12 thoughts on “Unintended Consequences”

  1. And, imagine the environmental impact of tens of thousands of square miles of solar array farms, the kind of coverage which would be needed to make a significant dent in our energy budget. The panels are, after all, designed to absorb as much light (and heat) as possible.

  4. This disruption of the ground layer seems like it would also affect evaporation. Putting wind farms in arid to semi-arid regions (the econuts in western Washington State have decided that the hills of eastern Washington are ideal spots for windmills. I’m sure the fact that these windmills are nowhere near the backyards of western Washington had nothing to do with their decision) would suck even more of the moisture out of the ground (coincidentally putting more of that horrid greenhouse gas hydrogen hydroxide into the atmosphere), which would likely adversely affect the fragile desert ecology.
    Google images of “pygmy rabbits”–they’re appallingly cute. Maybe posters asking why windmill fans hate pygmy rabbits would get some traction. The pygmy rabbit would certainly be a better poster child than the giant Palouse earthworm.

    1. Totally destroyed the skyline along the columbia river. It feels like you are driving through some dystopian post apocalyptic movie set.

      1. I was flying over last winter, the entire eastern half of the state seemed to be fogged in. The only things I could see above the fog were the wind turbines.

        If you think the view now is bad, wait for a couple of years when the windmills are broken and rusting. They’ll be an eyesore for decades.

        1. A few blocks down from my house is a big ole’ mansion up on the top of a hill with a large wind turbine behind it. The tower is I’d guess about 50-75 feet tall. The person that owns the mansion is obviously loaded. The mansion sits on several hundred acres with cattle roaming all around the back woods. They probably bought the turbine and installed it to get some kind of big tax break. I saw it spinning day and night for maybe all of about a year. I drive past it every day to and from work. It no doubt generated a piddly amount of power compared to what that mansion actually uses. Then one day I noticed it had stopped spinning. I imagine that it broke and the owners saw the bill to get it repaired, said screw it, and now just leave it locked in one spot. I haven’t seen it spin for about 3 years now.

  5. On the one hand, I have noticed, and joked to that effect, that my locale has had considerably less snowfall and warmer temperatures since they started building all those turbines along the Allegheny Front in Logan Valley about thirty miles upwind from us. On the other hand, data is not the plural of anecdote, and there’s no good proof that that handful of wind turbines are powerful enough to cause a precipitation shadow some thirty to forty miles long…

  6. Al Gore –the hypocrite– refuses to acknowledge the danger of free roton emissions from wind turbines. Notice how many tornadoes we had last summer? Wasn’t a problem until people started putting up them things. Federal roton-emission standards –natch– are still tied up in committee hearings (the whole bunch is in the industry’s pocket).

    From the Wikipedia entry:

    . . . nevertheless, the science remains sketchy, occupying the no-man’s-land between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. In basic terms, a free roton is a quantum –a packet—of angular momentum, released from any unshielded rotating mass (a barber pole; a merry-go-round). Nearby ungrounded objects can absorb these until a tipping point –the Spinner Threshold*—is crossed. Free rotons are mostly absorbed by the circumambient air, resulting in wind vortices of varying size. Effects on exposed human subjects were first observed in Holland (for obvious reasons) and can range from dizziness to “augering”.

    *Named for James Spinner 1881-1919, who made the first measurements of free rotons. It is believed that Spinner himself succumbed to a lethal dosage (>100 whirlies) while conducting experiments with a ceiling fan, causing him to bore through the floor of his home in Devonshire. His body was never recovered.

    If Al Gore can get away with basically just making stuff up, so can I.

  7. “But it’s a politically correct energy source, at least for now.”

    If it ever became a cost-effective, reliable one, it would be an instant and very easy target for “environmentalists” to shut down. But there’s little danger of that. Providing the equivalent of our baseload capacity (just rated capacity, not actual output) would require an optimally spaced windfarm occupying a square patch of land roughly 1,000 miles on a side. Neither that or anything approaching it could ever be built.

Comments are closed.