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It’s amazing, isn’t it? Winds that are too high for a machine made to turn in the wind to produce power. Like cars that can’t use gas because it might make them run too well. What’s the point? Other than the gubmint subsidy scam that goes along with these ugly bird killing pieces of crap? And let’s not forget how much oil, transmission fluid and other pollutants those famous wind machines in central Cali have poured into the landscape.
And most of them are no longer working, and are scavenged for parts to run those still working because there aren’t any parts available…cause the machines were a boondoggle to begin with and even the manufacterer, Mitsubishi, didn’t keep these stinkers around. Go figure.
Sorry about the rant, but I hate these darned things with a passion and blame Algore the human roof truss for their continued presence on the earth.
Hope those winds die down and all is well. Also hope all those machines break and are removed. ALL OF EM.

Your mileage may vary.

No matter how big your propellor is, never try to take on a Jap Zero in a craft that is anchored to the ground.

I’ve had nice long debunking chats with all my classes this week, using the words “fraud” “hoax” “fake” and the like with great liberality. When I asked if any of them had heard of climategate? One had. Did any of them know that these windthingies are boondoggles? Nobody. So I asked them where the electricity was gonna come from to run all of BO’s electric cars, and they all said “your house, duh.” Right, boys and girls, and where does most of THAT electricity come from?

Yeah, fossil fuels. Educating the masses, one resource-wasting, human destroying meme at a time.

But this story made me laugh. It is just so richly ironic you want to eat it with a spoon.

We’ve had our winds here.

Where is the energy coming from? Oh that’s simple. Someone will release a biogenic weapon – probably a virus, that reduces the number of ‘brown skinned people’.

Simple – isn’t it?

There are too many people on Earth – and too few resources. Can you imagine Indian with 2 billion Wogs? Most of their resources go into feeding themselves. They are breeding like rats! Just look at London.

Wow. I think that could be termed an “inelegant failure.”

BTW, Stotie, the B&W doesn’t do that picture justice. You can’t see that the entire turbine nacelle is glowing red.

Mike C – Saburo Sakai seconds your message…..

I hate those freaking things with a passion, too, sandman. They are ALL OVER Britain, and they are a giant scam. And an eyesore.

The nearest one is over in Kent, on Romney Marsh, in land that is so ultra protected you can’t metal detect on it. Near a bird sanctuary, would you believe (with RSPB support, so you know there was some kind of massive bribe in the background).

It gets by on huge government subsidies, greasing the palms of the locals to keep them sweet.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Winds that are too high for a machine made to turn in the wind to produce power.

Sandman-for-all-seasons: Not to be contentious but, well–seems to me that other energy-producing systems can be overwhelmed when the input exceeds the design parameters. Waterwheels don’t necessarily function during–and may be damaged by–floods. May be that the designers should have anticipated 165 mph winds and allowed for them in their design–even if only by designing a shut-off mechanism when the input was too great to be usefully processed. But–they aren’t the first designers of mechanical systems–and they fersher won’t be the last–not to remember that bit.

I’m not defending the windmills, mind you. They are so often ugly and intrusive (unlike, say, telephone poles and wires), and I find myself wondering about their practical utility. . .all the same. I don’t think you can condemn them out-of-hand based on an overflow situation.

I am not condemning them out of hand. The company that made them would not guarantee them for high wind. So what good are they? Just use for gentle breezes kissed by the sun? They don’t tolerate wind well, they fail frequently, they require more money to operate than they can generate profit from wind… boondoggle. Thousands litter central Cali…once prime agro land ruined by leaking Mitsubishi wind turbines and tramsmission fluid. Oil. sludge. Dead condors. Dead raptors. Dead migratory birds. For frigging pieces of shiite wind turbines that can’t handle high wind loads. Not 165, how bout 55 mph? Why the hell build a power generator that can’t maximize its power source?
Talk about built in obsolesence. Built in irrelevance. Built in failure. Been done before. Sucked then. Failed then. Cali learned. No more bird killing crap turbines after the Mitsu abominations. For once.Cali learned from its errors. ONCE. These things are a failure. Accept it and move on. The age of steam and coal is gone too. Noble failure is still failure.
Move on.

