Wind Turbine Tour

[beige_alert]

On Saturday Joyce and I went to the We Energies Byron Wisconsin wind turbine tour. While it seems very silly to drive 80+ km each way to tour a renewable energy facility, it was a rare chance to see them up close.

The site has a pair of Vestas 660kW turbines, with 23m (75 ft) blades and 65m (215 ft) towers, small by current standards, but built in 1999. They average 3000 MW-hr/year.

They are impressively big, and it’s fun watching them spin and seeing the blades flex in the wind. Even up close the noise level is low, unless by up-close you mean inside the steel tube tower. It’s fairly noisy in there.

Photos!

Comments

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I'd be fascinated to have an up close look at them.

I'm confused about why the "state of the art" seems to keep pursuing ever more huge and expensive turbines. It seems like smaller ones would be so much more economical to build that it would more than make up for being less efficient. (It's not even clear why a big one should be more efficient than a small one anyway.)

I'm also confused about why people resist them so much. I think wind turbines are much nicer to look at than grain bins or cell towers or even farm fields. But the logistical and non-economic hurdles get much bigger when the turbines get bigger. (Taller masts means more work getting approval, a bigger radius of people complaining about how it messes up the view, etc.)

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

One advantage the big ones have, besides the usual economies of scale of digging fewer foundations, running fewer wires, and so on, is that intrinsically they get taller as they get bigger, just from the greater rotor diameter and the then-necessary greater tower hight for ground clearance. The wind is stronger and steadier up higher. You could put a little turbine on a huge tower, but that ends up making less sense than putting a huge one up there.

For offshore use, bigger is definitely better given the much greater costs of underwater foundations and wiring.

The turbines we saw were almost more of a demonstration project, just two built back in 1999. The currently-in-progress project is 88 bigger ones. I can't imagine that siting 250 less-big ones could be any easier.

I also don't understand the aesthetic objections. They are the prettiest power generators around. Ever seen a coal-fired plant up close? I have, and maybe they are pretty in a very industrial sort of way, but even in my weird view, they are pretty ugly compared to slowly spinning white blades. The people who object still seem to use electricity.

[hsifyppah.livejournal.com]

Ooh! I heart Vestas. They're a fabulous company. The trade desk used to hate us because we were always buying them for our clients, and they had to do all kinds of arcane things to buy it in danish kroner on the copenhagen exchange.

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

Along the lines of renewable energy, is the recumbent bicycle in your user pic an Easy Rider Gold Rush?

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

It's an Easy Racer Tour Easy, the steel frame version. Lots of photos of it on my flickr site, most of them can be seen here. What sort of trike is that? (http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=53332339%40N00&q=toureasy&m=text) ()

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

My tricycle is a Lightfoot Roadrunner 2XL. It is a heavy duty version of their standard Roadrunner trike. I regularly ride it to work (8 miles each way) in good weather.