Wind turbine in my backyard

It's also very risky to get your head caught in the blades.

I don't know of any real health issues other than the mental anguish caused by people like Mr. Yancey Jr. There are some questions of mental health from the low pulsing noise, but I like a good bass track, myself.

I want a windmill in the back yard and two Chevy Volts in the garage. That will solve a lot of my problems...

It seems to me the guy is emotionally pissed off because it affects his gliding.

Yes it seems. As to me I certainly should be agreed if someone offered to install such device at my backyard especially for getting paid on regular basis. The friend of mine has a good project of rotor wind heating generator and I think through this issue. But I am not sure about how it will be met by members of my family and neighbors.

I do not mind about smell of gasoline, solder, I'm not scared of any technological noises, dust and other such things. I do like this stuff. But most of people do not. So I'm compelled take their viewpoints in account.

regards, caramba

This reminds me of what happened in a new development that was right next to a busy interstate highway.

A number of large homes went up in the $500,000.00 price range. the developer put in a nice pond and a park, and they started the development about 1/4" mile back from the highway. The homes and condos where selling and the development creeped up to the highway, and in about 5 years the home owners petitioned the town to put up a sound barricade to eliminate the noise from the highway.

Its like I bought a home next to a large noise producing public road. Its not my fault that I was stupid enough to realize the consequences. Now someone else should pay for my stupidity, naming the local government which is everybody else to pick up the tab.

The guy in the article the only way to control it is to own the land. If his dad going to turn over the land to him. He should'nt complain.

With that type of income from the land I wonder how that effects thier tax base.

Would it still be taxed agricultural, or commercial?

That guy in the article is just grumpy........

I picked up this article as instance of what could be faced residents of wind generators' site in social matter. If no one is too hypochodriac around you, I'm admitting here's nothing like terminal disease's threat to install wind turbine(s) at your backyard.

I just read that article, I own land on Tug Hill, I see those same wind mills. Glad to have them.

Note the size of the towns around them. All small.

the big draw to that part of the country is how remote it is. Very few people, yet every winter, thousands of people come from all over the country to snowmobile there.

We have them going up in our area,

Some of these Hobby Farmer are putting up a stink with sighs such as "A good nieghbor does not put up a 400' wind mill".

Any body else including farmers that actually have to live off the land thinks that the income is pretty good, probally the wind mills are the best cash crop they ever would get off the land.

Second hand knowledge is about as useful as secondhand experience.

I love the technology too. In fact I'm looking to built on on my property.

However, before you follow me down this slippery slope I urge you to stand for an hour or more in a field of wind driven turbines.

When you leave, you will find yourself much more appreciative of silence.

The constant whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of those giant prop blades is annoying at times.

L. J.

You may gain appreciation and tolerance if trying to pedal produce the power instead.

I haven't heard of any specific health issues. Like most people say it is more of a 'Not In My Back Yard' issue. If you are worried about health issues consider what you have for health problems with our current batch of energy generation systems. Everyone, including you, needs to get energy from someplace. If we don't stop fighting environmentally good projects like these then the dirty energy plants will just keep getting built. The evidence is overwhelming that we can't keep pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere like we have been doing. There are serious health issues to the climate change that we are causing.

It really amazes me how everyone can fight so hard to keep windmills out but the coal plants seem to go in with no problems.

I apologise if I seem to be trivializing or diverting your question to get a political agenda across, but it really does come down to what you asked. If we don't start allowing clean energy projects to go forward then you, me, your wife, everyone will have some serious health issues to deal with. It doesn't take much warming to seriously affect all our lives.

I personally live on a small island. A little water level change due to global warming and my home is gone. That is a health issue for me.

A group of us have been pushing the idea of a wind farm in the shallows near our island. I am more than willing to have it in my back yard because I feel it will have long term benefits for me and everyone else.

Good luck and I hope that it all works out for the best.

-Doug

"It's already been shown that a similar rise in temps have occurred on every planet in our solar system and that those increases are in perfect lock-step with increases in the temperature of the sun. Increases that are cyclical."

References, please!

Bravo, Jaguar! You are absolutely correct! I think it's ridiculous for the President and the government to argue that there's no global warming, and at the same time I also think it's ridiculous for other countries to blame the U.S. for it. China, by the way, is acknowleged as the biggest producer of CO2 emissions, not the U.S. Geology proffessors teach their students that the world is actually just finishing coming out of the last Ice Age, and the world is still warming up from that. Additionally, I read recently that there's a huge amount of CO2 bearing rock in Canada from that period, that is still putting out a huge mount of CO2 each year, and remember that CO2 is a one of the greenhouse effect gases. Hence 2 really good reasons that the world is facing global warming. While I believe that these are natural reasons that we're facing global warming, I also believe that we humans with our industry are speeding it along. While we can't stop the natural progression, we can stop our own activities, and the sooner we stop pointing fingers at each other and denying our own involvement, we can at least slow down the inevetable.

