Wind Farm, Coachella Valley, California
The next morning we took a tour of a wind farm in the Coachella Valley. Our expert guide educated us on the history of wind farming, the Coachella Valley’s natural advantages, how windmills work and the equipment used to convert wind energy into electricity used on Southern California’s grid.
Click any image to see them all enlarged.
Yep! That comes pretty close to my feeling that trying to solve one problem, we are creating new ones… And indeed – there ‘s way too many of us…
I am a fan of windfarms…they are beautiful! when you consider what they do and not do at one time it was thought a lot a birds were killed by the huge turbines but the research does not bear that out…they are quite noisy and birds are not stupid. There are so many in the Netherlands and there are huge geese and swan and now stork populations with all that water around.
When I see a windmill ‘settlement’ like on your photos, somehow a feeling creeps up to my mind that we may be creating just the next human pest – as interesting as the technical side of it may be… Too many people see only fragments instead of something closer to the whole picture… (Sorry for the negative vibe… 😉 )
I think something people tend to overlook is that with almost 8 billion people on the planet, exploiting energy and resources, almost anything we do is bound to have untoward effects. That’s not to say renewable energy shouldn’t be preferred to carbon energy – only that the cradle to grave impact of supplying the renewable energy needs of 8 billion people is not negligible either and things don’t always work out the way you think. Using organic cotton shopping bags is often worse for the environment than re-used plastic bags; extracting and creating ceramic bugs and washing them in an electric dishwasher daily is worse than quite a few paper cups. – Scale these up for billions of people around the globe and it’s hard not to have negative impacts.
We have a wind turbine assembly plant right here in my town. They are huge!!