The Great Windfarm -vs- Lesser Prairie Chicken Fight

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009727245_apwaspottedowlwindfarm.html
And in the State of Washington:
Spotted owls block Skamania wind farm expansion
Plans for a wind farm on some state land in Skamania County are on hold because it’s spotted owl habitat.

Freudian slip? . . . that would be Audubon.

There is always some kind of an effect on wildlife how about the desert tortise catching five in the shade of a heliostat or other solar power collector, the caribou huddling around the heated oil pipeline, raptors getting “cuisinarted” by the windmills and now windmills and transmission lines disturbing the mating habits of prarie chickens. Not to mention the deer raccoons birds etc that end up as road kill (you might even be more prone to hit them with a quiet electric car) We just can’t win. Perhaps mountain top removal for coal mining isn’t as bad as it seems.
great article!

Between NIMBY and endangered creatures it’s going to be pretty difficult to find places to put 200 times more windmills than we already have, to replace just our current electrical demand, let alone provide for any growth in supply. And given the notoriously poor performance and intermittent nature of wind power we’d probably have to double or even triple those numbers to have any hope of adequate supplies. There has been quite a bit of enthusiasm around here lately for flywheel systems to provide the necessary buffer to tide the windmills through slack wind and I certainly hope the new ones workout but having looked at the sites for some of the manufacturers claiming breakthrough technology I usually find the BS detector in the back of my head going off rather loudly. The idea is eminently feasible, but the implementations have been difficult and a lot of info on the flywheel websites is of the form of “If we can just get a truck full of money, we’ll be banging these things out in no time”. I’m willing to be convinced, but haven’t been, so far. Even if they do perform as described, we’re still left with the problem of where to build all these beauties and since the wind power is already seriously expensive the additional cost of the, presumably not cheap, flywheels will add to the subsidy required. Of course, if you’re filled with pure motives and good intentions you don’t really need to worry about the little details. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
‘

BTW, now that [Ted Kennedy has passed on], maybe that big wind project in the Atantic off Hyannis Port can finally set sail. I think it would be the most fitting memorial possible for the big windbag, if it was named in his honor.

The wind industry is in a very ironic position. It’s not financially viable on its own and thus requires the government to compel consumers to buy its product. The justification for forcing the public to buy the overpriced product is environmentalism. But then it turns out that the greens are killing off wind power about as fast as they’re building it up. It’s a bit like the dog becoming dependent on the ticks. A couple of links discussing specific instances:
http://www.otherbrothersteve.com/?p=3263
http://www.otherbrothersteve.com/?p=2962

The windmills is not the problem if you build them on chicken farm territory.
But wait until they make you wear wooden shoes (clogs) plant tulip and the Japanese come in to make pictures.
That is the moment life starts to become pretty embarrassing and inconvenient.
Ask the Dutch.

So what comes first. The chicken or the windfarm? 🙂
The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.

Now the real damages of the AGW-cult start to occur. I don’t speak of some stupid birds (Sorry for that….but it’s true).
I speak of massive destructions of the environment by wind turbines. I don’t speak of wind turbines in the US where they have plenty of space, I speak about wind turbines in the dense populated areas in Europe!! They destroy beautiful landscapes by their 50-100m high tubines!! IN THE NAME OF PROTECTION OF THE NATURE!
The “Greens” oppose everything, they oppose production plants, roads, everything to “protect the nature”. I even know about two cases where they killed two hydroelectric power plants, even they were planned at very remote areas!
The day is very near where I start “civil disobedience”, but the other direction than idiots like J. Hansen

They are playing a game of chicken with America’s energy supplies.

What appals me is the over-design.
Vertical windmills mount the generator vertically and avoid a lot of engineering as a result, and they’re gust-proof.
These things will fail and there will be no money to mend them. In ten years their tattered hulks will stand testimony to an age of Hubris.

If I were the windmill people, the moment the prairie chicken’s name was raised, my breed and release program would have begun. For literally “chicken feed”, the Texas countryside can be flooded with miserable prairie chickens. There are inexpensive ways to fight back against enviro loons, when one considers the relative cost of the projects they are blocking. Animals like Mexican wolves breed quickly and need not be a development roadblock . . . if you like animals, and have alittle imagination. The enviro wackos see these animals as freebie keys to blocking development. It would be cheaper to raise a bunch of whatever is being touted at the moment than see billion dollar projects scotched.