We're all in this together, folks.

- Marty

'We are all in this together' is the truest statement. It truly doesn't matter where the greenhouse gasses come from, it is going to affect everyone the same.

I believe that we need to stop worrying about the blame and start working on fixing the problem. It is true that there have been periods in history that have had global warming and greenhouse gasses have gone up and down over geological time periods. The difference this time is the speed that it is happening and the extent that it is happening.

We have done something amazing. The carbon that nature spent 100's of millions of years sequestering in the ground in the form of oil, gas and coal is being released by us over a roughly 200 year period. Even if you don't believe that we are the primary cause of global warming you must admit we are certainly giving it a serious kick in the butt.

Every country in the world needs to be doing something about the issue and we all need to start now. Regrettably, getting a consensus on global treaties is going to be difficult to achieve quickly. I feel a better approach is to all start doing something. After we have all tried to make a difference we can look at what approaches were the most successful and promote those as the best solutions worldwide. This actually works at all levels. Individuals, communities, regions and countries can all try different ideas and we can see who is doing the best to change the situation. Even less effective approaches will produce better results than waiting around and doing nothing. It will also mean that nations will be able to talk to each other about the issues as peers that are all doing something rather than competitors that are promising to do something if someone else will.

I acknowledge that this is a bit of a Pollyannaish view of the world reality, but something does need to change. The longer we wait the more painful the change will be and the chance of us making a difference will go down. I personally am willing to put in some effort and accept some pain in my life to ensure that my kids and grandkids will have a planet to live on.

It is my hope that humans are actually better than the scenario put forward in "Tragedy of the Commons". I would like to think that we can all accept a little hard work and sacrifice in order to ensure the long term benefit of everyone.

I hope I am not the zealot that someone was mentioning earlier. My view is actually more of a realist who sees the strong potential for hard times ahead and wants to start working on it sooner rather than later.

Once again, that was my two cents.

-Doug

Doug wrote: "I hope I am not the zealot that someone was mentioning earlier."

"True Believers" are fanatical Doug and get animated and severely agitated if you so much as ask them a question. Rest easy. You are too rational, too open minded and have none of those symptoms.,

I urge everyone who wants a clear insight into the thinking of fanatics to read The "True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. It's not a new insight, he wrote it over 40 years ago but it's still on shelves in bookstores and required reading by any student of Sociology!!

My own personal thoughts are that it is crucially important that we properly identify the real causes of global warming and not go running off half cocked simply because Al Gore gets some camera time. I thought I would vomit when Yasser Arafat got the Nobel Peace Prize! Now Gore?! How to cheapen a prized award in a heartbeat!

If we are too quick to accept the wrong reason for what is the cause of global warming, and that appears to be happening, we run the risk of investing heavily in a false premise.

"There's no point in fixing brakes what ain't broke when the throttle is stuck wide open Homer! Pass me the jug!"

L. J.

I cannot help but be amused that we are not fighting the 'coming global ice age' like we were in the '70s. .... The best I have heard is from a semi-reasonable greenie, is that global warming due to gasses, etc, is happening, but it is being moderated by the global cooling caused by particulates in the atmosphere, so we are 'warming more slowly' than the models predicted.

So if we stop burning coal or scrub the air 'real good', we will effectively reduce the global cooling caused by the particulates, and be allowed to see 'global warming' in all its glory.

They were actually able to MEASURE the global cooling effect, on 9/11/2001 in the USA, by watching the reduction of condensation trails left by jet aircraft, and its effect on evaporation. (This evaporation has been being measured daily for over 50 years, pretty much world wide. So there is a base line to compare to.)

Yes, I saw this guy speak on PBS, so I assume (my bias) that if there are political / social tendancies, it would be to the 'left'. But that was not verified by this individual that was speaking.

None the less, they made a more scientifically based, and thus compelling argument, than most I have heard.

One merely needs to see the effects in the Canadian Arctic to gain an understanding of this climatic shift.

For years scientists had wondered where the 'missing' CO2 was before discovering it was locked in the arctic permafrost and stone. It doesn't take much of a warming to effect a cascade of methane release. Whether this will affect the earths thermal equilibrium or not it nevertheless begs a deeper understanding ...especially when it is now possible to drill a hole in freshwater arctic ice and ignite the escaping gas.

