Secrets of the City

Post edited slightly for length and grammar/spelling.

Anyone interested in renewable energy should check this out:

“Come Celebrate Energy Independence Day!!
June 24th, 2pm-4pm at the Green Institute in South Minneapolis”
http://www.greeninstitute.org/energy/

This is such a scam. There have been wind farms working all over the planet for years and they don’t cause a single problem with radar.

Each day it gets delayed, it’s more money into the pockets of oil companies and those they’ve bought.

It’s just so god damned blatant it’s pathetic.

Wind farms are getting bigger, so this makes sense to look at I think. Funny, I don’t remember an uproar when bird enthusiasts complained that wind mills killed birds. Someone actually studied this when I was in college. I nearly died laughing.

No big deal. It’s just another example of the myriad and overlapping local, state and federal bureaucracies involved in the approval and permitting process for every major construction project.

There WAS an uproar about bird kills, Kevin. As a result, bird migration routes are now considered when planning and building wind farms. I’m going to see my father this weekend — he’s a retired electrical enginer and military radar expert (Air Force, NASA, Navy aviation) who should know if this claim makes any sense at all.

I’ll ask him and report back to the MNspeakers next week.

There WAS an uproar about bird kills, Kevin. As a result, bird migration routes are now considered when planning and building wind farms. I’m going to see my father this weekend — he’s a retired electrical enginer and military radar expert (Air Force, NASA, Navy aviation) who should know if this claim makes any sense at all.

I’ll ask him and report back to the MNspeakers next week.

dead birds are so funny.

I meant to say I don’t remember an uproar about bird protectors standing in the way of wind energy. I know people were upset about the birds, I read the study and then laughed a lot. Now with bird flu about to kill us all, maybe we should put windmills along the common migration paths to kill the deadly bastards.

Maybe that’s because a mound of dead birds would be, at least, verifiable; whereas many claims made by the military (and certainly its civilian leadership) are, unfortunately, not?

In any event, this reeks of politics:

Congress ordered the study about wind farms and their effects on military radar in a last-minute amendment to a national defense bill in January.

The language apparently was added because of a wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts. Some residents of the Cape Cod area oppose the project on grounds that the machines will spoil their views and kill migrating birds.

The author of the amendment was Sen. John Warner, R-Va., who, the Chicago Tribune reported, has tried previously to block the cape project.

Stupid question — how tall are windmills, on average?

Couple hundred feet maybe? We have lots of them back home.

Looks like 230 feet. At least the one in Morris is that tall.
This particlar windmill is testing a system to turn the energy into hydrogen. A very interesting propostion.

So, the DoD doesn’t want us to built more wind turbines since it interfere’s with the Shrub’s so-called “War on Terror” campagin. Gee. And you thought the left-wing loons within the enviromental movement were bad enough to protest against renewable enegry resources in the free market for the last several years at least. Now, the Neo-Cons in Washington are joining in the frey as well.

Let’s face it. The American public is totally stupid on the premise of trying to create any form of biomass energy, in order to get us off on oil and fossil fuels as a long term. Right now, we’re so damn addicted to gas, you might as well start new illegal wars overseas in order to get a decent price at the pump. And you can thank all those companies in the automobile industry for our downright lack of logic on saving the enviroment, and all of those dim-bulb soccer moms in the burbs for creating our enegry crisis for future generations by driving those SUV’s across town.

So technically, they would cast a fairly significant radar shadow. Though probably not any worse than a typical downtown in a metro area…

The odd thing about a radar shadow in West Central Minnesota…how did that plane get there? Or better yet, where is this plane going that it wouldn’t get picked up by radar as soon as it left the shadow.

I guess if I lived in Clontarf I might be worried they are a very high on the list of potential targets with their 8 businesses and 39 employees.

This is all about stopping the Cape Wind project, and it’s total bullshit. I understand some rich enviromentalists are worried about ruining their view (personally, I find wind turbines beautiful, but that’s me) of Cape Cod, but damnit, stalling every single wind turbine in the country is totally unacceptable!

how much is it gonna take people? how much bullshit are we going to put up with from legislators and their cronies before we take away their power?

Argh!

Hmm.. I’d think that 230 feet would be below radar in many cases. It depends on how close the radar is to the wind turbine.

I might be the only one who remembers this, but National Weather Service folks up in Fargo had to deal with a giant shadow on their radar between the time that the Fargodome was built and when their NEXRAD station came online. Of course, in that case, the radar was pratically across the street from the dome (which looked more like a disgorged warehouse rather than a stadium, but whatever).

I haven’t been able to find a reliable source yet, but it appears that planes aren’t guaranteed reasonable radar coverage until they reach 1000 feet or so.

Hmm, some quick math indicates that at 20 miles out, you’re about 260 feet below the horizon (unless some radars point down slightly, which might be possible if the tower is tall enough). f(x)=sqrt((3963*5280)^2-(x*5280)^2), where 3963 is Earth’s radius in miles, and 5280 is a multiplier to convert to feet.

Um, I was told there would be no math.

My Dad’s the radar expert, not me, but these turbines also generate electromagnetic energy (which is why they are there) and the moving blades could also factor into the reported interference. In any case, I’ll be interested to hear how they could possibly interfer with military radar.

Frankly, the Cape Cod scenario (which is well-publicized) sounds possible as well. We’ll find out….

Just seems odd that this is now an issue. Haven’t there been windmills for ages? I know there is a huge abandoned field of them on the southern tip of the Big Island in Hawaii. There are also quite a few in the mountains outside of San Diego. Anyone with a map of currently installed windmills?

In life there is always math.

If you’re interested here is the end all be all of American Wind Energy information and a link to the map of the number of projects. This is listed by Megawatt output and not in total towers but you can click on individual states to get detailed info.

So airplane turbines don’t interfer with military radar but windmill turbines do, so we keep airplanes but get rid of windmills? Hmmm…somethings stinky…

you might as well start new illegal wars overseas in order to get a decent price at the pump

Still looking for those decent prices during this illegal war.

Kevin I’m pretty sure the joke was that it doesn’t work, as evinced by this war.

Big wind farms may warrant a quick look (but it seems SO fishy that the oil president’s war department – or was it the Heimat Waffe? – is getting in the way.

Anyhoo, we should all be asking for homescale wind turbines for our birthdays – there is a funny one at http://www.milwind.com – their video is irresistible. Honda makes one for home use and it’s very popular in Japan, where many people in those smaller japanese homes are able to sell power back to the grid. The interface with the grid isn’t compatible in the US, but once there’s a small turbine we can own and operate, we’d individually and collectively be a threat to the energy cliques and cabals.

Won’t that be fun?

Ethanol, meet wind energy.