Problem is also that these 5500 MegW’s of energy are “nameplate” ratings – reduce that a “on-line” factor of around 19 – 23 pert based on German, Denmark, and Spanish experience with their wind mills.
And those countries rely on base load generation from French nuclear reactors.
The reality is that electricity systems are demand driven systems. Not enough supply (when the wind isn’t blowing) and the system or parts of it go down or are shut down. Too much supply (when the wind is blowing) is lost.
Wind power is useless for mains electricity suppply. Although it may have a role where demand can be regulated to meet supply such as desalination.
Passive solar is a much more promising technology because storage of power as heat is viable.

anna v (22:49:51) :
Blinking pore, went ‘poof’ overnight. Single pixel.
SWPC no count.
All My Rotations.
Days of our Pores.
As the Sun Turns.

Saw a spotted owl once. It was stuck in my boss’s radiator.
Point is: No matter where you go somebody can find a species to stop all progress.
Green Energy is doomed.
Look at the Dinosaurs: They went extinct when all that Fossilized Green Energy was produced.

The left invented “endangered species” and they invented their use to stop projects they didn’t approve of. In a delightful turn about, they are now blindsided when projects they favor falter because of one of their own tactics.
In truth, the left doesn’t know what it wants, except it is constantly yearning for a secular utopia, where resources are not finite, where hard choices do not have to be made and where everything is based only on good intentions. And worse, not only can they not bring themselves to be honest with the rest of us, I can only conclude they cannot be honest with themselves.
When the left scolds us that instead of conventional energy we could use a little bit of the vast barren desert to build “non polluting” and “renewable” solar power plants, and yet quickly finds reasons to oppose the building of those plants when they are actually proposed, what did they really want all along? Not renewable power, now solar power! They wanted NO power! Indeed, when the left tells us that the earth would just be better off if humanity had never come alone, they really mean it. Such self-loathing foolishness. Indeed, such dangerous foolishness.

Official government and Greenstrife/Fiends of the Earth reaction to the toll on birdlife of their ghastly “wind farms” is to ignore it or to claim that the ornithologists and bird watchers are exagerating the problem. Of course none of them live anywhere near the damned things and so don’t have to put up with the noise from them or the bird carcasses.

Aren’t Bats a severely protected species in Old Blighty? I have heard that if they are in your belfries, you have to move! How many bats are being processed by these giant Cuisinarts? Seems bats would be particularly vulnerable to them. Wouldn’t the owners of these enormous rotating knives be subject to huge fines for every dead bat?
Bat pie anyone?

The problem is that Prairie Chickens need prairies. Without shortgrass prairies it doesn’t matter however many you raise and release, they will go extinct all the same.

A very good business within a few years: A lot of scrap.

I suspect that all the harmonics drive the flying mice batshit crazy and away from windmills, but don’t birds have pretty good hearing, too? What does the wind sheer do to insects? I’ll bet toads sit under them, just like they do at streetlights. The thumping frog of Caliwindmill County.
===============================================

nogw 06:00:47
Yes, I’ve seen the trains go by; oversized cars carrying gorgeously shaped clubs sticking out fore and aft. Immense, blunt force instruments. The real damage is the weakened winds distal to the windmills; they create regional climate change and damage directly proportional to the amount of energy stolen from the wind, and worth far more. The cure for the regional destruction is worse and more than the benefit from the energy ripped off from the wind, one of the globe’s premier climate regulating mechanims.
===============================

This story was out in Texas in early August. Notice how these headlines portray the native wildlife as the villian.
“Native Prairie Chicken Threatens Wind Energy Expansion In Texas”
“Prairie grouse could hamper wind energy growth”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h1XABXkmxXarxZDRzr_IrO5FtkkgD99S7KU82
And I don’t like this part of the story.
“For energy companies, it’s a race. If transmission towers to bring the energy from the turbines to utility companies are up before the bird is listed, the structures would be grandfathered. If not, they probably would have to avoid the birds’ habitat.”

Bats can fly outside all night long and I will not bother them. Sneak into my bedroom and their ass is mine. You knock um down with hornet spray than broom them to death.