Since the 50's it was discovered that the shifting Pacific Decadal Oscillation has influenced warming and cooling of the northern latitudes. Within the last three years it and the Atlantic Decadal Oscillation have shifted into a cooling phase. The jury is still out on the long term effects although judging by recent events there is a significant interest in exploring the arctic all of a sudden.

They are very loud when you are in the downwind path. But this is also dependant on how high the blades are and how far away you are as well.

Big windmills can be heard up to a mile away downwind.

Look up the prevailing winds in your area to find out how often per year you will be "downwind"

Regarding noise levels, is the vertical ribbon type windmill as noisy as the propeller type?

It is much louder. In the 70's the National Research Council of Canada built a large windgen of this type and had to dismantle it because it exceeded their safety recomendations for acceptable db levels.

If memory serves the spinning rotors created a low pressure inner core which acted as an amplifier.

I guess noise affects people differently. This summer I spent a few days with friends in Holland, near the coast. There's a large wind turbine about a half mile away. I could hear it, but no big deal. In fact, it kind of lulled me to sleep.

Ha......the more I read about windgens the more I'm convinced Del has the answer.

You're right about noise affecting people differrently. I live outside of an urban environment and any kind of noise is irritating to me.

Having said that I should add that I helped build a vertical vane windgen back in the 70's. What wasn't factored in were the gear ratios in the event of high winds. Actually, the thing had a braking system using teflon pads (brilliant). As luck would have it the third day after startup just happened to see winds of 60kph that lasted for hours.

This thing had people running for cover for miles around. Our biggest complaint was from an irate farmwife who claimed the hypersonic screeching sound made her bread dough collapse.

Many new windgens have modified blades that reduce the shock wave coming off the prop tips.

Our favorite duck wrote: "Many new windgens have modified blades that reduce the shock wave coming off the prop tips."

That's not likely to work "Duck" for the simple reason that the noise that most offends people occurs when the propeller tip speed goes supersonic. It's this very same phenomena that frustrates aerospace engineers.

Conventional A/C engines rarely spin faster than 2400 RPM because the longer blades needed to absorb the engine's power can easily exceed the speed of sound at the tip.

So they make the engines larger instead so the required torque is available at lower crankshaft speed. This keeps tip speeds low and increases engine reliability too.

Smaller engines by contrast can develop similar power to larger ones but must spin faster to do so. This need runs right up against the tip speed limitation

The smallest Lycoming or Continental engines available today are over 235 cubic inches and barely make 110 hp.

Smaller A/C engines typically get around this need to spin fast by using reduction gearing. The engines get to spin faster than the prop, produces more power but the tip speeds stay low. The price is added complexity; added cost to acquire. Added expense when overhauling, which on some smaller engines is every 300 hours!

All the wind driven turbine designs I've looked at use reduction gearing and judging from the failure reports, the transmissions are the weakest links.

L. J.

Hence the racket comin' off the props.........personally I've always favoured Da Vinci's air screw.

I suppose one could replace the conventional prop with a round air foil, paint concentric lines on it and silently hypnotize the immediate population into building more.

On a more serious note..... I've sen wg props with a swept back prop design. Would this not transfer the shock wave over a greater distance and effectively dampen some of the sound?

For sound waves the amplitude of the wave determines the loudness of a sound. Loudness can be related to pressure excesses (the differrence between the maximum pressure developed in a compression and the normal undisturbed air pressure). Therefore the amount of energy carried along by the prop determines the energy transfer and hence the amplitude. By redirecting the transfer and contracting it, it should be possible to make the thing quieter.

Duck wrote: "On a more serious note..... I've sen wg props with a swept back prop design. Would this not transfer the shock wave over a greater distance and effectively dampen some of the sound?"

I haven't a clue. I know little about acoustics. Even less about supersonic shock waves.,

I do know that with the onset of supersonic tips speeds, the ability of the propeller to absorb more power was attenuated.

If the problem were an easy one to solve, I think that the major prop manufacturers (Sensenich, Hamilton-Standard, etc)would have done so.

Certain kinds of constant noise can cause physical harm. I think I just saw this discussed on a web site called "Ask Dr. Weil".

Dr. Weil is a Harvard trained MD, who specialises in Natural Medicine.

Since the erection of the enormous windgen at Spanish, Ont. the residents of said town have lost a lot of sleep.

Wanting to spend some time in the marina and do a bit of exploring I left on the second day because I couldn't get any sleep! I moored six miles east and downwind of the town and it was still audible.

The aesthetics leave a lot to be desired.

