letter from your country cousin

8/4/2019 Letter From Your Country Cousin

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Dear City Cousin,I know you’re a big fan of those windmills that you see from the interstate highwayreally big ones, not the ones that do work to pump water. And since I know you dosuch a thing in the city where you live, I thought I’d write to tell you about what I’studying.

Sometimes we don’t appreciate all thehard work and sacrifice that goes intobringing a new patch of windmills intothe unproductive mountains we callhome. There’s trees to cut and rocksto be blasted and roads dozed not tomention lots of engineering to be done.The engineering’s probably the mostimportant part because our mountainsdon’t seem to have a lot of wind to offeralthough the developers say the wind’sgreat. Placing those monster windturbines so they don’t steal eachother’s wind is a complicated task on rough ground.Being lucky enough to have the luxury of experiencing several of thosewind turbines located outside my window has given me a rare andspecial opportunity. I guess I never noticed how many directions thewind blows from in the course of a week. You’d think that it would be out

of the west, but we get days at a time when it blows from the east.I guess it’s just one of those many things I’ve never thought about.

As often as not, the wind blows along the ridge line from the north or south and thaquestion to mind. How good did those turbine engineers plan their turbine spacing days when the first turbine blocks the second the second the third and etcetera, etceetcetera - to quote Yul Brynner. Those engineers must be pretty good though, they’way to make the windmills turn even when the air is perfectly still. And that’s not aamazing how, even when they’re turned off, the windmills keep changing where thways back, I hired an airplane and a fella to fly it. We flew over our mountain and,

seems to me that it was Mother Nature that did the picking of where the turbines mlocated rather than the engineers.

I sure hope it wasn’t, because I’m aware of the huge cost of each of those giant struSome say it’s around three million just for the hardware, not to mention all the periexcavating, wiring, transportation, concrete and of course legal fees to keep those Nwho get in the way trying to protect their health, safety and property values, at bay



come cheap. We sure wouldn’t want the investors(that’s us U.S. citizens) to not be getting theirmoney’s worth. With that in my mind, I took it uponme to go across America and find out just what allthe wind power fuss was about. I saw a lot and oneof the first things I learned was a new appreciationfor our Allegheny Mountains, at least those thatdon’t have the windmills yet. When it comes to theUSA, well, most of it’s flat. Flat seems to be thepreferred location for wind farms. I took to callingthose locations “Wind fields” like our “coal fields” orthe Southwest’s, “oil fields”.

Those “fields” really bring home the point that the Allegheny Mountains don’t hav



suitable for putting up a windturbine. We have wind plantsthat number in the dozens of turbines while other placeshave ones that number in thehundreds. I was at one inTexas a couple of monthsago. Horse Hollow they calledit. Largest wind farm in theworld, the sign said. Went on,six or eight turbines deep, forforty miles or so as Iremember. They were havinga drought at the time whichmade me wonder if all thatscrub, cactus covered groundhad ever been as rich andproductive as our cool, moistAllegheny hills. They hadsome of those noisy, hatch banging GE turbines there too. Just like the ones I saw iNorth Dakota that make an appearance in that video, Test of Time, we’ve all seen aAllegheny Treasures computer blog. I took a snapshot there of a wind mill sitting bof wind turbines to show a size comparison. I guess if I’m going to sound like an inperson, I’m going to have to stop calling the turbines “windmills”.



The hatch banging along with the blade noise twirling along at 150 miles per hour many reasons folks I visited in places like Wisconsin are a little sensitive about thesetting up industrial strength wind turbines as close as 1,000 feet from the foundatihomes. Right out their front doors. That’s the rules out there.