Utility transmission and distribution lines, the backbone of our electrical power system, are responsible for 130 to 174 million bird deaths a year in the U.S.1 Many of the affected birds are those with large wingspans, including raptors and waterfowl. While attempting to land on power lines and poles, birds are sometimes electrocuted when their wings span between two hot wires. Many other birds are killed as their flight paths intersect the power lines strung between poles and towers. One report states that: “for some types of birds, power line collisions appear to be a significant source of mortality.”2
Collisions with automobiles and trucks result in the deaths of between 60 and 80 million birds annually in the U.S.3 As more vehicles share the roadway, and our automotive society becomes more pervasive, these numbers will only increase. Our dependence on oil has taken its toll on birds too. Even the relatively high incidence of bird kills at Altamont Pass (about 92 per year) pales in comparison to the number of birds killed from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. In fact, according to author Paul Gipe, the Altamont Pass wind farm would have to operate for 500 to 1000 years to “achieve” the same mortality level as the Exxon Valdez event in 1989.
Tall building and residential house windows also claim their share of birds. Some of the five million tall buildings in U.S. cities have been documented as being a chronic mortality problem for migrating birds. There are more than 100 million houses in the U.S. House windows are more of a problem for birds in rural areas than in cities or towns. While there are no required ongoing studies of bird mortality due to buildings or house windows, the best estimates put the toll due collisions with these structures at between 100 million and a staggering 1 billion deaths annually.4
Lighted communication towers turn out to be one of the more serious problems for birds, especially for migratory species that fly at night. One study began its conclusion with, “It is apparent from the analysis of the data that significant numbers of birds are dying in collisions with communications towers, their guy wires, and related structures.”5 Another report states, “The main environmental problem we are watching out for with telecommunication towers are the deaths of birds and bats.”6
This is not news, as bird collisions with lighted television and radio towers have been documented for over 50 years. Some towers are responsible for very high episodic fatalities. One television transmitter tower in Eau Claire, WI, was responsible for the deaths of over 1,000 birds on each of 24 consecutive nights. A “record 30,000 birds were estimated killed on one night” at this same tower.7 In Kansas, 10,000 birds were killed in one night by a telecommunications tower.8 Numerous large bird kills, while not as dramatic as the examples cited above, continue to occur across the country at telecommunication tower sites.
The number of telecommunication towers in the U.S. currently exceeds 77,000, and this number could easily double by 2010. The rush to construction is being driven mainly by our use of cell phones, and to a lesser extent by the impending switch to digital television and radio. Current mortality estimates due to telecommunication towers are 40 to 50 million birds per year.9 The proliferation of these towers in the near future will only exacerbate this situation.
Agricultural pesticides are “conservatively estimated” to directly kill 67 million birds per year.10 These numbers do not account for avian mortality associated with other pesticide applications, such as on golf courses. Nor do they take into consideration secondary losses due to pesticide use as these toxic chemicals travel up the food chain. This includes poisoning due to birds ingesting sprayed insects, the intended target of the pesticides.
Cats, both feral and housecats, also take their toll on birds. A Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) report states that, “recent research suggests that rural free-ranging domestic cats in Wisconsin may be killing between 8 and 217 million birds each year. The most reasonable estimates indicate that 39 million birds are killed in the state each year.”11
There are other studies on the impacts of jet engines, smoke stacks, bridges, and any number of other human structures and activities that threaten birds on a daily basis. Together, human infrastructure and industrial activities are responsible for one to four million bird deaths per day!
turbine deaths:
The report found that over the study period, 25 bird carcasses were found at the sites. The report states that “the resulting mortality rate of 1.29 birds/tower/year is close to the nationwide estimate of 2.19 birds/tower.16- The report further states, “While bird collisions do occur (with commercial wind turbines) the impacts on global populations appear to be relatively minor, especially in comparison with other human-related causes of mortality such as communications towers, collisions with buildings, and vehicles collisions. This is especially true for small scale facilities like the MG&E and WPS wind farms in Kewaunee County.”17
The report goes on to say, “previous studies suggest that the frequency of avian collisions with wind turbines is low, and the impact of wind power on bird populations today is negligible. Our study provides little evidence to refute this claim.”18
So, while wind farms are responsible for the deaths of some birds, when put into the perspective of other causes of avian mortality, the impact is quite low. In other words, bird mortality at wind farms, compared to other human-related causes of bird mortality, is biologically and statistically insignificant. There is no evidence that birds are routinely being battered out of the air by rotating wind turbine blades as postulated by some in the popular press.
http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html

