Image Source: Freepik
This time I’ll take you on a trip kind of like Don Quixote’s as we examine troubling aspects of generation of power by windmills, in our case, just jilting at the wind. Yes, those majestic towers scraping the sky with 3 pronged blades, all shamelessly displaying white privilege (never seen a windmill of color, have you?). They are big, expensive, and if you’ve ever been in the middle of a bunch of them, quite noisy. Did you know the speed of the propeller at the tip is near the speed of sound? But they look innocent, slow moving giants seeming to move by magic.
But like magic, there’s something up their sleeve, now for a few facts.
The only way wind power is built is because of tons of government money (YOUR TAXES) is being poured into the wind. Buying land, burying cables, cutting down old growth forest on the ridge of the mountain, hauling in massive towers, a minimum of 300 feet tall, and erecting doghouses for the turbine generators, transmissions, and propeller mechanisms on top of the tower, and finally installing the prop. When activated they produce DC voltage, some in large quantity, which is put onto a DC line and sent someplace where it’s changed to AC and sent out to be used by the led Christmas lights across the doorway to your basement bar room, and the Costco humidity controlled 48 bottle wine cooler. DC because all ya have to do is make it and dump it onto a line, no pesky phase angles and other Westinghouse nonsense. Simple. Works great. Electric investors get windmills for pennies on the dollar and can create electricity much cheaper than your local utility, who pay full price for their stuff. By the way, the only main part of most windmills that is made in America is the fiberglass “doghouse.” What could possibly go wrong? Ever wonder how much pollution is generated making carbon-fiber windmill blades 120” long? Transporting them? Clearing roads to mountain tops? Digging cables connecting them together and then to the grid?
Well, there are no expenses on the thing for a few months, until the transmission oil needs replacement, or a bearing overheats, and the machine faults off-line to save itself. Maybe a tree falls and hits the prop, cracking a blade. Then the problem arises, the Federal money is for building the dammed things, not maintaining them. Hey savvy investor, it’s your $190k for a new transmission, or $24K for an oil change (did I mention the transmission oil was 300 feet in the air?). Lord help you investors if the prop needs replacement (an estimated 6% do in the first decade if the machine lasts that long), a 350’ crane that can lift 6 tons is expensive, and a ton of special permits are required to transport the 120’ carbon fiber blades from the port to the mountains. Did I mention these things are installed on a mountain top?
Bottom line, there are hundreds of out of service windmills across the country, maybe thousands across the world. There is no plan to fix them, there is no plan to remove them. There is no plan whatsoever, hell, metal scrappers won’t even climb the 300’ for the salvage. Wonder how long before the bolts holding everything together rust and they fall over on their own?
Image Source: Freepik
A working windmill array is not a benign part of the landscape. Green-new-deal- Vietnam-Purple Heart winner John Kerry led a group that wanted no windmills that could be seen from his and other well-heeled property owners on Martha’s Vineyard. Ok, a 300’ tall tower with another 120’ blade on top waving in the breeze can be seen a long way, and as mentioned, they’re white! Shallow water is < a mile out. Guess what’s a few miles off the MV coast, just out windmill of sight of land? 1,000’ to 3,500’ deep water. A little tedious to build a windmill in ¼ mile or more deep water, then run cables 25 miles to land. Just remember, windmills are not okay in sight of Martha’s Vineyard, noooo way, but they’re just fine on the land next to your West Virginia mountain property you fuc*ng hayseed deplorable.
Bats are our friend, except maybe the ones from some ancient cave in China where the Chi-Comms had to go messing with them, then “accidently” developed bat-shit crazy viruses nearly killing the human population of Earth. But I digress. Normal flying mice (bats) eat a ton of bugs and do so nightly.
They find bugs by a type of sonar and are pretty good at detecting a flying bug as small as a mosquito and consuming it in mid-air. If, however, they get near a rotating 240’ diameter propeller, with the afore mentioned blade-tip speed near the speed of sound, the pre-prop air pressure-VS-after-prop air pressure difference blows out their little sonar-tuned-ear drums. Forget the likely excruciating flying mouse pain, they are now not only blind as a bat, but sonar deaf as well. No, you won’t find piles of the little guys dead under the windmill, they fly away, lost, until they crash into a tree or something, or simply drop from exhaustion. Bam! The mysterious decline in bat-cave population in mountain areas is explained, no it was not some bat-eating fungus.
But hey, no problem since bats don’t have money grubbing-green-new-deal-carbon-offset buffoons with private jets pointing bony (but manicured) fingers at the throngs of tree-huggers arguing to protect those innocent bats, and they do not live where the bugs are no longer controlled by flying mosquito catchers, anyway, mosquitos don’t like blood containing $1,200 a bottle Chardonnay.
We all have heard of the decimation of birds of prey in the vicinity of windfarms. I am skeptical of the numbers, but not of the fact that drifting hawks, eagles, and even buzzards, most of which are protected species by the way, routinely get T-boned by a windmill blade. There are YouTube videos of it happening. They never win the encounter. Remember, birds look ahead and down, the blade comes from the side at 90° to their normal soaring path.
One of the most prolific and trustworthy windfarms anywhere is on the Columbia River gorge in Washington State. The topography of this area sends winds over the edge of the bluffs and into the gorge, windmills along the cliffs catch the dropping air and make a ton of power. Unlike most areas, the wind does not die at sunset, although it does diminish. It is the prime supplier of electricity for one of the three “north-south Pacific DC Interties,” these million-volt DC feeders supply a big part of the left coast and much of California’s electricity. One day some years ago, the wind simply stopped, and stayed stopped for 10 days. Chaos in all the electric control rooms, luckily this was before many of the coal fired generation plants had been destroyed during the Obama/Biden years, and most were brought back on-line. These are now gone and if the wind stops again the rolling blackouts in CA will not be rolling, they will last until the wind starts again.
Since the Texas freak storm a year or so ago, we all now know what can happen to windmills in a severe ice storm, especially where ice seldom happens. The windmills simply stop, and probably a good thing because if the pitch of the propeller were set to a radical degree, the wind would over-speed the device and explode the transmission (there are YouTubes of that too!). The props are automatically adjusted to bite or deflect wind to maintain stable revolutions per-minute. If the gear system to do this is frozen, and if it froze when there was little wind and the prop was set to max angle of attack, and the wind picks up…BOOM!
Well, I could go on, but like all things that start with Federal money, there are countless unintended consequences. Wild fluctuations in wind farm total outputs, maintenance fiascos, dead ones across the mountain tops, wildlife destruction, and worst of all these woke days, they are all white.
At least Don Quixote thought he had a good idea what he was going against, we just have what the government, the jet-setting charlatan Al Gore, and that buffoon John Kerry says it is.
Some stuff to think about when discussing the green-new-deal.
To know more about the grid and how the USA power system works, read “The Grid” by Gretchen Bakke
