Via Firehand, here’s something you don’t see every day…
The entire rationale for wind turbines is to stop global warming by reducing the amount of CO2 being returned to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.
In the attached picture, recently taken in Sweden, freezing cold weather has caused the rotor blades of a wind turbine to ice up bringing the blades to a complete stop.
To fix the “problem” a helicopter is employed (burning aviation fuel) to spray hot water (which is heated in the frigid temperatures using a truck equipped with a 260 kW oil burner) on the blades of the turbine to de-ice them.
The aviation fuel, the diesel for the truck, and the oil burned to heat the water, could produce more electricity (at the right time to meet demand) than the unfrozen wind turbine could ever produce. (Before it freezes up again).
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep right on saying it: Solar- and wind-generated electrical systems lend themselves very well to small, localized applications. Depend on governments or big utilities to use the technology in a centralized manner, and all sorts of expensive and worthless stupidity will ensue.
Have you ever watched lighting nail one of those things? They are useless afterwards. Not to mention they look like a tornado on a Doppler radar and you watch the weatherman dismiss the hook as the local wind-farm. While you are trying to figure out whether or not to grab the kids and the critters to head for the storm cellar.
I keep asking all the ‘greenies’ out there about the carbon footprint of the manufacturing, transporting, and installation of those eyesores and with their ten-year life expectancy if they even break-even. Haven’t had a one of them give me a straight answer, hell, I haven’t had one of them give me an answer. Then, the local residents get to pay for the road repairs because the wind farms gets a ten-year tax break from the county/state (more fossil materials being used).
Yup, I know, those things are a sore spot with me.
I have wondered about lightning on the big wind farm turbines. I assume they’ve at least got grounded lightning rods, but with that big and high a target it might not help.
I have seen what happens when lightning hits a smaller wind genny. It ain’t pretty, and it’s terminal. They probably have their uses but I much prefer solar. When I first moved out here in 2006 there were lots of wind turbines, but most of them are gone now.
That is quiet the photo. I didn’t realize the wind generators would freeze up like that. With the cost of those units you would think they would have some form of de-icing gear on them.
When visiting friends in Germany I noted the wind turbines are all over. The two biggest problems they have are low flying aircraft i.e. military and there is no way to store the power that is generated.The Germans really depend upon these things plus solar panels on a lot of the roofs to feed their grid because they have decommissioned their nuclear power plants.
One of my wife’s cousins owns a farm over there. A decade ago he was approached by representatives of a wind turbine generating company who wanted to erect a wind turbine on his property. He struck a deal with them, he granted them access to a small part on a corner of his land where they put up a wind turbine. The deal is the company pays him a monthly fee plus the electricity he uses on the farm he doesn’t pay for. It’s a sweet deal.
The gang is coming over for a visit in March. If I remember I am going to ask about the lightning issues. I would have thought that they would have serious lighting protection. But then again I do remember seeing in fields where there were hundreds of these things and a couple of units always seemed to be out of service. I always thought this was for maintenance but lightning would also explain this.
Remember also that the wind turbines require bearings made of materials that are at the absolute bleeding edge of 21st Century materials science–not that this keeps the manufacturers from buying them made in China, made out of the finest waste material from a nail factory that money can buy, and guaranteed only slightly* radioactive. *for some values of “slightly” No wind turbine lasts long in service. The loads on the bearings are just too high, no matter what kind of unobtainium they’re made from, though the cast whatever-random-scrap-metal-we-paid-children-to-dig-up-from-the-Shanghai-city-dump ones from China certainly don’t help matters.
You will also sometimes, even today, hear people talk about “solar power” and photovoltaic cells as a substitute for real power generation, with a straight face. Photovoltaic cells, the manufacture of which involves etching lots of silicon wafers with hydrofluoric acid–quite possibly the dirtiest industrial process going anywhere on Earth today on a large scale–haven’t gotten much more efficient than they were fifty or sixty years ago, when they were a laboratory curiosity that converted ambient light to electricity at around 0.3% (that’s one third of one percent) efficiency, despite billions, with a B, of tax dollars thrown at snake-oil salesmen at companies like Solyndra that promise the moon and stars, pay themselves eight or nine figure CEO salaries, then declare bankruptcy and run off to Rio with the people’s money. There are reasons, well understood and grounded in 20th Century solid state physics, that the photoelectric effect produces little power down here at the bottom of Earth’s thick soupy atmosphere (and even less when they’re covered in snow in the middle of January, when you really need the juice). This won’t keep the environmentalist wackos from trying.
If any of this snake oil actually worked, 1) the market would invest in it and the “inventors” wouldn’t need welfare checks from Obama, and 2) the environmentalist wackos would be dead set against it. They don’t WANT cheap power. They want to tear down civilization and go back to the caves, which makes them natural allies of the other nihilist madmen on the far Left, and they want it right now, only they want us to go first so that they can arrive fashionably late to the Stone Age. It’s not a secret conspiracy–they publicly say so, whenever they think we aren’t paying attention:
“If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.” —Amory Lovins, environmentalist, Mother Earth News, Nov.-Dec. 1977
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” —Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and Dr. John Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, 1970, p. 323
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” —Jeremy Rifkin, environmentalist, Los Angeles Times, Apr. 19, 1989
A couple of years ago I made a trip from Western Oregon to Eastern oregon along Interstate 80 … which parallels the Columbia River (the border between Washington State and Oregon).
In the area of “The Dalles” I saw the biggest windfarm ever. WHILE I WAS DRIVING (and paying attention to the road), I counted over 260 of these wind generators …. and that was just those which I could see on the bluffs overlooking the river!
Bear in mind that this was the COLUMBIA RIVER, which boasts several hydroelectric dams. Oregon exports electricity to California, because the output is in excess of Oregon needs.
Also, this was within 100 miles of Portland Oregon and Vancouver Washington … Portland is the largest urban area in the state.
And yes, there has been a continued outrage at the number of birds killed by the rotor blades of the windmills. But the blades are sturdier than the birds, so it’s not perceived as a major problem.
Am I the only person looking that and thinking the real stupidity is flying a helo that close to what should be spinning blades, and this his job is to make those blades spin again?
Well, no. That’s what I meant by the title. That much ice weighs a lot and if he’s de-icing that one blade, it’s going to want to go to the top unless the whole thing is clutched down. If he’s in the way when that happens, the helicopter will lose.
Back in the 1980’s,you couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about Rifkin attacking Biotechnology.He filed a ton of lawsuits against it.His main complaint was that scientists
were rushing to use this technology without having a formal discussion on it’s safety and impact on
society and the enviroment.He raised concerns and issues and warned of unforeseen consequences.But now,with his Third Industrial Revolution,Rifkin’s doing the exact opposite.He’s
getting people all excited and anxious to make the switch to renewable energy.The problem is Rifkin’s not raising concerns and issues with renewable energy like he did with Biotechnology.He’s
not questioning the cost,safety and reliability of hydrogen and battery storage and the toxic chemicals and materials used in the production of solar panels.Not to mention the impact solar panels and wind generators will have on society and the evironment.