Time ago a poster here gave the figures of Finland´s windfarms actual yield of about 2.5% (two and a half per cent!). He gave a link. I would like to get that link again as it is a real important data.

wes george (00:52:49) :
Surely, that’s why a chicken that can’t really fly represents the only weapon neo-Luddites can wield as an axe to chop these beautiful machines down.
Prairie chickens are excellent fliers, highly wary of movement, and spook easily. In my experience in Nebraska, the actual numbers are vastly underestimated.
For example, the American flying squirrel is a listed specie. In Arkansas there is a $500.00 penalty for cutting a tree down that contains a nesting site. The Ark. Game and Fish estimated, alledgely from field counts, that on average there was roughly one nesting pair/100acres. Unfortunately these nests are extremely hard to spot from the ground. When I owned a sawmill I followed BMPs and selective cutting (as opposed to clear cut) and instructed my crews to keep an eye out for nests. We found a nest or two a week or one nesting pair/10 acres (unfortunately usually after the fact). The point: the squirrels only come out at night, and do not fly when predators are around (read man). The numbers were seriously underestimated. There’s a simple solution if you want to increase Prairie chicken numbers,
1.Improve the habitat. They like a 1-2 acre plot with short grass (2″ or less, ie buffalo grass or mowed area) surrounded by taller species to strut their stuff.
Plant some forb food species:alfalfa Illinois bundleflower, prairie coneflower, etc and some wild plum, sumac, etc for nesting sites.
2. Kill coyotes. The number of Prairie chickens is highly associated with the decline in sales of fur coats and price of pelts.
Another unintended consequence of envirogreenie policies.

bill (07:02:40) :
1. Agricultural pesticides are “conservatively estimated” to directly kill 67 million birds per year.10 These numbers do not account for avian mortality associated with other pesticide applications, such as on golf courses. Nor do they take into consideration secondary losses due to pesticide use as these toxic chemicals travel up the food chain. This includes poisoning due to birds ingesting sprayed insects, the intended target of the pesticides.
2. Cats, both feral and housecats, also take their toll on birds.
1. If you add up all your numbers, the total exceeds the number of birds on earth (10, 11). But I’ll just take these two scenarios. Since the EPA eliminated the use of pesticides with an LD50 below 2500, I’ll have to see the actual reference and sampling techniques to believe this scrod.
2. Colorado Game and Fish studies determined that feral cats (released or abandoned domestics) were the number one predator of quail and pheasants.

Split Atoms -not Birds…

ERCOT, The Electric Reliability Council of Texas is responsible for operating and regulating the Texas electric grid. They have now determined that the capacity value of all the wind farms in Texas is only 8.7%. Although wind promoters claim that 3.5% of the the electricity generated in Texas is from wind, ERCOT has determined that Texas will really only receive 1.2% from wind through 2014.
http://bx.businessweek.com/green-energy/view?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.energytribune.com%2Farticles.cfm%3Faid%3D2159

Geoff Sherington (03:13:39) :
““Denmark trades power in the same Nord Pool, which has announced that from October the spot floor price for surplus power will drop from zero to minus EUR 20 cents/kWh. In other words, wind generators producing power in periods of low demand will have to pay the network to take it…
Wind generators may be losing EUR 0.20 per kWh, but they’ll make it up in volume.

Tim Clark (08:23:50) : the figures are not mine but from the reference given.
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/2009/07/wind-birds-and-bats.html
http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/policy/windfarms/index.asp
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2227411/wind-farm-impact-bird-life
It all depends on which agenda you are pushing

All that’s needed to assure survival of the bird is repetition that they taste good. People will raise them, whether indoors or outdoors.
And on behalf of the males of the Lesser Prairie Chicken, I suggest adding to the list of names to be changed.