I dont know why but I am reminded of a bloom county cartoon:

....in the Fauklin Islands thousands of penguins stand on the beach each year. During the British invasion they would all turn to look at the jets coming in from the carriers. They would all turn in unison to watch them fly inland. Then they would all look up as the flew over thier heads to go back out to see. And thousands of penguins would gently fall on their fannies as the jets whizzed by over their heads.

The moral is just because thousands of others are doing it, doesnt mean its a good idea.....

my timing is not as good a Opus, and I am not sure if this parable is apropriate, but it always comes to mind as driveling zealots start to babble about alternative energy, and those opposed cackeling about the dangers of subsonic this and electro-magnetic that.

The bottom line is that everything and anything can kill you given enough time.

have a great day

There is one risk that has not been addressed in this string and that is the potential for catastrophic failure of the blades.

The stresses on these blades are substantial. Besides the bending loads that are a natural consequence of the wind, there are the tensile stresses placed on the shanks that attach each blade to the hub.

The prop hubs on these machines are complicated devices that are necessary to optimize blade angle for different wind velocities.

Because the entire turbine rotates to keep the blades square to the wind, moving the hub while the blades are turning adds gyroscopic loads to an already complex mix.

I've had some experience studying prop failures on aircraft where the blades are subjected to the same forces as those imposed on wind turbines. Unless the blade has been subjected to trauma, most failures happen in the shank as fatigue weakens it.

Some propeller designs have permanent Airworthiness Directives by the FAA mandating tear-down and X-ray inspection of the shanks in order to prevent catastrophic failure.

When props fail at the blade, it's usually because a crack has propagated from where the blade was struck. That sort of trauma is not likely on wind driven turbines unless, of course, a large bird flies into it.

Regardless of how the trauma is caused, failure of any one blade inevitably causes failure of the others because of the imbalance.

Hubs and blades are not designed to withstand high amplitude vibrations so if one blade fails and separates, the other blades inevitably part company as well.

How bad is the vibration? It's quite violent actually. I've seen situations where the loss of just one blade on a aircraft propeller induced such severe vibrations that the entire engine was torn completely from the aircraft! I've seen motion pictures of the entire wind driven hub and internal transmission being ripped from the tower after a blade failure.

Noise problems notwithstanding, my guess is that the highest probable risk of personal injury around a wind turbine will be from being struck by a blade that has failed.

I continue to hear reports of reduction gear failures in their transmissions. Unless fail safe devices are incorporated in the drive train, a gearbox failure and sudden lock up could conceivably cause total destruction of the turbine blades.

Inertial loads being what they are in that massive a turbine, it seems inevitable that if the hub stops suddenly, it would shed all it's blades and it's any one's guess where or how far they'll travel.

This is a worst-case scenario. While I am confident that engineers have taken all these possibilities into consideration and designed fail-safe factors into their designs, I don't know that.

As I suggested in another post, I'd sooner live next to a nuclear reactor that a wind farm.

L. J.

There's a good video of an overspeed failure of a large wind turbine in Denmark. I linked to it from this CR4 discussion

I suppose if left to imagination...

Impressive. The moral of that is "Don't stand directly under a wind turbine during a wind storm."

I don't think that even under extreme conditions the blade would fly too far. It should be easy enough to figure out a safety radius under extreme failure conditions.

FYI, cool vid.

-Doug

about 1500 rods

One--The cash crop for the land owners are TAX DOLLARS. Mine and yours.

TWO--The "Manifest destiny" of wind generated power--After all the money and all the disruption--Is 1% of power generated globally.--I don't have the source--I'm tired of sifting through this crap. 1%? 1%! It's a chick who stuffs her bra.

Correct me if I am wrong--A wind turbine can produce NO more power than it would consume to turn it with the same amount of force and has an attendance of 25% of the time or less. It may get you away from the propaganda and realize the amount of power that the turbines are likely to produce. Kinda whimpy as far as I am concerned.

Correct me if I am wrong--A wind turbine can produce NO more power than it would consume to turn it..

Hmm, (I know I've chopped off part of your quote..)

But...turning a generator OFF load and turning one ON load are two entirely different things. If you take an ordinary small DC PM motor like you get in kids toys, it's easy to turn...until you put a short across the terminals.

So I'm not sure your visualisation hold up... especially as you could apply the same reasoning to any generator..ok they are bigger, but you could still get one spinning off load.

Del

Mechanical loss--Isn't it the reason of why perpetual motion can't exist?(to a degree)

Say, a clock work--The stored energy you create by lifting weights to run the clock for a definite period of time.

