[Abathar]

$3.4 million to save $136K in oil a year. With maintenance and repairs I guess Castro will never see the theoretical payoff date.

[darkwing104]

I thought this article was about Cape Cod...

[SkyPilot]

I thought Castro's 4 hour speeches were the Cuban wind farm?

[FreePaul]

Probably too little too late. In past years Castro's hot air could have kept the wind farm going.

[manic4organic]

How about rum?

[Uncledave]

Renewable Energy Ping

Please Freep Mail me if you'd like on/off

[thackney]

and its windmills are designed to be disassembled quickly in case of hurricanes or tropical storms

Designing a structure to withstand the wind would have been a much better idea. Trying to predict just how strong the wind is going to blow this afternoon is rather difficult. How many times will they take it done, find out they didn't need to, then leave it up just once when they should have taken it down.

[kinoxi]

The park was built using French technology, and its windmills are designed to be disassembled quickly in case of hurricanes or tropical storms.

Or invasion/collaboration as well I'd assume.

[DungeonMaster]

In before the ping.

[atomicpossum]

Cuban Wind Farm

[DungeonMaster]

These are more expensive than typical windmills.

[Izzy Dunne]

using French technology, and its windmills are designed to be disassembled quickly

The "retreat" plans are already drawn up...

[vpintheak]

The lefties will be hailing this as how great Cuba is, even though we have been doing this for years.

[TXnMA]

[Zeppo]

$3.4 million to save $136K in oil a year

Maybe they intend to make up the rest in tax credits (heh heh)...

[3Lean]

That was my thought for a more accurate title

"Cuba Experiments with Really Dumb Investments"

[KarlInOhio]

The park was built using French technology

Are they using the latest in Charles de Gaulle detachable propellor technology?

[Uncledave]

The park was built using French technology, and its windmills are designed to be disassembled quickly in case of hurricanes or tropical storms.

I would imagine you have maybe 5 days notice that a hurricane has a decent shot at hitting your wind farm. These machines can be disassembled and stored in five days? That's a bold claim.

[PzLdr]

And the seabirds flying into the blades may help alleviate the food shortages.

[goldstategop]

Will John Kerry go wind-surfing off the Cuban coast? Inquiring minds would like to know.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Asfarastheeastisfromthewest...]

Sorry but the math in this story doesn't even remotely compute, even for Cuba..... I don't have time to say what the 'reasonable numbers' might be for a project cost of $3.4 million, 1,800 MW of electricity and savings of $136,000 of oil but at least one (and more likely 2) of the 3 numbers are totally off-base. I suspect it is the 1,800 MW figure for two reasons. 1. $3.4 million for 6 wind turbines would imply that each wind turbine is worth something less than $566,000 apiece since there are lots of other costs as well beside the actual wind turbine. I highly doubt this is a reasonable number for a 180 foot diameter turbine. 2. The article states 'during its first year of operation it could produce 1,800 megawatts of electricity' which implies a relationship of some quantity to time. If this is the case, it would appear that the writer of the article doesn't know the difference between the terms 'power' and 'energy' since he/she is using a power term for something that has a time component attached to it (namely the one year period). If he/she really did mean to use the 1,800 number to denote the number of peak MW that the group of 6 wind turbines is capable of producing, this would mean that each has a peak capacity of 300 MW. I'm not sure what the state of the art is now (and I'd have to do more research than I have time for now) but my guess is that there is no wind turbine in existence that does 10 MW and only a handful of ones of 5 MW capacity (and those are all much bigger than 180 foot diameter).

If I had to take a quick guess at what the correct numbers might be, it would be that the maximum power capacity of the 6 wind turbines is 1,800 kW (not 1,800 MW) and with winds that only blow 20 to 25% of the time. That would give 1,800 kW x 2190 hrs/yr (at 25% operating time) or 3,942,000 kWh/yr of generated electrical energy. At a cost of roughly 3.5 cents per kW-hr, this roughly computes to the $136,000 cost of oil (and clearly I'm skipping a few steps here to equate cost of electrical energy to what can be achieved by burning oil). This would take more work than I want to give it to refine the numbers but clearly, the 1,800 MW figure would appear to be off by a factor of 1,000. Another possibility is that the writer perhaps to meant to say that the 6 wind turbines can produce 1,800 MWh annually which at a wind usage factor of 25% would yield wind turbines in the 800 kW size range. Who knows. Sheeeesh, as for the costs.....just the environmental assessment study for a project of 6 - 300 MW wind turbines would be in the gazillions of dollars (mind you in Cuba, they might have no clue what an environmental assessment means).