I see richcar has already posted this link…
From the regulator of power in Texas. Note that if Texas was a country, it would be considered the 6th largest producer of wind power in the world.
Click here for Press Release
Using 2006 data, ERCOT has determined that 8.7% of the installed wind capability can be counted as dependable capacity during the peak demand period for the next year. Conventional generation must be available to provide the remaining capacity needed to meet forecast load and reserve requirements.
My emphasis.
Which means, for every mW of power that wind generates, you also need to build 0.91 mW of conventional power generation (coal, gas or nuclear). Or you could build 11.5 mW of wind capacity, to ensure 1 mW of power.
So, you could build 12 wind power plants;
or 1 wind and 1 conventional plant;
or 1 conventional plant.
And generate the same power, when needed.

Robert Wood (10:16:11) :
Dave Wendt (22:46:14)
But all those flywheels will change the spin of the Earth.
Oh, wait, New Scientist has already claimed that one.
Hey, flywheels are great stabilizers. Maybe, if we just build enough of them, we can get rid of that pesky planetary wobble that’s rumored to be causing all those ice ages, or at least counter the 2.5 cm of polar drift, that the disappearing ice caused by AGW is causing, Come on, it MIGHT work!

Bats are, indeed, killed by wind turbines. According to a recent Canadian study involving post mortem examination of the bats, the turbines alter air pressure in a manner that causes bat lungs to explode. Because no one has taken a census of these bat populations, we aren’t able to put the numbers here into perspective. Do wind turbines represent a nominal or major threat to these populations? We have no idea.
I wrote a recent blog post on this issue pointing out that ExxonMobil was recently fined $7K per dead bird (after they landed in wastewater pools). If the same standards were to be applied to windfarms, they’d all be bankrupt. Why is one kind of energy producer legally prosecuted for bird deaths but not others? Is this a looming liability that should discourage any sane business person from touching wind power with a ten-foot-pole?
My blog post is here:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-much-is-birds-life-worth-part-1.html
Cheers!

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Environmental groups have been using the declining number of prairies chickens and sage grouse as a bludgeon ( Endangered Species Act) to have cattle removed from public land throughout the west.
Permits for power lines and fences have been refused due to the possibility raptors could use the perch to prey on the game birds.
Sage hen at least can fly faster than shotgun pellets…I can attest to this!

I don’t get it. Birds in general deal with wind-blown branches all the time. Windmills shouldn’t be an issue for them.
Prairie chickens like other poultry fowl, do not fly very high off the ground at all. I doubt they could get on top of a Winnebago, let alone to the rotors of a power-generating windmill.

People, these are not airplane propellers. I live in windcharger country. They are all over the place. I wish they had brown towers and green blades for aesthetics, but anyway.
I’d guess that the blade tips move at 20-30 mph based upon observation and car speed at the same difference. Certainly no more than twice that. Possibly 10-12 rpm.
And they are nearly always in motion.

Pamela Gray:
Bats use echolocation for avoiding obstacles. Unfortunately evolution has only provided them with echolocation to find obstacles in front of them, not ones coming in from the side at 200 mph. Further bats seem to be very sensitive to abrupt pressure changes and are apparently often killed without even coming into physical contact with the blades.

If they were polar bears and not prairie chickens, this would be a world-class news story.
What we need is pictures of little prairie chicken chicks to set this off. Be sure not to photograph and hawks or predators hunting the birds and be sure to also get ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of the prairie chickens documenting their encounters with the turbines.

Well, one German environmental minister once said:
“Wind turbines will be seen as the cathedrals of our time”.
He did not know how right he was. Just like the cathedrals of medieval times, they dominate their environment, have no economic function, but are monuments to the religious faith of their rich and powerful builders, and paid for by the peasants.

The main weakpoint with the operational life of a wind turbine is the gear-box. Gear Boxes fail after about 5 years. They are like the transmisson of a semi. There is no technical substitute (electronic/electrical) for the mechanical gearbox, since they must be the main component of transferring the extremely high torque, slow rotation speed of the spinning wind turbine to the 60 hertz grid requirements. This fact more or less limits maximum nameplate capacity of wind turbines.

Steve Schaper (12:12:49) :

I’d guess that the blade tips move at 20-30 mph based upon observation and car speed at the same difference. Certainly no more than twice that. Possibly 10-12 rpm.

Mmmmmm…
One of the limits on these monsters is the tip speed approaching the speed of sound!
DaveE.

Nogw
If I understand you correctly, your point is well worth taking. I’ve been on the platform overlooking the 8 to 10 generators in one room producing power from hoover damn. The 8 to 10 generators produce more electricity in one year than the proposed T. Boone Pickens giganic wind farm (4000 wind turbines) in the Texas Panhandle which cover hundred of square miles.

