Child's play

My thoughts about wind farms can be found in other blog posts.


















This set of [wind] farm-related toys was found at our local Alco store in Alpine; it makes industrial scale wind turbines seems benign. One behemoth wind turbine (perhaps 1 MW, no more than 1.5 MW from the looks of it) powers a farm and it's peachy. I mean, there's a tractor and a greenhouse and some plants, too! But building one wind turbine by itself isn't practical, efficient, or realistic. So the smallest cluster tends to be ~6 and those are generally within easy driving distance of another cluster... otherwise you've got technicians who would have to drive all day to get between isolated turbines. But I digress.

















Really, the biggest problem I see is that this set is incomplete. The turbine foundation is forgivable - nobody really cares about a few trucks of concrete underground - but the power lines? How about the substation? There needs to be at least one replacement blade. Clearly dead birds and bats are left to the imagination (along with the techs and out-of-state operators, not to mention international corporations who sponsored it unless it's actually backed by a multi-millionaire farmer). Child's play.

Again, I digress. But that box gave me chills. "Country Life" indeed - because nobody wants a wind farm in their suburban backyard. Oof.