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Windmills for electricity
Art mentioned in another thread about the windmills poping up in his neighborhood. I've been quite fascinated by them since we have a son involved in all this who keeps me up to speed on their development. The ones he works with are shipped in three 70 ft. tower sections topped by a headhouse holding a a three blade prop with composite blades ninety ft. long. I can't remember the KW rating. Anyhow the group he works with has enough of them sold that they must produce two complete windmills every three working days. This same son is also involved somewhat in the ethanol production industry, so I get a lot of tech. data from him that is sometimes beyond my comprehension. I don't know if we are building windmills fast enough and putting up ethanol plants fast enough to heep ahead of the demand growth or not. I do find the windmills fascinating in that we are harnessing a free source of power, but we may tire of looking at them Frank.
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Windmills for electricity
Frank,
I dont think the windmills will be a problem when we are looking at them from inside our air-conditioned and heated homes. I wish your son the best this is indeed a worth while Job. I'll take two windmills if the payments can be streched out over a long period of time.
Phil
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Windmills for electricity
There are other types of windmills. One type is called Darius Rotor. According to the research I did 30 yeas ago it was one of the more efficent types. Mother Earth News showed ho to make a mill using stacked and halved 55 gallon drums. I built a small one and it worked great. The nice thing about the rotor types I mentioned is that do not have to be oriented into the wind.
Two of our local cities are getting invloved in windmills too to sell energy back to the power co's.
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Windmills for electricity
I'm waiting for the technology to become less intrusive. There are new designs that pretty much can be mounted on or near almost any home. They take less space, make less noise, and kill far fewer birds. Popular Mechanics has a link to one that Jay Leno is building (below). I sure like that magazine.
[Edit] OK, the link to Jay Leno's wind power stuff keeps getting deleted so you can go to PopularMechanics dot com and search for "wind power". It's right there.
[Edit] I put the link in and it works DennisCTB
[Edit] Thanks, Dennis, I just got around to retrying it and I see you were here first.
Link:
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Windmills for electricity
In Michigan's thumb area, a windmill facility was started. A whole bunch of people got upset. They felt there were ugly. Some farmer sold a bunch of land, and they tried stopping them. I guess they may have a couple up and running. It sounds like a good idea to me. When driving up in Northern Michigan along I-75 a couple can be seen just before getting to the bridge.
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Windmills for electricity
Somewhere in the recesses of my brain is the nagging feeling that there is a downside to windmills that nobody is seeing. I'm not talking about bird kills or visual blight, I'm talking about Newton's third law which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If billions of windmills are built what will it do to weather patterns? Will it affect the speed of the earths rotation even slightly? What will the long term ramifications be? Food for thought (or laughter if you're so inclined)
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Windmills for electricity
Ken:
You are correct but that would require vast amounts of windmills. Likewise, if we harvest lots and lots of wave energy the tides may be affected. If there were enough solar panels we could make the earth dark. We also shouldn't have every human and their car go to one spot on the earth simultaneously. But if every muslim went to Mecca at the same time and we had a Christian terrorist that would be good!
A little closer to reality is everyone going to battery powered vehicles in California and everyone charging them using the power grid which barely supports current (he-he) power consumption.
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Windmills for electricity
I have no idea if I'm correct on this or not, but I'm sure the USA is either the largest or next to the top in energy consumption. Even in my somewhat remote part of the country compared to the east and west coasts the new home, business, entertainment business seems to be going at warp speed. It is hard to find a house with one vehicle, most have two or more plus a recreational unit,(boat, RV, Jet ski, etc.) all of these being energy consumers. We as a nation don't seem to want to conserve, (me included). I listen to the son I spoke of and wonder if all the stuff he is involved in is going to keep up with our wants for more energy. Frank.
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Windmills for electricity
I get get cornered and bombarded with ecofriendly green type folk every day in my line of work. (Camping and Outdoor Education.) People are sold on the idea that being environmentally friendly comes in a box- ironically enough. Environmental marketing is a technique that is used because it works, and works well. I chose not to buy into any of it because there is a simpler way to go about accomplishing the same mission: Self reliance. Owning a tractor promotes self reliance, a windmill, even more so. The more self reliant a person becomes, the more concerned he becomes with the resources directly available to him. The better those recources are managed, the more sucsessfull that person becomes. On the other hand, when a person relies on others for everything he depends on in life, then he comes to depend on more.
I don't need one more AOL article or another key note speeker giving me five tips on how to reduce energy consumtion in my home in order to save "Mother Earth". I want to cut the energy use in my home in order to cut my utility bill down to size... but, I don't think that getting advice like "keep your windows closed when using AC" is a good peice of advice... unless you're 6. - Just had to put in my two cents here.
Back to the subject at hand... I would love to have a windmill someday if it means my electric bill is half of what it is now. Anybody know about costs?
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Windmills for electricity
Kleinchris; I get your point. yes owning a tractor or other equipment even just a chainsaw makes a statement that you want to take care of yourself. For the most part we have evolved into a society that could not fare for it's self if the purchased energy sources we are acustomed to became unavailable. We still raise a bit of a garden, know how to, but don't can food in mason jars anymore, I can milk a cow, shoot a rabbit, or butcher a hog or a beef if I had to.
I'm starting to see a stray privately owned windmill here and there but know nothing about their cost or payback period. The ones our son is involved with are high dollar units mostly purchased by energy Co-op's that are set up in groups of maybe fifty or more widnmills. He has told me but again I've forgotten the cost per unit, there must be a reasonable period of cost recovery or the money just wouldn't be going into them. Frank.
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