The wind turbine towers are about 240 feet tall, and the rotor blades can be between 60 and 130 feet long. When you see one rotating in a field, it seems, well, big, but somehow it’s hard to imagine how big. A woman sitting behind me on the interurban train ride said that she had seen flashing yellow lights in her rearview one night when she was driving home. She pulled over into the slow lane. A Long Load warning vehicle and a Wide Load warning vehicle passed her, and then a truck with the behemoth rotor strapped onto the freight car. It was huge.
In the picture, I think the blades are different lengths, and I think this is because there are several generations of turbines in this complex.
They rotate at twenty revolutions per minute. That doesn’t sound all that fast, but the tip of the blade is moving 300 feet per second. That’s the length of a football field. Don’t stick your hands in the fan!
Sometimes the towers line up and the blade rotate in unison; sometimes they are off, and swirl through the air like the arms of the swimmers in the aquatic ballet performances.
According to Wikipedia, the wind-farm in the delta is validated for 300 megawatts of power, enough to provide power to 150,000 homes according to Yahoo and others. (I did not check the Yahoo guy’s math.) That isn’t enough to power an entire city; but imagine if 80% of the buildings in that city were built efficiently; if the tall ones had photovoltaic panels; if people were using enegry efficient technology and got some of their power from a windfarm.
This picture symbolizes the evolution of windmills and turbines. Our “motorman,” a really nice woman named Enid, stopped the train so people could take this picture. We were slightly disappointed because the wind had shifted and the windmill had pivoted away from us, but it’s still a great shot.
So here we were looking at an old-fashioned water-pump windmill in the foreground of the current generation of turbines, just as we rode out across the California prairie on an electric train, like the one that was here in the 1930s, while we discuss the possibility of fast rail, light rail, and hybrid cars to reduce our dependence on petroleum.
Hello Marian, (I finally found my way to ‘Rick’s Place’/Marion’s Blogsite.). I think I’ll be a regular here…..bellyin’ on up to the bar and gettin’ my fill of fantastic photography and tales of the west as you’re bloggin’ along. I enjoyed my visit and will be sauntering back in soon! Thank you!, Denise
Good morning, Marion. Thanks for taking me along on the electric train ride! It has been a synchronous morning on the computer. Wind power. When I was on Molokai the locals were fighting the proposed wind towers that were going to be put in. Molokai is pretty radical and they are always protesting something (and yet, somehow letting Monsanto in was okay!) However, the wind power was supposedly going to Honolulu and they wouldn’t see any benefit. I didn’t want to believe wind energy had a downside. This morning I went to check out the reviews on new documentaries and found a film called “Windfall.” http://documentaries.about.com/od/revie2/fr/Windfall-Movie-Review-2010.htm?nl=1
Then I checked out your latest “View from the Road” and—Voila! Windfarm in SoCo. You California folks probably know all about it, but I didn’t. Sigh.