat wave. But, if I understand it correctly, those nat gas plants are horribly inefficient to scale up or down as needed. We wouldn't want to build a bunch of them to be able to power the entire grid, scaling up and down every day (i.e. turning on all of the nat gas plants at night when the sun goes down, then turning them all off the next day after the sun comes up and energizes many solar farms).
All of that means that it's horribly wasteful to put intermittently powered sources onto the grid (i.e. solar farms or wind farms, if the solar farms are powerful enough to energize much of the grid).
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