That in mind--If you have a force that can be used to create say HP or electricity or calories or do work, it should be equal to(minus the mechanical loss) to the force you could create with the same amount of HP, electricity, calories or work. Yes --No?

The wind turns the foils and should be similar or possibly equal to what it would take to stop them in the same amount of wind--Nah winds too hard of an example of what I am thinking.

If a dam lets water push it's turbine--and you used that power to run a pump--and you tried to pump the amount of water that moved the turbine and pumped water back into the reservoir--You could with some, but there would be power lost and not all the water would be returned--Mechanical loss?

If you had 100 lbs. and it had potential energy and you used it. What is the difference of taking 100 lbs. and creating the potential by raising it? Is the difference mechanical loss?--they can't be equal, right? Close but not equal?

I thank you Del, but I think you may be party to an aneurysm

I'm 100% with you...I was just trying to illustrate that it's probably harder to turn those blades than you imagine...especially if you had to do it from the generator shaft with sweaty hands and my claws would make it a bit tricky too.

Del

Kilgore Trout,

My simple mind can discern from your statements that you reject wind energy as feasible because it doesn't meet the classification of perpetual motion??

Kilgore wrote: " If a dam lets water push it's turbine--and you used that power to run a pump--and you tried to pump the amount of water that moved the turbine and pumped water back into the reservoir--You could with some, but there would be power lost and not all the water would be returned--Mechanical loss?"

There is a small community North of New York City and West Point called Cornwall-On-The Hudson. It sits near the top of Stormking Mountain and looks down on the Hudson River far below. It's a pastoral setting, especially in the Fall with splendid views of the Hudson River Valley to the North and South.

A supplemental power reservoir, just like the one you defined, was engineered by the local utility company. The idea was to pump water during slack power period's from the river below, until the reservoir was full and just let it set there.

Later, when a drain on the local power grid required it, the water would be allowed to escape downhill through the same tunnel and diverted through a turbine driven generator to supplement the available power.

The plan triggered a hissy fit amongst community residents who were agitated into hysteria by the usual environmentalist wackos who insisted that the stored water would play havoc with the regional water tables. Or the reservoir could spring a leak and wash the town into the river. The fact that the reservoir was virtually solid rock and already a natural bowel was lost in the yelling.

That was back in the 60's and I'm not sure what became of the project. I do have a vague recollection that the large pipe was laid in place and the reservoir area was under development when a court order was issued to temporarily stop the project while the doomsday prophets screamed their usual ". . . the sky is falling!" hysteria.

It's all rather moot. The Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant is just a few miles south. I believe a second immediately adjacent nuclear reactor was built later on.

Except for intermittent shut downs for maintenance, that plant has run continuously for about 50 (?) years. To the best of my memory, there have never been any accidents or leaks of radioactive material in that five decade period.

And as for Cornwall, that nice quiet little town has all but disappeared in the urban sprawl from nearby Manhattan.

The Merrill Creek Reservoir in Warren County, New Jersey is also an artificially created entity that survived the protectionist hollering.

It works exactly as you described: water is stored there and released when needed. The project was funded by power generating utilities.

Environmentalists supported it reluctantly when they found out that it's purpose was not to generate electricity but rather to stabilize water temps in the Delaware River nearby.

Some large power generating stations on the river use river water to cool the towers and the heated water is then discharged back into the river.

The Merrill Creek Reservoir was built solely for the purpose of mixing cool water with the plants discharge so as to normalize water temps and thus not disturb the ecological balance. Subsequent attempts to install power generating turbines caused a lot of rancor and were subsequently withdrawn.

Still, the risk from the artificially made dam is substantial. Many hundreds of homes and thousands of residents live in the valley directly in the shadow of the dam and although a dedicated klaxon alarm system is in place in the potentially endangered communities, it's generally agreed that if the dam suffers a major rupture, there won't be time to avoid a Johnstown Flood scenario. That doesn't seem to bother many as the area as the population in valley continues to grow at a significant rate.

Ironically, most of the power plants involved are coal fired! The coal ash residuals from the one at Martin's Creek are subsequently dumped into a settling ponds at each site.

In early 2007, the timbers that formed the dike burst and tens of thousands of tons of ash contents spilled into the Delaware River. That discharge continued for three days before anyone told the State and Federal EPA's or the local communities. It was almost a week before the breach was closed.

The river is a major supply of water for the many communities in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Like I said earlier, Nukes are better. All this goes to show that most power generating technologies are either not cost effective or create consequential problems that must be dealt with later, usually a tax payer expense.

Even the Nukes are not entirely without consequential cost.