Communism doesnt work. Leftists today still feel like they are than every one in the room. Everyone will love working for the common good. Except not everyone works equally. Or at all. Wind turbines, like so many tired hackneyed leftist ideas such as communism or affluent socialism, just don’t work. Like spend your way to prosperity Keynesian economics. Like hun control. Like self esteem over achievement. Feel good failure is still failure. You know what you learn from failure? It sucks. What you learn from losing? It sucks. Companies don’t hire for high self esteem unless you got it from success.
Wind power is a failure. Undependable and inconsistent. Why support failure? Feel good politics are the politics of failure. This is the mantra of the Obama years. The politics of failure. Wind power gits right in. How about solar panels that overheat and fail in direct sunlight? How about electric cars that don’t sell and catch fire? Oh, yeah: Obama gave us Solyndra And 200 units a.month of GM Volts that double as toxic gas grills. Wind power fits right in.

in-and-out-sandy: There’s high wind, and then there’s high wind. 165mph isn’t high wind, it’s a disaster, and there’s only so much one can prepare for.

It’s like the nuclear power stations at Fukushima. They were designed to withstand a tsunami safely, but not that tsunami. According to the MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub:

The Fukushima power plants were required by regulators to withstand a certain height of tsunami. At the Daiichi plant the design basis was 5.7 metres and at Daini this was 5.2 metres.

Tepco has now released tentative assessments of the scale of the tsunami putting it at over 10 metres at Daiichi and over 12 metres at Dainii.

That’s 33 feet and 39 feet. At Dai-ichi, the surge was 14 feet over the design requirement; at Dai-ini, 20 feet.

Sometimes Mother Nature just stomps you.

Those turbines could have handled 55mph easily, and probably have. 100mph? 120mph? If not too long, yeah – and better than a lot of other infrastructure in the country. 165mph? Bend over, stick your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.

I’m amazed any of those turbines survived.

BTW, I agree that wind power is a colossal boondoggle that wastes billions of dollars. There are 14,000 abandoned turbines in the U.S. alone.

enter exiting:

I guess I’m curious about whether you are condemning wind turbines in general, or just the Mitsubishis used in California. I believe I am not the only denizen of Schenectady, NY who would like to see GE’s current wind-turbine venture suceed; on the other hand, being a GE brat who feels a personal emotional stake in the reputation of the company (and, boy, has /that/ been a handicap over the years!), I would not want to see it succeed through the deployment of smoke and mirrors. Bottom line, for any source of energy, the value of the energy produced should significantly exceed the cost of production–including generation, installation, maintenance, and replacement costs.

All the same. 165 mph is, (thank you Wikipedia!) in excess of the speed of hurricane winds. Yeah, gusts, but all the same, the only thing you can judge about any system based on its performance in emergency conditions is whether the emergency/fail-safe processes are adequate–and apparently in this case, they turned out not to be. As noted in my prior post–water wheels (the mainstay of both agricultural and industrial mills in an earlier era, whose descendants generate much electricity in the US even as we speak) could be overwhelmed by floods. There is no system–none— which can be relied on to continue functioning normally in extraordinary external conditions. . .and that is particularly true when the external conditions affect the external factors the system relies on to function.

I’m not defending wind power as a concept, although I’d be glad to see it become a workable option (um, well, yeah, um, /beyond/ the workable option of windmills that have been around for, um, well, quite a while, one might even say ‘centuries’); but I think it is important to differentiate between “didn’t work in this instance” and “can’t work,” and I think the distinction has to do with the quality of the technology, at least in this instance. I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise, of course. 🙂

I am not dogging machines that fail in 165 mph hurricane force winds.I am dogging turbines that have to be locked down over 55 mph. The maker would not warrantee them past that. Those Mitsu junkers litter the central Cali landscape and still pollute today. Close to three decades later. Wind too high? Shut em down. Can’t find parts?Shut em down. They take more power to run than they produce? Cost several times as much to remove and clean up than they ever make…aside from gubmint subsidies…shut em down. Killing protected birds? Shut em down.
Really. A bad idea is a bad idea. Well engineered successful projects usually don’t rely on subsidies for survival. Wind power. Solar. Welfare states. All of them rely on gubmint largesse for existence. None of them succeed on their own.
Noble failure is still failure. I equate wind and solar with concepts like Islamic democracy and successful communism. Or anthropogenic gorebal warming. None of them exist. None. And they never will.

