A Glimpse of the Future in Midwestern Wind Farms
I’ve long lamented the fact that “the future” seems to be such an incremental affair. As we approach the year 2010, we have handheld communicators, swept and angular electric and hybrid automobiles, a world-wide electronic information network — even books and newspapers can now be delivered over the airwaves to a flat panel electronic device you can carry on a train with you. And yet, it all seems somewhat pedestrian, because it just crept up on us.
So it’s with great excitement that I personally experienced the sweeping wind farms of Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa this week. Driving along I-70 toward Denver and then I-80 from Colorado to Chicago, I was absoutely struck by these large, graceful, futuristic vistas. The best way I can describe them are to reference the wormhole-creating gadget in the movie Contact:
I even love the moniker — wind farm — as if nothing would be more logical to marry up with the soy beans, wheat and corn of these farm-heavy states. (I happen to know there’s still a lot of farming going on in these states after about 20 hours of combined driving through them in the past week. If it weren’t for wind farms, XM radio and the world’s largest truck stop, I might not have made it.)
Depending on the wind farm and the date it went into service, each turbine seems to generate between 1-3 megawatts of power, enough to run 100-300 households per windmill. The devices themselves are big and tall — each blade of the three-bladed turbine is hauled on its own flatbed truck, as we witnessed on the Interstate — but the base doesn’t seem to take up terribly more square footage on the ground than would a large inner city highway light post.
Of course, such windfarms aren’t without their controversy — one being that they require a great deal of investment and management in order to build the farms and pipe the electricity around — which is exactly the sort of thing that keeps big utilities in business. The alternative — tax credits and incentives for smaller, microgrid investments (solar and wind per household, with the ability to sell the excess back into the system) — might ultimately make more sense.
(And, of course, the microgrid would be more of that incremental future-creep again.)
But, whatever the end result, the wind farms are quite a sight. I’m impressed!
My Comment At ShopLocal.com(TM) Blog
I can’t seem to get the guy who runs the ShopLocal.com(TM) blog to un-moderate my comment (although he’s allowed many others through and mine is a reasonable discussion of his post), so I thought I’d try a trackback to it.
This is part of an ongoing discussion — in the Jackson Free Press this past week we ran a story about ShopLocal.com(TM), a service of Gannett newspapers that presents you with online versions of big-box circulars. It seemed to us to be rather a cynical example of “local washing” — large corporate interests claiming to be “local” because they see the trend of people to take an interesting in shopping and buying with locally owned enterprises.
Here’s what I wrote and he won’t open:
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