A very old one, ". . the oldest in the Country. . ", is on the West Coast on the Columbia River. It was part of the original Manhattan Project. It was built for one purpose: to be the major supplier of fissionable materials for the atom bombs detonated over Japan in 1945.

60 years later, the site is now part of a major clean up project that is costing USA taxpayers two billion dollars a year and will continue to do so for the next two decades as contractors fuse the radioactive materials into glass like ingots for subsequent shipment out of state to the Midwestern underground storage site.

At the risk of appearing contradictory, I still say Nukes are Better!

A 60 year old nuclear reactor is hardly State of the Art

L. J.

If you are talking about the Trojan nuclear power plant in Oregon--It is gone now(I think less than 10 years ago)

Kilgore asked: "If you are talking about the Trojan nuclear power plant in Oregon--It is gone now (I think less than 10 years ago)"

This was a top secret military installation Kilgore and while it's possible that it was Trojan, I doubt it if for no other reason that the cost of clean up is a current budget line item and spoken for for the next 20 years for the once Top Secret site.

This site is said to be on the Columbia River but I didn't write down where.

L. J.

It was an odd location to begin with, might have been.

Is 1% of power generated globally.

At current employment levels. Go back to the drawing board, establish fact and deliberate upon the actual.

Huh?

Instead responding with anything offensive, what is it, then? I will yeild to you here, sir.

I was insinuating though I agree quite vaguely that criteria used in developing the argument may have arbitrarily rendered your point rather dull regarding wind derived energy. From a general misunderstanding of the application in that arrangement of wind turbine farms were only employed in the areas of the earth surface where wind current were constant @ 12+ mph at 60' height the percentage figure may dramaticly increase.

Dull? Bring them up, please. It is easy to have emotion creep in here and ruin a healthy conversation.

It may dramatically increase? You were pacing me on a figure that I didn't cite a source for. "May"?

U S wind power sometime after 2000 was 0.1% of the total energy produced in this country. 2005 it had climbed to 0.4%--The current figure is hard to find as it changes daily.

I am not claiming that they don't work--Just that the affected area is bigger than any other form of power production I have heard of and the amount of energy is minute. You want them, you can have them, but someone put them where I used to want to live and where I have always considered home. NOT ANY MORE you can have that place also.

I assure you that the region I am in RENDERS my opinion as qualified as yours. I lived 7 miles from the Goodnoe--DOE Mod2 project from the late '70's. I watched that play out from my front yard. I have been witness to this from the onset.

The technology is ramping up so the %% will increase too.

I live in not a hole in the ground but a hole in the prairie sheltered from wind and the turbines are not placed at my door step. They are in the immediate vicinity and at night the beacons are not ugly.

On the subject of ugly those dams and coal fired plants aren't aesthetically pleasing.

Storage is a great endeavor let's use the earth as a battery

I live in a scenic area surrounded by large hills, numerous lakes and many rivers and streams. The proposed erection of 600+ windgens on high elevations would be worse than having a single generating facility. I'll take the dam anyday.

Perhaps. Until you find out it's going to flood 30 miles of your favorite valley.

You're a real bundle of joy!

I hasten to add that it would also flood prime farmland in many cases.

On the positive side I'd suggest flooding would create some valuable shoreline properties which would benefit the township in extra tax revenue (I think I hear the mayor of my town recovering from his coronary vacation).

But I do get your point. The lesser of two impacting dilemmas is what is really the issue.

Right. Everything has an impact. We find ourselves in violent agreement

Just don't lookmup

Kilgore said:

A wind turbine can produce NO more power than it would consume to turn it with the same amount of force

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything? Typical large turbines today are in the 1 to 3 MW range.

...and has an attendance of 25% of the time or less.

I assume by "attendance" you mean "availability." Typical well sited wind turbines today have availability of 65-90%. However, they don't run at full output the whole time they're available. Typical "capacity factor" (the ratio of actual power produced over time to maximum possible power that could have been produced if it ran at full output the whole time) is in the 25-40% range, compared to 40-80% for a conventional power plant (though I think 40% is on the very low side for a conventional plant).

source: American Wind Energy Association (possibly biased, although if the numbers were significantly worse than this it just wouldn't be worth doing)

The researchable information(as unbiased as possible) changes daily on this subject--I am not that interested to research all of it again.

The information has become very optimistic towards wind power. You tell me--Is the advertised MW rating actual or potential? Potential, it is too subjective and if we are discussing facts, the conversation will lose it's consistency.

This site in the 90's had around 80 raptor strikes DOCUMENTED and no I don't own the paperwork--I doubt I could recover it.

