Wind Technology & Politics

From a distance, wind turbines make a lot of sense in that they tap energy from a renewable resource, produce no waste, and have minimal impacts on wildlife. 

But, nothing is ever as simple as it looks.  In digging into the issues of wind power politics, it seems that where the power goes is a big deal.  I have not confirmed this, but the locals contend that the power is generated in Ontario and then exported to the US and sold there for less than what they have to pay for their power.  So Ontario residents have to look at these giant towers with spinning blades disrupting the landscape, realizing that while the turbines are environmentally benign, the only benefits that come their way are the small  number of jobs, the land lease fees paid to local farmers,  and the fleeting flow of profits going to the (probably) US-based companies that organized and constructed the wind farms.

All that said, in a global sense we all use energy, and the residents of this area should (in my opinion) be proud that they are helping the world wean itself from fossil fuels.  I did get a kick out of this image showing a wind turbine, a solar panel, a car, a power transformer, and a power meter.

 I've heard lots of concerns about turbine blades hitting birds, especially at night, and that is a tough question.  The wind farm developers insist that turbines kill less than 0.001% of the birds that human activities do, but in ways that misses the point.  As more towers are built and put into operation, the number of dead birds will obviously increase.  But the real concern is whether the birds that are impacted are being threatened with extinction from other causes.

Ultimately, the only ones who can fairly protest the centralized power production of modern industrialized nations are those that produce their own power.  This guy had his own wind turbine, solar panels out back, a sign on top of a hay bale bragging that he was "off the grid", and what appeared to be wires coming from roadside transformer to somewhere on his property.

I was really surprised to see tobacco plants way up here - I thought that it only grew in North Carolina and Virginia.

 Anyway, we did learn some really interesting things about the turbines.  One of the most remarkable ones was an optical illusion when we were looking at the blades side on.  At first we thought that the blades were spinning backwards, but then as we moved along the road, we realized that the shadows just made it look that way.  We got so we could look at the rotors and make them go forwards or backwards at will!  The other thing that amazed me was how much weight is up in the air - each blade weighs 7 tons and the hub/rotor assembly weighs 64 tons, so there's over 90 tons, or 180,000 lbs of stuff 300' in the air!
We also observed how the machines can adjust the blade angles to turn in the slightest wind and also how the hub assembly rotates the main body to keep the blades pointing into the wind at the optimum angle.