Wind Generation

[bigtiller]

An interesting fact..
About 57.6 percent of electricity generated in Iowa in 2021, came from renewable sources.

 

[caver]

We had a company that paid us for our slag. The had a simple wash plant and then loaded it on a barge. The county would come in during ice storms and use it on the roads. Gas plants are great for peaking. They can be put online in minutes. A coal plant from a cold startup can take 24 hours. Coal plants start to have slagging problems at about 50% capacity (at least ours did) so they run best at wide open full load. That can be hard to do at night when load is way down unless you have a constant load from say an aluminum smelter. We had that option for years. Typically 400MW around the clock. Many plants switched to Wyoming coal in the early 90s to meet the clean air act. Why? Because scrubbers are expensive to operate. Our plant spent millions in building a rail spur and rotary dumper. We originally got our high sulphur coal off a barge on the Mississippi. Fly ash is what is usually the big waste component. At certain grades it is part of portland cement. Ours had too much unburned carbon in it. Our boiler was modified to burn low sulpher coal but even though they tuned it over the years you would still get small amount of unburned carbon.

 

[SandburRanch]

what sort of evidence did you imagine they'dleave?
If they dig they replace the soil and plant grass make it pretty. If they use burrowing machinery there's no trench.

The natural gas plant i retired from has buried pipe lines in over 1,200 sq. miles ( small gas field ) with several miles of 8 and 10 inch pipe with as much as 900 lbs. pressure. There hasn't been nor at present any of those pipe lines been flagged for safety which only a idiot would even think about burying a cable without calling 811 for a line locate . Plant grass and make it pretty ? About like a plumber would mop the lady's bath floor after setting a toilet . If that isn't enough evidence , there are winter wheat fields that's easy to see the evidence whether trenched or burrowing, and grass pastures where a shallow trench remains for years because of soil that's settled .

 

[dodge man]

When I worked on the wind farm near here I saw all sorts of cable being plowed in. I did the construction layout for the electric towers that hook it up to the grid. I didn’t personally hook up the wires to the turbines so I can’t guarantee they are hooked up. Does anybody think they put these things up and didn’t hook them up?

Birds? One of the statistics I saw is that house cats kill more birds than wind turbines. We have cats, I can vouch for that.

 

[Boss 302]

Look at some of the arial pictures of the windmill grid and you can get a better idea of what's hidden.

 

[MAX-24-Dean]

My name isn't Dude and of all the thousands of turbines , and some being present during construction no one has actually seen a cable being laid . That's strange .

If the electric meter didn't spin on the new wind turbine installation, it is my understanding that there would be no Govenrment $$$$ sent to the owner. 30% subsidy as I recall. At $1.3 million dollars per Megawatt installation cost per wind turbine, I don't think the owner would give up there 30% subsidy.
Had to install cabling to get the meter spin.

 

[SandburRanch]

If you had said the blades must spin for the government to pay i would agree .

 

[3 Horse Ranch]

You are about ten years behind the times. The big incentives for wind energy have expired and they are producing wind energy cheaply. You don’t seem to understand how power is generated and distributed. The wind energy doesn’t feed into a power plant; the wind farm is the power plant feeding into the distribution grid. So does the solar farms and the new natural gas power plants. Modern electrical generation is a mix of sources; no some old fashioned single coal plant providing all the power.

Around here when we talk power generation we just say "Dam" But there are a few wind farms too.

 

[Hay Dude]

I agree, but where I live, we are also generating a lot of low cost wind and solar. Gas is the largest source though. My state should be a leader of nuclear because we did invent the bomb and develop nuclear technology first, but those power plants are hugely expensive and use a lot of scarce water resources.

We got all the water in the world out east in the big population centers. I have a nuke plant 25 miles northwest of me and 25 miles southwest of me.
I aint skeered. Build more where theres lot of water.

Best thing about nukes is its American technology and those are really good high paying jobs. Many in engineering, applied sciences, welding, computers and electronics. The windmills and solar panels are disposable junk, mostly foreign made and not as many American jobs.

We gotta get off being reliant of foreign crap spoon fed to us. Let’s roll America!

 

[workinonit]

Ask the Euro countries in a few months how closing all their nukes, going green too soon and hitching their wagon to Putin's pipelines is working out for them. I have no real issue with having wind turbines and solar farms. It's kinda like putting accessories on your tractor. They look good, make you and everyone else feel better but when work gets really serious they are turned off or not used. Those Euro countries will find out really quickly that the wind don't blow all the time and the sun don't shine as much as they thought it did. It'll hit home when the oil runs out and they are sitting in the dark. They will be exactly where we don't want to be but our president and leaders are trying their hardest to take us. Hopefully if nothing else comes out of WWIII this country will get an eye opening.