Opinion on the subject of need versus acceptable negatives has changed--Read this.

www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/altamont-10-17-2006.html

And here is some propaganda--Who collected the data?:

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/protecting_birds_of_prey_at_altamont_pass/pdfs/factsheet.pdf

The following shows a figure of (in 2005)0.4% of US energy coming from wind--

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-04-windmills-usat_x.htm

The 25% attendance for usable wind was cited from my region and again this was quite awhile ago--Read this, especially the capacity factor section. My opinion is that, again they report with some optimism--The data the wind companies use and report is their own. We don't have anyone else doing it that I know of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power

Picture what it will take to become a SUBSTANTIAL SOURCE OF ENERGY. We are no longer stewards of the land.

All the time I have for now.--Cheers!

http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/07/16/meeting-gives-wind-turbines-a-guilty-verdict/

Mr Trout

Please read the above link. A small community against the machine.

Duck flying high

Kilgore said:

.... We are no longer stewards of the land.

Compared to what? Dumping coal ash in landfills and acid rain on Northeastern lakes and forests? Wind turbines are pretty benign by almost any standard!

If you read the same wikipedia article you reference, it cites a statistic from the DOE:

"U.S. Department of Energy studies have concluded wind harvested in Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota could provide enough electricity to power the entire nation, and that offshore wind farms could do the same job.^{[52][53]" (}Wikipedia⁾

It's fine to grouse about how small a fraction of our energy is provided by wind (or any other alternative), but we need solutions.

Oil is an extremely "rich" source of energy and will not be replaced by any other single energy source. Nonetheless, it is getting more difficult to find and more expensive to extract. There is tons of data on this - it's not an open question. We will need to replace it. Coal (even "clean coal") is dirty. The answer will very likely be a diversity of "alternative" sources, combined with much more efficient use. Our great grandchildren will shake their heads in amazement at how we squandered energy. I'm sitting in a building where the air conditioning in the summer gets parts of it so cold that people run space heaters in their offices to keep warm, when it's 90 degrees outside!

One more thought:

The issue with all "alternative" forms of energy is storage. None of the alternatives provides the same smooth, reliable, 24X7 power that you can get by burning oil or coal. The technology that secures our energy future will very likely not be a generation technology, but a storage technology.

We are no longer stewards of the land----I stand on that and the rest may be true and the only thing I am responding to is the part of storage and amount of area adversely affected--Electricity enables us to do WORK--If we WORK we can produce electricity. There's your storage problem being solved. Don't try to store the state of an electron!

It will take a billion wind generators to supply DOODLY SQUAT--Conservation makes more sense.

http://www.nrel.gov/wind/

I found this--Now if you find a fact or something else that supports a view I don't have--Please don't throw it in my face like I was too stupid to realize it was there. I will try to be objective and I will dig up what I can--just remember this isn't my job and the wind generators have sacked my childhood playground already.

Hi Kilgore,

"If we WORK we can produce electricity."

Please explain?

Don't try to store the state of an electron!

Storage is already pretty widely used, even for conventional sources. Just down the road from me, the Blenheim-Gilboa Pumped Storage Project uses two reservoirs with 1000 feet of vertical separation between them to store energy. They pump water up the hill when there's excess, and let it run down again when they need to generate.

The system can store 12 gigawatt-hours of energy and can generate 1 gigawatt (approximately enough to run Manhattan, I think). One of its best features is that it can go from a standing start to generating a full gigawatt in less than a minute - much faster than any conventional power plant. So when a plant drops off line, it's right there to make up the loss.

How is this water 'pumped'?

By the same turbines that are used for generation. I believe they use Francis turbines.

Ok....so we have a geographic feature here that was utilized to accomodate the generation of power at peak demand and shut down in order to replenish the upper reservoir at low demand....with a creek that helps out. Great idea. Wish we had one. http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/blengil.htm

However....this is not a storage system that can continuously generate power in the true sense of the word. It is the next best thing and looks to be very succesfull in it's inception.

Thanks for the link.

Correct. Storage does not equal generation. It is not a fundamental energy source, just a place to put energy until you need it. However, with all fluctuating sources of energy, storage is necessary to provide energy when the source is not available.

This is the first I have seen, but similar to what I was trying to say--Use the electricity to do something else that can be stored-- In flat country maybe clockworks of sorts--Lift a weight.

I will have to look at it later--off to work, thanks Steve.

Good point, another way to offset the harmonics

Minimal/maximal gain/loss co-efficiants using mechanical models...ie...work done to generate usable energy in conjunction with available energy doing the work to sustain generation of sellable energy....it's the closest we'll get to perpetual motion.

