In terms of hydroelectric power, the Hoover Dam produces just under 3 billion watts of power. 7 Hoover dams equals all the combined US wind power. So why not just build more giant hydroelectric dams or spread nuclear plants all around the earth?
Debate over safety from nuclear power plants is ongoing and intense. And the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from each of those 40 coal fired plants equals around 3 million tons a year. There are many conclusions we can draw from all of our wind farming arithmetic.
The first is that even though we have barely tapped into the viability of using wind power to heat, cool and light our homes, the progress thus far shows that the feasibility is proven. We have the land and we have the wind. If we had ten times as much wind power generation we could provide power to 50 million homes or if you prefer 150 million people. No, this doesn’t mean that our overall energy needs could be so easily met. Industry uses far more energy than housing. Cars, buses, trains, planes and those coal fired power plants themselves massively chew up power and spit out pollutants. Nuclear power releases one fiftieth as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than does a coal fired plant. A hydroelectric dam just 10% of that and a wind farm half of the CO2 emissions of the dam. By comparison, greenhouse gas emissions from wind farming is minuscule. But as long as we are doing some math, the accountants will have us calculating the cost of building our wind farm. This is pretty simple. It costs around 5 million dollars to make a one million watt producing wind turbine. This is a cost of five dollars per watt. Coal fired plants have initial costs of around $1.50 per watt. Solar power bounces between 3 and 7 dollars per watt and nuclear power comes in at a cost of a whopping 11 dollars per watt. Now what makes wind turbine technology the most feasible of all of these is two things. The first is the already mentioned clean emissions standards from wind power. The second reason that wind farming is the future for power production worldwide is that once you produce a large enough wind farm the price per watt will plummet drastically. A 100 megawatt wind farm can be built for 100 million dollars, or… a dollar a watt. Want to see proof of how strong an energy source wind power can be? Let’s take a look at the largest wind farm in the world. You won’t find it offshore in the ocean. Although there is a pretty nice wind farm off the coast of Copenhagen. And this working wind farm is not lost in the Australian Outback, even though there are several 200 megawatt wind farms in southern Australia.
The world’s biggest wind farm is in the United States and in Texas. It is the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Taylor County, Texas. It is owned by NextEra Energy. NextEra is a subsidiary of energy production and management giant FPL (Florida Power and Light). NextEra produces over 18,000 megawatts of power with over 90 percent of that coming from clean or renewable fuels. 42% of Next Era’s power production comes from wind power! 735 megawatts of that power are produced at Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center.
The energy created from wind power at Horse Hollow comes from 421 tall powerful wind turbines. Each of these is mounted 260 feet above the ground so as to guarantee a steady flow of higher than average velocity winds. The 116 foot blades are connected to a tour bus sized container for the power generation components that weighs 56 tons. This operations area is call the Nacelle. Each of these massive wind driven turbines produces between 1.5 and 2.3 megawatts of power. As with all wind power designs, there are virtually zero emissions and as one might expect there is no fuel to buy and burn. The moment a wind turbine is turned on it starts paying for itself directly. Access to the turbine’s components is made by climbing up the inside of the tower and entering the Nacelle or if you would prefer to think of it as so, the engine room. Here the four basic turbine components the rotor, yaw system, the transmission and the generator are housed and give protected access.
Huge three bladed propellers that automatically turn to face the wind turn at a relatively slow rate of 16 revolutions per minute. One might wonder how this slow rate of speed translates to power? The huge blades of a wind farm turbine are set at a specific pitch so as to maintain a relatively steady rate of revolutions. Those 16 RPMs are channeled into a gear box or transmission if you will. This allows for a progressively faster build up of shaft speeds until a final drive speed of 1800 RPM into a permanent magnet generator. This generator produces a processed steady current at 34,500 volts! That power is sent by underground cable to substations where it is transformed in to smaller voltages several times until it reaches your home in a 120 or 240 volt form.
Horse Hollow Energy Center sits on 47,000 acres of owned and leased land in Texas. Those stories about Texas being the land of wide open spaces are certainly true, as the turbines are spread apart giving each a clear blast of wind. Unlike nuclear and fossil fuel power production facilities, a wind farm does not require near proximity to water. This explains why Australia has vested so heavily in the technology. Huge expanses of land are indeed needed for wind farming and obviously geographically smaller nations are a poor wind farming fit. But wind farms can be built offshore where there is virtually endless room for turbines. In the case of Horse Hollow, the 47,000 acres used for the energy center share space with livestock and agricultural production. Each wind turbine requires from 10 to 100 acres of surrounding land.
For the most part, wind turbines are fairly quiet. Most of the noise from the turbines at Horse Hollow comes from the whirring of the gears and bearings within the turbine itself. A certain degree of this noise filters down to people and animals on the ground. The turbines by necessity are spread far apart and this limits the overall noise heard to just that produced by one or two turbines. How loud is the sound from a Horse Hollow wind farm turbine? It is quieter than the sound of a vacuum cleaner coming from the next room. And at Horse Hollow the cows grazing have yet to issue a single complaint.
Zenith Wind Charger In the 1930s most farms across the United States either used 32 volt DC systems or were without electric power. Those without juice managed to get along by curing meats in a smokehouse and canning fruits and vegetables. But what about entertainment? The thirties were the golden age of radio. Surely the farm community didn’t have to miss out on Fibber McGee and Molly or the Lone Ranger? America’s rural areas stayed in touch with the world by means of DC powered radios. Those on farms with direct current wired in did just fine and those without any power at all used large tube type battery powered radios. Check out an episode of “The Walton’s” and you will see exactly this type. These radios brought in signals from all across America and via short wave all across the world. But like all battery operated devices are apt to have happen, the batteries ran down. And when that happened what was our depression era farmer to do? He hooked up the battery to a Zenith Wind Charger. A small generator connected directly to the shaft of a spinning pinwheel of a turbine rotated and turned cranking out both RPM’s and current. In a few hours the battery was charged for that night’s radio shows and the meaning of the term “Wind Farm” was truly understood.
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