lol. Once a oil man always a oil man. T.B. Pickens pulls the plug on his windmill scheme now supporting drilling for natural gas and oil. With over a million supporters of his energy plan based on wind energy he shuts it down and now endorses oil and gas. Imagine that? The problem was to be the infrastructure to deliver the electricity. The solution would be to make smaller wind farms right next to the grid. Can you say rocket science.
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There are plenty of places along the grid that wind generators can be placed and it would cost less to tie them in. We need to put them where they will work. Using the existing grid makes it simple with less problems. When you start a movement based on wind then switch to drilling, that's not progress that's manipulation.
Russell Ade | 07/08/09 | 22:34 PM
Russell Ade | 07/09/09 | 10:36 AM
If the wind generators were mounted on top or over the existing grid towers
Unfortunately these towers could not handle the dynamic load. In winter it is common for lines to be brought down by the static weight of ice. Now imagine the dynamic sideways load on a tower from a wind generator. The drag of a generator is directly proportional to its wind profile - silhouette, if you like - and increases as the square of the wind speed. That is for steady winds - gusts cause even more problems such as shock loads and flutter.
I am very much in favour of wind generators. They may be ugly but the prospect of permanent damage to the environment from our over-dependence on coal and oil is a lot uglier.
Patrick Lockerby | 07/09/09 | 11:17 AM
I believe the look of a massive wind machines over a massive grid would be a monument to a great society, might as well be ours. Of course it would have to be engineered. The grid is impressive but at 2 or 3 times the height with wind machines it would be awesome. If you can imagine it, it's almost of science fiction proportion. I'm sure many of us who marvel at great engineering would love to see it.
Russell Ade | 07/09/09 | 22:36 PM
The issue, as we all knew it would be despite green energy utopian claims, is running thousands of miles of new miles of power lines through someone's backyard - and those someone's with high voltage transformers near their houses will invariably be poor people, not activists living in cities.
If the spot he wanted in Texas won't allow it - and they won't - he has to go somewhere else in the midwest. As he says, those turbines won't fit in his garage. And if you live in California, you know that putting wind turbines where they are convenient rather than where they work doesn't ... work. If I drive to Livermore I can see plenty of that $15 billion boondoggle sitting idly on the hill.