Having said that I think I'll go and kick the shit crap out of the NewAge Energy Technologies ceos' Gucci suit.....figuratively speaking of course....sort of.

I'm wondering whether the Windgen turbines can be converted to accomodate Pelton or Francis wheels.

Hmmm.....all is not lost!

Keep paddling I'm just going to use the power and reduce dependency.

It would be very effective if generating stations of this kind could be staggered in such a way as to continuously supply energy. Upgrades to the existing grid could easily be effected.

If one did a study of the geographic potential to incorporate such an infrastructure the question remains how much generating capacity can be had and over which specific areas.

worth doing in my books.

Generation capacity is in many cases not the biggest issue, matching specific capacity with demand is. There are many storage systems that have been proposed. A very interesting one is using the windmills to compress air in large underground containers and using that compressed air to generate electricity at need.

Separate from wind power, an interesting idea that is to use electric vehicle to store power for use during peak times. Power companies would encourage EV users to charge their vehicles at night and allow them to sell that power back during the day at higher rates. The vehicle owner would be able to make a little money and the cost of the power would still be cheaper for the electric company than buying from expensive on demand generators.

Regrettably, this idea has numerous holes in it. One is that there currently aren't enough EV's to make much of a difference. Second is that I drive my car during the day when they want me feeding the power back into the grid. Finally, any power I sell back is going to be after charging losses (roughly 50%) so the buyback rate per KWh is going to need to be at least twice the price they sell it to me just for me to break even.

Anyone who can find a highly efficient energy storage system can get very rich and be a hero to the environment at the same time. An inexpensive non polluting energy storage system that is 80-90% efficient would change the game for the whole world. We waste enormous amounts of energy by not matching the power generation with the power demand. Additionally a larger portion of the on demand power generation systems are expensive sources and big polluters. By being able to store energy for when it is needed we could drastically cut the number of polluting power generation plants. We could also run the remaining generators in their higher efficiency ranges rather than trying to match the generation to the current demand.

Just something to think about.

-Doug

The thing is that between the theoretical and the hypothetical is an inherant diastrophism which digresses in proportion to the immediate necessity. Just as there are no two people who agree on a given solution does not necessarily mean the solution is the only ticket to heaven. In this present regard the current solution merely accomodates what is available with the current technology and the will to apply it. I refer to windgens. Peachy?........hardly! Sound good?.....depends who one asks! Democratic?........maybe! Either way the demand for energy will grow and back-to-grid buyback must be subsidized at an affordable rate to warrant these technologies succesfull incorporation. THAT puts it directly into the local geographic template.

EXCELLENT

I would completely disagree about widely used--Maybe in that county.

But top notch! That is awesome to see a solution to grid penetration/capacity issues. But I would classify it as hardly, and rare--Do you know of any others?

Environmentalist will reel backwards away from anything that manipulates water in power production--It's a marketing term they use(Do I have to cite it?) Rename it to an indigenous fluid used for storing energy from a sporadic alternative source and it might keep them from freaking out.

The reservoir idea needs work--You will lose fluid and that is lost power.

It were some information that Wind turbine can generate infrasound and it can scare away some animals. Latest investigations shows in Europe big turbins create low pressure zone behind and it kills bats by decompression. Ofcourse, any significant negative effect can create only big industrial turbine, I think it would not be enough space in "backyard" to install any industrial turbine.

There should be none unless she is a hard-core NIMBY. Growing up in southwest, there were always the old Aeromotor windmills around. They made a lot more noise than modern wind turbines and were a lot closer to homes. The only ill effects I ever heard of was people falling off the tower. Oh, and I once pinched the web of my hand in a diagonal support.

Bucky

Oh, and I once pinched the web of my hand ..

Duck in the Pond gets that a lot with his feet

Lap it up furball..........lap it up!

Did I catch a pause before the clause?

Thanks for all the banter over turbines. Gives some real perspective.... and some not so real.

My personal opinion is in support of this source of energy. I would approach the energy company to build one on my site if it wasn't for the noise issue. Plus that video link of the exploding tower looked a little scary.

The only concrete issue is property devaluation.

The project is in the last stage of the process before approval. An environmental evaluation must be completed. I wonder if "people" are included in that evaluation with the birds, fish and above mentioned bats.

I would love to have wind turbines to watch from my back patio. Just not too close.

Careful what you wish for.

Why wait for one of these companies? Why don't you buy one and put it up and make the Gazillion dollars that they produce in power from the free wind, then?--There is a reason that I don't own any--They, without the incentives aren't a good investment.