Windpower leaping up all over Illlinois!

Hi saintjerome,

Good photos - can see it all nicely!

It would be interesting to know the rated capacity and manufacturer of the turbines in the photos if possible.

What brand of turbine are you considering? I am only an interested party not a salesman.

Having grown up on a farm I am aware that farm yields often times are kind of like fish stories - for the area involved, the 10,000 USD per turbine per year is fantastically better than the farmer has ever made with the crops.  

Nice photos.  It's always good to see more renewable energy projects get built.

Hi saintjerome, Yes I am in Turkey. Grew up in central Oregon and later had a home in North Carolina for many years. The past 30 years I have been mostly outside the US - first working on projects and now retired. Love the place, life style and people

I looked at the Bauer site and they seem to use Skystream which has a quality web site. Many sites misrepresent (or at least don't present correctly) what their turbines are capable of. Skystream is free of that kind of junk. No fancy words but looks like good equipment properly represented.

In buying equipment for the iron ore processing plants I designed and constructed I became used to looking into suppliers claims with a jaundiced eye - too often the promises were more than could be supplied. That includes suppliers from all over the world. When you push the start button the supplier isn't usually standing beside you. 

That's very cool, saintjerome! I drove past a wind farm in the Bay Area the other day called Atamont Pass. I don't know much about it, but it seems like the turbines are pretty old and defunct which is a shame.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Deej 

That's very cool, saintjerome! I drove past a wind farm in the Bay Area the other day called Atamont Pass. I don't know much about it, but it seems like the turbines are pretty old and defunct which is a shame.

Really?  I went past a wind farm on the train on the way to Richmond - I think it was Altamont - and all of the turbines were spinning.  It was an impressive sight to see all those hundreds of turbines all going at once.  The farm is over 30 years old now though.  Apparently it was one of the first in the USA.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dana1981 

 

Really?  I went past a wind farm on the train on the way to Richmond - I think it was Altamont - and all of the turbines were spinning.  It was an impressive sight to see all those hundreds of turbines all going at once.  The farm is over 30 years old now though.  Apparently it was one of the first in the USA.

Altamont Pass Wind Farm is indeed one of the first US wind farms.  But that also means that a lot of those original wind turbines are rather old technologies.  This is what Wikipedia says about it:

Deej, maybe it was the smaller turbines that caught your eye?

I wonder if this is the same wind farm I could see for many miles while driving through Illinois on the way home from a business trip. I was amazed at the number of wind generators.

Good stuff! 

Looks pretty cool and at least the landscape is suitable to wind generation (massive open expanse of nothing). 

In the UK a big off-shore wind farm called the London Array (out in the Thames Estuary) will be built over the next few years with phase 1 (630MW) planned to be on-line by 2012. Phase 2 will make it the worlds first 1GW off-shore wind farm.