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Mon 30 Aug, 2004 03:13 pm
This is just something someone wrote into a newspaper I was recently reading. He wrote that his main concern about the increasing use of wind farms as a source of power was based on his theory of them stealing vital wind which has been used for other things....sounds silly right, owing to the skyscrapers etc which stick up into the sky with no apparent wind stealing side effects...
however, I then began to think about the el nino theory, the flap of a butterflies wings causing a chain reaction of events which can cause a hurricane in another part of the world.
Soooo, has this man got his head screwed on or is he on another planet where they bottle and sell air? ....
fun but slightly disconcerting with too much thought...and i mean too much...lol
personally i think the guy may be off his rocker
he must be doing some serious drugs to come out with things like that
maybe he is a friend of david ike
maybe if people built a trillion windmills or say covered every bit of the planet with them, it may have an effect on the earths wind, but even then i doubt it very much....
maybe i could write an essay on how every body passing wind, ie f*rting, is causing hurricanes in the world
this would be as plausable as his theory...
or how everybody needs to f*rt more often to counter the effects of the evil wind stealing machines...
I'm with you 2 on this. The average wind turbine is broadly the same height as a mature tree, and certainly has less profile (width). So does this mean all the growing up and cutting down of trees is monkeying with the wind as well? Crazy!
Wind is a very renewable resource...as long as the Earth keeps turning we will keep having wind. Sure, if you put up a bunch of wind mills in a field I'm sure the air will be a little bit calmer around that small area...but it's not going to cause any negative effects. The air is less turbulent in a forest also, and you don't see that causing any problems. So yeah, it's BS.
well all I know is that since they built a wind farm not far from me, my kite doesn't fly like it once did.
I'm living close to the biggest windpark in continental Europe - more than 120 wind wheel in one area (okay, technically three areas).
Besides, every community/town has its own windpark (smaller, average 15 to 20 wind wheels).
No-one ever was and is concerned about stealing the wind ...
That's pretty cool Walter. Is Germany making good effiorts to move to renewable energy? I'm not sure how many wind farms there are in the UK but I can only remember seeing about 3 in the whole country as I've been travelling around. Some people complain about the noise (I had no idea they were noisy) and that they are ugly. I'm all for them. Geet big turbines on every hill!
are they concerned about breaking wind?
I also read they are more efficient than solar panels and more cost-effective.
How Till Eulenspiegel Became a Furrier's Apprentice
It was mid winter when Till Eulenspiegel arrived at Ascherleben. Times were hard, but finally he found a furrier who was willing to take on an apprentice, and he was put to work sewing pelts. Not being accustomed to the smell of the curing hides, he said, "Pew! Pew! You are as white as chalk, but stink like dung!"
The furrier said, "If you don't like the smell, then why are you a furrier's apprentice? It's a natural smell. It's only wool."
Eulenspiegel said nothing, but thought, "One bad thing can drive another bad thing away." Then he let such a sour fart that the furrier and his wife had to stop working.
The furrier said, "If you have to fart like that, then go out into the courtyard. There you can fart as much as you like."
Well, they are not silent - and therefor, there are regulations, how far they must be away from houses. (That's why the town councils etc. created special areas for settling of local windfarms.)
We have quite a low percentage of removable energy - about 3% (2003).
In 2003 there were 15.387 wind wheels working in Germany.
And from yesterday's news:
Germany Opens World's Biggest Solar Plant
dys
Now I remember, why m-i-l and her friend stay half the year in Aschersleben (county)
that silly Till Eulenspiegel, what a merry prankster.
Walter Hinteler wrote:We have quite a low percentage of removable energy - about 3% (2003).
The article quotes Germany's renewable sources as 9%, Walter. Even more reason to
Seems, my figure just is the actual percentage of wind energy in (daily) electricity.
There is a law of unforseen consequences. Basically it says that you can't forsee all the things that will come about from your actions, or inactions.
From my experience around windmills, the old plains devices for pumping water, there isn't much interference with the wind. However, salmon didn't have much problem jumping beaver dams along the tributaries to the big rivers in the Pacific Northwest either. The salmon did have major problems jumping the big hydropower dams though.
I only see a problem in that migrating birds do occassionally get hit by the spinning blades. How many that amounts to, and is it a sufficiently significant number to interfere with their species survival? I have no idea.
Could the wind farms mess up the rest of the environment, much like the water trapped behind the hydropower dams drowns the up river canyons, etc.? I don't know that either.
I will suggest that someone should start making measurements and observations of the climate, foliage, animal populations, and bird residents as well as migratory birds well before the wind farms are built. It wouldn't hurt to start those studies around, and I do mean all around, the existing farms. I would suggest a radius from immediately under the towers out to at least fifty KM.
But keep the study honest. Measure the average wind velocities, various pollutants, electrical fields, pollen distribution, rain fall, temperatures, and just about anything else that can be reasonably measured.
Also conduct the same measurement from about 100-120 KM from the wind farms as a control area to compare how changes in the environment from the wind farm compare to changes in the environment unrelated to the wind farm.
The publish the raw data as well as the compiled and reduced data every year, five years, and ten years.
I have aboslutely no idea what will be determined. But this is the only realistic way to figure out what, if any, effect the wind farms have on the enviornment.
Kelly
Such, what you suggest, KellyS, is done here, by pro and contra groups.
I wonder, however, how this compares to statistics about 200 years, when there were windmills in this region than now wind wheels.
I didn't realise they produced that little energy.
It's a tricky one as I can understand people worrying about the impact on the natural landscape. And I can also understand people worrying about the use of fossil fuels as the primary energy source.
Compromise is needed somewhere along the line.
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