interesting idea

[Toastar]

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/08/07/wind-turbine050807.html

wonder if it'll work and spread

[kreket]

It's pretty common in Denmark and I think maybe Holland too. The more flat the land around the windmills and the more out towards the sea, the better. (Wasn't there some that was built on a shallow part of sea?)

I'm a bit worried that they claim it will only provide power for six households. That's a bit small, isn't it? Another thing - the windmill parks I've read about tends to have at least a dozen windmills, in order to maximise the potential of windmills per repair crew. (Just standard checking and repairs. You do it with your car, so why not with a windmill producing muchneeded power?)

[Toastar]

uh, its only a test, it uses the wind produced from cars on the highway driving by

[kreket]

..and?

[Toastar]

they're testing it with only one so far... :P

[-V-]

Same in Germany by the coast, I think all open fields there are saturated with these things to a depth of about 100 miles from the coast.

[kreket]

Yes commie.. Well.. ehm ..you *could* read this as a question of windmills (as the subject in the article does) or as a question of tunnelwindmills.

I don't think it will get much more attention because you cannot achieve the same rate of maximised maintanance with only a pair of windmills for tunnels as you would in a 2 square km wide windmill park.

It would be kind of cool to have "windtraps" because of the name is from the scifi novel Dune. Could also be that we are one day desperate enough to seek this low level of output compared to wind coming in from the sea.

[Toastar]

They're only building one to test if they can actually generate enough wind from the cars driving by to create enough energy to make it feasible.

If it turns out that it can work well, they could string it all along all the 400 series highways, which is 1724.1km total length.

highway 401 is 814.4 km itself

[kreket]

I misread the article - it doesn't mention tunnels.

So the project could work given the large scale a highway is.

[Grunt]

They have one of those in St. Louis somewhere by the highway; used to power a construction site.

[Daywalker]

hmmm...very interesting. Makes sense to try

[Lusty_Muffins]

That pisses me off.

Governments and citizens alike piss and moan about dwindling resources, fear of electricity shortage, and pollution.

Now that something that eliminates ALL THREE of those things comes along they erect ONE FUCKING WINDMILL!

It clearly works. One 'mill will power 6 houses. Why not line the fucking highways with them and power a few cities? I know for a fact that wind turbines don't cost much, technically (friend's dad works for my city's city hall), so why not erect more? The money it costs to make the turbines and erect them along certain highways would be easily made up in time. The cost of fossil fuels and huge power plants definately dwarf the cost of a few hundred wind turbines.


*shakes head*

[Daywalker]

That pisses me off.

Governments and citizens alike piss and moan about dwindling resources, fear of electricity shortage, and pollution.

Now that something that eliminates ALL THREE of those things comes along they erect ONE FUCKING WINDMILL!

It clearly works. One 'mill will power 6 houses. Why not line the fucking highways with them and power a few cities? I know for a fact that wind turbines don't cost much, technically (friend's dad works for my city's city hall), so why not erect more? The money it costs to make the turbines and erect them along certain highways would be easily made up in time. The cost of fossil fuels and huge power plants definately dwarf the cost of a few hundred wind turbines.


*shakes head*


bueracracy?

[-V-]

That and I think that the cost of wind turbines needed to power a city versus the cost of a regular powerplant to power the city would be analogus if not slightly tipped in favor of the coal plant, since wind turbines aren't exactly the most compact of things. However, the things worth doing were never easy to do.

[Toastar]

my dad said that the powergrid has to BUY it or something.

[Enders]

That pisses me off.

Governments and citizens alike piss and moan about dwindling resources, fear of electricity shortage, and pollution.

Now that something that eliminates ALL THREE of those things comes along they erect ONE FUCKING WINDMILL!

It clearly works. One 'mill will power 6 houses. Why not line the fucking highways with them and power a few cities? I know for a fact that wind turbines don't cost much, technically (friend's dad works for my city's city hall), so why not erect more? The money it costs to make the turbines and erect them along certain highways would be easily made up in time. The cost of fossil fuels and huge power plants definately dwarf the cost of a few hundred wind turbines.


*shakes head*
so very true
I'm also fairly frustrated with this. There's always these studies and such saying all the resources will die out if we keep using them like this. Answers like wind power are right in front of us, and we fail to grasp them.
Basically, it's either the idea of totally reinventing the way we use everything scares people, or the big companies are more bullyish than ever

[vecdran]

Wind turbines are also an extreme eyesore.

[GoatChomper]

Well, I wouldn't consider a coal-fired powerplant to be an aesthetic joy either.

[HarryB]

Indeed, I doubt a couple hundred windmills out in a field are going to create a smog warning. If it works, use it.

[nojmaster]

It'll be fine and dandy till a prop falls onto moving traffic or something. Still, it's a good idea, eyesore or no.

[Dave]

Well, I wouldn't consider a coal-fired powerplant to be an aesthetic joy either.

Haha.

Out by Pincher Creek there are a shitload of windmills that harness the air rolling off the mountains.

http://www.albertawebride.com/pcreek/barn2.jpg
there you can see a few of the windmills.

http://www.greenspiration.org/Article/TiltingAtWindmillsNot.html

But he was on the right track. When you have lemons, make lemonade. That's what they're doing in Pincher Creek, Alberta - turning some of the best wind in Canada into a profitable resource.

This project alone would keep four million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere annually if it replaced coal fired kilowatts.

http://www.centreforenergy.com/silos/wind/windEnvironment/windEnvironmentHistory.asp
A neat timeline going over wind energy briefly. Can someone relate a megawatts to say.... how many houses it can power or something like that because i have no idea how much a megawatt is.

[-V-]

Lesse if I remember right, 1 house needs 1 kilowatt of power. 1 megawatt is enough to power 1,000 houses. 120MW is enough to power a town of 12,000 homes (~35,000 residents)

[Dave]

Lesse if I remember right, 1 house needs 1 kilowatt of power. 1 megawatt is enough to power 1,000 houses. 120MW is enough to power a town of 12,000 homes (~35,000 residents)

How long does the kilowatt last one household?

[-V-]

A killowatt is continusly made. Technically speaking 1 watt is 1 joul/second (1kw = 1,000watts). But for all intensive purposes, think that a killowat is 1,000 PSI and all your appliances are those air-powered tools and need to have X ammount of PSI flowing to them constantly to work.

(-e- Lapotop keybords>regular keyboards)

[Dave]

Gotcha, that makes things much clearer.

[Paluch]

Lesse if I remember right, 1 house needs 1 kilowatt of power. 1 megawatt is enough to power 1,000 houses. 120MW is enough to power a town of 12,000 homes (~35,000 residents)


You're WAY off. A typical home is wired with a 240v 200amp cicuit, so 240x200 is 48000W/hour which is 48KW/hour. You probly only use about a 1/4 to a 1/2 of that number so your looking at 12KW/Hour to 24KW/HOUR.