When one compares the bird or bat kill from wind turbines with other structures, you should keep in mind the significant aerodynamic differences.
The flow streamlines in wind turbines go through the wind turbine, which has the tendency to suck the birds into the blades, whereas the flow streamlines for stuctures point away from the structure which pushes the birds away from the structure.

Pamela Gray (06:55:24) :
Bats can fly outside all night long and I will not bother them. Sneak into my bedroom and their ass is mine. You knock um down with hornet spray than broom them to death
Years ago I had this insane yellow maine coon mix-Hobbes, one night my wife was
sitting in the living room of our old place in Port Orford,Or, and noticed Hobbes gnashing his teeth and looking up at the ceiling,then something large and dark flew
across her line of sight.It was one of the large,local, south coast bats,Boone and Crockett candidate bats.Hobbes leaped up, and nailed the Bat, and proceeded to
drop the still quite living and irritated bat at my wife’s feet.Now my wife, being
the product of Kentucky hill people, didn’t freak, but grabbed the broom.The bat
now is back in the exposed rafters, and is not about to co-operate with wife or
cat.At this point I arrived.Taking a step ladder and armed with a smaller broom,I
extricate said bat. that promptly does a nice immelmann,and flies out the door,
cat and wife in hot pursuit.Never had that happen again.However, Hobbes was searched every time he came in to make sure he wasn’t carrying his evening’s entertainment…

Douglas Taylor (13:49:57) :
The main weakpoint with the operational life of a wind turbine is the gear-box. Gear Boxes fail after about 5 years. They are like the transmisson of a semi. There is no technical substitute
Just so Wrong! Electronics can convert the output of a variable speed rotor into sychronous AC that can be fed to the grid via a transformer. This enables wind turbines to equal or better the performance of a standard generator under fault conditions. Resynchronization can be instantaneous.
Total moving high power parts 1 plus feathering and pointing control.
http://www.enercon.de/www/en/broschueren.nsf/vwwebAnzeige/A1F46D4783166914C125747B002DD858/$FILE/Netzintegration_Windpark_eng.pdf
check the rest of the site for other detail.

Henry chance (11:41:39) :
One of the two secret expenses are the cost of a gathering grid and loss of power.
Wrong. (unless the US grid is far inferior to UK)
Wiki
Uk gid power losses total:
[edit] Losses
Figures are again from the 2005 SYS.
Joule heating in cables: 857.8 MW
Fixed losses: 266 MW (consists of corona and iron losses; can be 100 MW higher in adverse weather)
Substation transformer heating losses: 142.4 MW
Generator transformer heating losses: 157.3 MW
Total losses: 1423.5 MW (2.29% of peak demand)
Although losses in the national grid are low, there are significant further losses in onward electricity distribution to the consumer, causing a total distribution loss of about 7.7%.[6] However losses differ significantly for customers connected at different voltages; connected at high voltage the total losses are about 2.6%, at medium voltage 6.4% and at low voltage 12.2%.[7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(UK)

One of the two secret expenses are the cost of a gathering grid and loss of power. A generator creates all it’s power in a single plant and is tied to a distribution grid. A wind farm is about gathering from a string of a hundred generators and shipping the electric elsewhere. The power loss of resistance is 10% per 60 miles. So if the farm is 200 miles from a city, we loose 2/3rds of the electricity.
.9^3.3333 ~= .7

Why many of you first world people have lost your reason?, you have made big advancements in science and technology, but this…, come on!, you just can´t imagine what the rest of the world think of you, with all these stupid ideas.
Of course nobody will say you that. The cultural phenomena you are in is reflected in those silly movies made in hollywood, for mentally retarded!. All that nut´s “discovery channel” science, all those end of the world theories, which reflect not other thing but your own subconcious recognition that you are near the end…and now you want to plant all these “fans”, those mounstrous “transformers” kind of things all over the landscape….Believe me: You are about to kill the rest of the world, just by laughing at you!.