I thought that their politicians were pretty callous until I remembered that we don’tkind of turbine tower set back requirements. Heck, we don’t have much regulation

protect plain folks here at home.I was surprised that at just about every wind installation there were several turbinerunning. I was also impressed by the number of times I came across wind farms thbecalmed with only a handful of the turbines turning while scores of turbines arounstationary. Come to find out that the ones turning were getting their power off the gof places, that’s fossil fuel that’s making it possible to run the wind turbines.In several of the places I visited, it was “carbon free” hydro power being used to po“supposedly carbon free” wind turbines instead of offsetting carbon someplace elseelectric supply chain. I used to think that if the turbine’s blades were turning, electr

being generated, but that’s not completely true. Wind turbines only work at their bebreeze is at the right speed which is somewhere between the mid thirties to the miAnd you might remember that a fifty mile per hour breeze is mighty strong. Somebexplain the math to me, but it works out that if you cut the wind speed in half, the egenerated is cut to one-eighth. Cut that in half and we’re down to a thirty-second. Tdown to amounts of electricity that are nothing more than a nuisance for power disdeal with. Think about all those still mornings and evenings in the mountains.



So, I asked myself,“How is it that I seethose turbines turningat times where there’snot a hint of a breeze?”I looked into that a little,and not being one of those engineer fellas,I was surprised to findout that each windturbine is controlled byit’s own little computerbrain as well assomeone sitting at abank of monitorshundreds of miles away.Way up on the tippy top of thenacelle (that’s the name they havefor the box at the top of the towerthat holds the machinery that turnsair into electricity), there’s ananemometer and a sort of weathervane thing that tells theturbine’ brain if the wind is blowingand which way. Some of thoselittle computer brains have beenprogrammed to never give up.You see, it’s hard for the wind toget those three, hundred foot plus long bladescovering about two acres of sky to turn the gears in the one hundred forty ton gearbthe nacelle. If the computer brain thinks there’s a chance, it’s programmed to drawoff of the grid to start the blades turning. I watched this happen several times onmy trip. Like theLittle Engine That Couldin that picture book, these duty boundturbines cranked and cranked for hours but were, sadly, unable to make the windblow. I had to feel a little sorry for them. You can tell when this is happening bylooking at a wind farm and paying attention to where they are facing. If several of the turbines turn slowly in various directions defying the laws of nature, then it’snot the wind that’s turning them. This doesn’t show up too well in a still picture so you’ll just have to take my word on it. Say, maybe that’s how they make theturbines back at home turn. I also learned that it ruins a wind turbine to sit still for Tons and tons of weight sitting on bearings is kind of like what we used to do to a we saw a train coming down the tracks.



I guess that must use up a lot of electricity when the wind doesn’t blowfor days on end just to keep the things from seizing up.Since my trip, I’ve noticed that the turbines outside my window at homeare turned off a lot of the time, but the nacelles do continue to trackthe wind by pointing in different directions throughout the day usingelectricity from the grid while producing none.Unlike back home, some folks here are downright happy about havingthe wind farms around. If you ride around some you’ll find lots of signssaying “Welcome to Podunkville, windmill capital of Podunk County.”In the interest of full disclosure, I made those names up to protectthe clueless, but when your town’s other claim to fame is theirrattlesnakes, maybe we should cut them some slack.

In some places the wind developershave built little shrines to windpower in the corn fields or in whatmight be called “the middle of nowhere”.

In a lot of these places it could befive miles to the nearest neighborand there’s several miles betweenthe neighbors and the wind turbinesWe found some really noisy turbinehere with lose hatch covers bangingon every revolution. We found thesame problem in GE turbines inIowa, North Dakota and Texas, andthat’s only the turbines that could bseen from the road.



I suspect that if the noisedoesn’t have an effect onelectricity production, there’sno reason to fix it. Or do likethey do in a lot of places, if the part creates a problem, just throw it away.

I reckon some of the pro-wind farm folks here find it’s a gooddeal to get government subsidies for farming the corn thatgets government subsidies for being turned into ethanol,while taking payments from the wind developers which comefrom the renewable energy subsidies. And boy do they haveevery variety of ethanol you could think of out there. It was allI could do to figure out how to fill up my tank. I took a pictureat the pump because I knew you wouldn’t believe it.