Your mileage may vary. I speak only for me.

🙂

Now I have to sleep. A lot of freeloaders depend on my tax money to make ends meet. I wish you all well.

Thanks to Stoaty for my favorite blog. Always something novel here.

You folks are the best.

My answer to wind turbines and solar panels?
One sentence; midgets on treadmills. chasing little hookers. Power for everyone. Charlie Rangel acting as pimp. Got success just oozing from it.

Mm.

‘K.

[waves “hello” to Rich Rostrom]

Had a GPX5000 for a while, rather good.

Don’t know for certain, but based on the barometric maps I saw, I believe that wind in Scotland was 165 KPH, not MPH

Sandman is a genius.

“Aye, blae, blae! ye skreekit winds…”

Sandman is a genius.

Hardly. Sarcasm aside. I have an enduring fondness for raptors and birds in general. I first learned about how bad these things were when I lved in the central part of Cali in the late 80s. I didn’t know about the boondoggle gubmint subsidy stuff til much later. I live in a windy part of the Eastern US now and we’ve been threatened with these things being out up here for years.
The other thing I neglected to mention was how horrendously loud these things are. Think propeller driven aircraft tethered to the ground and you get an approximate idea.
Frankly I am pro geo thermal and hydrogen development. The other things out there are not getting the job done. But geo doesn’t kill eagles, hawks, owls, and all that.

I apologize for being a drudge.

I’ve been recovering cells from Indians and doing some cell culture.
I’m trying to isolate specific receptors for biogenic viral culture … we bioterrorists really have to do a lot of hard work … sigh

It looks to me like that turbine is pointed in the wrong direction – might that have caused the issue? How does that happen?

They’re usually pointed in more than one direction, to take advantage of different winds.

And to answer Can’t Hark’s question from way up above…my understanding is, the math doesn’t work on wind power. The way they make it seem to work is not to include the cost of manufacturing and installing (which, among other things, includes giant concrete pads).

So…to build, install, maintain and take them down when their functional life is done (which is a surprisingly short time), they don’t make nearly enough power to pay for themselves. Hence the government subsidies.

Also, they aren’t all that green. Leaving aside the risk to birds, the ugliness and the huge concrete pads sunk into the land, manufacturing things this gigantic (they’re really, really big) uses a LOT of sweet mother earth’s resources.

Also, they aren’t all that green. Leaving aside the risk to birds, the ugliness and the huge concrete pads sunk into the land, manufacturing things this gigantic (they’re really, really big) uses a LOT of sweet mother earth’s resources.

When you’re right, you’re right. These things are a boondoggle of the first order. If we want alternative power sources (and I for one do) we need to look at lower cost margins and higher back side gain type ideas. Geo thermal does that (ref:Iceland) and Hydrogen will if followed up and developed while we still have the oil thing to rely on. One day that door will close but not for a good while.

The rush to develop lame ideas due to “Peak” oil is a farce, presented by the luddite wing of the Left, because they resent progress that they have little control over. Were they the stalwarts of oil in this country, “peak” and oil would never occur in the same story. The use of frac welling, oil sands, oil shale, slant drilling, is extending the oil/gas age and the Left hates it.
Nothing can interfere with their cockamamie narrative or they get all shrill. Algore the human floor truss being the lead wingnut on this front.

But I digress, which I seem to do a lot…
digressing…

Hey, stoaty 🙂

Stoaty & sandman redux: Ah. Fair enough, then. Although. . .I can sorta see a problem with picking Iceland as the poster child for geothermal success, given its special geographic characteristics. But I see (thank you Wikipedia) that there are several other places where it is being used successfully. Um. Hydrogen? How?