GEAR BOXES AGAIN: I copied this from the Web, from WindPower Magazine.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
THE GEARBOX: WINDPOWER’S ACHILLES’ HEEL
This month’s Windpower Monthly examines a little-known twist in the “mature technology” of large-scale wind turbines:
Gearboxes have been failing in wind turbines since the early 1990s. Barely a turbine make has escaped. Six years ago the problem reached epidemic proportions, culminating in a massive series failure of gearboxes in NEG Micon machines. At the time, the NEG Micon brand was the most sold wind turbine in the world. The disaster brought the company to its knees as it struggled to retrofit well over one thousand machines. It has since been taken over by Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer. Vestas is still grappling with the aftermath of the gearbox catastrophe.
The wind power industry and its component suppliers now believe that such major series failure of gearboxes is a thing of the past. Today’s far larger and more sophisticated turbines, they say, are safe from mistakes encountered in early phases of technology development.
Bigger turbines, however, are proving to be far from immune to gearbox failure, as Windpower Monthly reports in its November issue. …
The wind industry’s gearbox problem has for years been shrouded in secrecy. While blame for the failures has been spread far and wide, questions outnumber the answers by far. At Windpower Monthly we set ourselves the task of finding out the true scale of the problem. Why is it that gearboxes in wind turbines have so massively failed? What is the solution? …
The good news is that understanding of the highly complex loads that gearboxes — and particularly their bearings — are subject to is being helped by a new industry willingness to co-operate and face up to the challenges of wind power’s rapid technological evolution. But only time will tell whether a definitive solution has been found — and whether it will stay the course as wind turbines get ever bigger and more demanding of engineering ingenuity.

kim (06:43:06) : “The real damage is the weakened winds distal to the windmills; they create regional climate change and damage directly proportional to the amount of energy stolen from the wind, and worth far more.”
Could you let me have more detail, perhaps a link, kim, so that I may gain an understanding of this? (My email is RogerCarr AT datacodsl.com)

Nogw (11:48:09) : “I am proud that recently my government, the peruvian government, has rejected offered investments for the installation of this “1st.world” non-sense…”
Clever Peru, Nogw! You have every reason to be proud… and relieved.

bill (15:49:37) :
Douglas Taylor (13:49:57) :
The main weakpoint with the operational life of a wind turbine is the gear-box. Gear Boxes fail after about 5 years. They are like the transmisson of a semi. There is no technical substitute
Just so Wrong!
Apparently, the Department of Energy thinks you’re “just so wrong”.
Current Obama money pit:
A new U.S. large dynamometer facility is needed for the following reasons:
• The long-term reliability of the current generation of megawatt-scale drivetrains has not yet been fully verified through field operating experience. As a result of fleet-wide gearbox maintenance issues and related failures, it is now becoming an increasingly standard practice to perform extensive testing of new gearbox configurations on a dynamometer to prove performance, durability and reliability before they are introduced into serial production.

TonyB,
I think the idea that windfarms will steal the wind and change the climate is so bogus. It just shows how desperate the anti-development crowd is. What we see revealed is an anti-human movement going on here; NOT a pro-environmental movement. They use “holy lying” like the cults.
Grant

Tony and Roger, sorry I don’t have more, but conjecture from theory.
Grant, I suspect you project. What we see revealed here is a bizarre sensitivity to motive. Because of losses of efficiency, and of energy transformation, the value of the energy taken out of the wind can never be as great as the value of the energy left in the wind.
Now granted, there is a very great amount of energy in the wind, and even ‘significant’ amounts taken from it pale in comparison to the amount within it. You cannot argue that it has no effect, and the valuing of that effect is key. Obviously, the various actors in the play value it differently.
An interesting example, but not directly climate related, is to consider what would happen to the fertility of the Amazon basin, which gets much of its mineral nutrients from Saharan dust blown across the Atlantic, if a wind farm were built in the mountain gap leading to the Boedele Depression, whence comes that dust. The ecosystem that is the Amazon rain forest would die from wind farms half way across the world. Don’t presume that the effects of windfarms are benign or merely local.
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Grant Hodges
I am all for offshore wind farms as a far better (and more reliable) alternative to onshore wind farms. Many things have unexpected consequences though, and it would be good to see these examined BEFORE off shore farms become common place, not after.
As far as on shore goes, I see them as a blind alley as in the UK circumstances I can’t see how trashing the countryside saves the environment, especially when the down time is so considerable.
I’m all for wave power, but our development of this resource is around twenty years behind that of wind.
tonyb