I got to witness some mighty strange thingson my trip. In Spanish Fork, Utah they saythey like to “surround themselves withtechnology”. If there were a cake for defyingthe laws of logic, the Edison Mission windfarm here would surely take it. At the timeit was being proposed by the winddevelopers, they bragged that SpanishFork had the best windpotential in Utah.Actually I can’t remembera wind proposal anyplacewhere the developersdidn’t say that a placehad great wind potential.At any rate, SpanishFork was the best.In 2007 they put up nineSuzlon turbines fromIndia. Of course therewas hardly any wind thetwo days I was therewhich didn’t exactly meetEdison Mission’s windclaims, but maybe



it is different here the other three-hundred-sixty-three days of the year. I have my dabout that though. Spanish Fork ison the western side of the WasatchMountains sitting on a large planestretching to the west. Theturbines are located in a hollow atthe base of a mountain pass. Theirnacelles stick up slightly above theneighboring housing developmentsto their west and the wind turbinessit hundreds of feet below themountains to their south. I was leftscratching my head at what EdisonMission might have been thinking.The other wind power facility,presumably without the best windin Utah, is still growing and has overa hundred turbines about a half days ride away. It’s located on flatground. Flat ground. I’m sensing apattern here.

On the way home, I passed by several brand new installations in Minnesota, Iowa on more flat ground. Like the ones I’d seen in Wisconsin and elsewhere, these weruncomfortably close to private residences among the farm fields. All the elements

At each turbine site, there were three tower sections, three bland nacelles set out along a neat grid of gravel lanes. All that

was for the cranes to arrive and assemble thparts. It wasn’t too windy that day, but I’ll bthere are times when they get a tornado ortwo to make up for it. I couldn’t help butwonder at how much cheaper and easier iwas for these wind developers, or the winfacilities I’d seen in more than a dozenWestern and Midwestern states, to put ua wind farm than back home where the

had to blast, gouge and tearour mountains apart toattempt the impossible.



I wondered too at what kind of people would think that short term work for a handfolks ultimately leading to six or seven permanent jobs was worth the damage to theconomy and real estate values that would last until the project was taken down.

As I look at the stationary turbine outside my window, I sure hopethat all the talk about how wind generated electricity doesn’tamount to a hill of beans is wrong because I’m going to be lookingat these turbines for a long time. And even though the governmentwind study maps say otherwise, I’ve been assured that we havethe best wind around.Give the kids a hug from me.

Your Country Cousin



The preceding letter is written in the voice of a fictitious character who represents meand many of my mountain neighbors. It is based on an actual voyage of discovery thattotaled three months riding the highways and back roads of the US and Canadaseeking out wind farms in twenty states on several trips from August 2010 through April2011.

The purpose of these road trips was to look and listen. When it comes to the concept of electricity fueled by the wind one size does not fit all and everything depends on localpoint of view. The true story lies in the fact that wind power has nothing to do withsaving the planet nor does it have anything to do with NIMBYs protecting their backyards. The reality of whether wind power is good or evil depends on where it is located, andhow it impacts people. It has nothing to do with conservatives or liberals. Another pieceof the puzzle is how wind power is funded, by whom, and what are its long term costs?We might want to add the question: Does it really achieve its goals?

“Letter from Your Country Cousin” is based on the old children’s story of The City Mouse And The Country Mouse . In this case the city cousins rarely see what’shappening in the country, yet they have a large, concentrated population which carriesgreat decision making, political power. This is the case with wind power where wellmeaning city folks who have never experienced the reality of wind powered electricalgeneration, might overestimate their grasp of the facts and underestimate theknowledge and experience of their country cousins.

At its least, this piece presents some interesting pictures to explore. At its best, itprompts the reader to ask some questions and to question some beliefs. Perhaps thefirst question should be: How did you form your understanding and beliefs regardingwind power?

Cousin John Terry

letter from your country cousin

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