Blowing In The Wind

I went looking for arguments against wind powered electrical generation. What I found is that the anti-wind people are full of hot air and not much else. Certainly wind power is not a panacea but then what is? Honestly; what the hell is a panacea? How many people have ever even seen a panacea, let alone tried to generate electricity with one. I don’t think you can do it, not unless you set one on fire, and buying a panacea just to burn it up is absurdly expensive, not to mention that nothing stinks worse than a flaming panacea, unless it is standing downwind from a coal, or methane (also called ‘natural gas’) or oil power plant. That will just kill you, eventually. And I’m sorry but ethanol just stinks. It makes the little hairs on the inside of my nose curl up. And I’m thinking that can’t be good for the environment.
* I admit that wind farms are just ugly, particularly up close. But they are not nearly as ugly as the Grand Canyon filled with soot, which is what a coal generating plant looks like from far away. And have you ever read what goes into making a solar cell? The proponents like to boast its mostly sand, but that’s just the sales hype. You have to refine the sand via “carbo-thermetic reduction”, which means heating it to 1,700 Celsius (3,000 Fahrenheit), which is expensive, and makes about 1 1\2 tons of carbon dioxide, which is tough to breath through. And then you add selenium, cadmium, copper indium gallium diselenide, or copper indium selenide, or maybe some gallium arsenide, and none of those things sound particularly eco-friendly, and they are not. They are all heavy metals, and like the music named after them they cause cancer and sterility and mental problems and eventually deafness; which is bad.
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And then you’ve got wind farms, which are like free power, except of course that in Germany, which has been leading the wind power movement with 19,000 wind farms across the country, there have been a few hick-ups. Lately, the damn things have been blowing up, and catching fire and falling off. Ooops.
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According to Der Spiegel newspaper, in an article entitled, “Wuthering Heights” (another example of that famous German sense of humor!) a wind gust in Saxony recently ripped a 32 foot rotor blade off a 328 foot tall turbine and dropped it almost 1,000 feet away, into a field. After an inspection the locals shut down six turbines in the group; metal fatigue, manufacturing defects and improper instillation were the diagnoses. And this by the anal retentive Germans; I can only imagine what kind of sloppy horse manure has gone at American construction sites. Did you know that we once installed a nuclear power plant, backwards? How did that happen?
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The Germans had two turbines catch fire, and the local fire department didn’t have any ladders long enough to reach them. An entire tower simply folded up as if it were a Minnesota highway bridge, and another wind mill started throwing blades fragments like candy out of a piñata. German insurance companies are now requiring maintenance agreements before they will write paper for any more turbines. I guess this means that wind power has come of age.
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Of course the industry has made some pretty outlandish claims up to now, about free power and freedom from foreign oil and a whole list of other manure. Basically this had been a rehash of the horse crap we heard from the nuclear power folks, with the primary advantage of wind power of nuclear being that should a wind turbine fall over on your house they won’t have to rope it off for two hundred years. But all those who bought the sales pitch for free wind power should be ashamed of themselves. I know I am.
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The biggest problem is that the gear boxes in the turbines are burning out after five or six years, even though the manufactures insisted they would last twenty years. And then there are the vibrations that are transferred by the generators to the base of the tower, where, over time, the concrete foundation cracks and crumbles. But, hell, if we had known back in 1920 how corrosive gasoline was, and how often filling station gas tanks would have to be replaced, would we have been so impressed with Henry Ford’s Model T pricing system? I’m guessing the answer would be no.
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So with all the problems with wind power, it still looks pretty good to me. I just wouldn’t want a wind farm in my backyard, of course. But one in your backyard sounds like a good idea to me.
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And that is what is called “Passing Wind”. - 30 -