Simple solution. Attach wheels or in this case pontoons to the giant fans and have greenies bumpdraft them around a pre-determined, left turn only track.

It might not improve power output but the wrecks would be spectacular.

Syncro

sync

ahhh , yes, the movable turbine solution mentioned in the comments had me rolling on the floor

make a financially inefficient model more costly

pretty soon they be able to justify unionized bicycle peddle power to generate electricity

"justify unionized bicycle peddle power to generate electricity"

Well at least you wouldn't need as much backup generation. Unless of course the union went on strike for longer bathroom breaks or.... OK never mind. Hey how about if we fire all the unionized coal miners and put in a bunch of coal fired generators.

'shopped.

GYM

Well if we're gonna move em we're sure as hell gonna race em ;-)

Syncro

Thank goodness here in Ontario we don't have to worry about having a premier so stupid that he would conside spending $7 billion on something like this. Hey, wait a minute!

Has anyone considered that after millions of fans have killed billions of insect-eating birds, that there will be a pestilence and infestation of crop eating insects competing with us for what's left of the food.

How about those pesticides eh? Ya that'll green up the planet real good.

THE ECO FREAKS ARE MESSING WITH THE BALANCE IN NATURE.

I feel like I am living in a science fiction novel that describes how a planet of beings destroyed themselves while trying to save themselves.

This is a nice quote from the WSJ. It is about Australia's Tony Abbott, the opposition leader who prevented the cap'n'trade scheme:

"His case is not an appeal to do nothing, but to avoid doing something stupid. And unilateral Australian action in a post-Copenhagen world would be stupid: Economic Pain For No Environmental Gain. Not a bad slogan during an election scare campaign."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703652104574651610217495546.html

I would slightly change it to "do nothing, if it avoids doing something stupid". This applies to not only carbon penalty schemes but also sinking tax money into wind towers.

"Attach wheels or in this case pontoons to the giant fans and have greenies bumpdraft them around a pre-determined, left turn only track."

Heh.

But did you ever read about the proposal for pedal-powered commuter trains?

If you want to keep write satire you're going to have to work ever-harder to keep ahead of the moonbat reality.

someday, someone will calculate the opportunity cost of this whole global warming hysteria thingy.

$Trillion of dollars diverted from the pursuit of real science, real inventiveness, real human progress. Millions of humans who will suffer harsh, hungry and brutal lives so the AGW Hysterics & Zealots can drive a car on fuel made form food and housing a battery that comes from mines in China that have poisoned and ravaged a huge region that makes the Oil Sands look like a postage sized national park.

It is always this way . . . when the Progressives get to "reforming" millions of people die, and $Trillions of dollars are wasted on showcase technologies that satisfy warped egos and little else.

We should be thankful that this time, so far, there have been no show trials, despite what Dr. Fruit Fly thinks is appropriate.

At least so far

Bad engineering in the power generation sector is not the sole purvey of the wind group. CANDU ring a bell?

As for the claim that the wind changes direction and therefore a straight line of mills won't work this is in many locations not the case. For example, along the coast of western Nfld. The wind blows from the WSW over for the vast majority of days. Of course the wind can gust up to 200 plus KM - a speed that would disintegrate most if not all commercial turbines.

Over the next four years SaskPower plans to double the amount of wind power generation currently used. However, the only criticism I have is that they plan to purchase it from private wind electricity producers rather that owning and building the wind farms themselves. The minister in charge Bill Boyd made this announcement in late October, 2009.

pst314

True enough. Unintended satire is a seemingly exponential moonbat trait but the apex has to be close...No?

Syncro

"they plan to purchase it from private wind electricity producers "

and buy it at what price? How big will be the subsidy and how much money will be diverted away from Education or Healthcare just so someone can think they are being green?

And of course, since the Wind Turbine industry is subsidized, they have no incentive to get creative, improve their technologies, their efficiencies or their procedures.

Fred
[.....We should be thankful that this time, so far, there have been no show trials, despite what Dr. Fruit Fly thinks is appropriate.

At least so far]

The UK Parliament has a special committee investigating the hoax and the conflicts of interest.
The unelected UN beaurocrats will not allow a trial where they are the defendants.
The UN is now as irrelevant as the League of Nations...
Time to cease funding and scrap it.

All this alternative energy is Bull Shit when you live in an area of the world that has the big three, oil, gas or coal. I am not saying alterative energy sources shouldn’t be developed or experimented with but what is the point? Our current energy sources in the West will last us for hundreds of years. Why not spend the majority of the billions of dollars pissed away every year on alternate sources to develop what we have into a pollution free, or as near as possible, source of energy?

I am a big (in girth and interest level) NASCAR fan, and there is another phenomena noticed by NASCAR announcers and fans.
The micro climate a running race creates.
When a rain storm is approaching a race, it has been noted that if the storm is not severe, the 43 cars circulating on the track (especially a shorter track of a mile) generate a form of a rotating heat vortex that rises above the track keeping low cloud systems away.
Now if one of the increasingly rare temperature monitoring stations where placed in the infield of the track, it would generate readings markedly higher than surrounding areas experiencing the rainfall. During a typical race the temperature at track level is upwards of 40F higher than ambient temperature, not only from the solar effect, but also from the heat energy expelled from the cars,(and maybe a 100,000 or more fans in the stands.)
OMG, I've just given reasons for the AWG to ban NASCAR but in the interim, use their tracks to bias there results. D'oh!

What difference would it make if some Grand Poobah could make them all lead dogs? They still would be.
And he’s got it bass ackwards using NASCAR as an example. A car drafting the lead car increases their aerodynamic efficiency so that they both can go faster.
One’s trying to suck out energy and NASCAR is trying to conserve it.

Stop me when I get something wrong.

1. Green house gases are bad and are heating up the planet.

2. Water Vapor is a green house gas.

3. Wind turbines are causing water vapor to be add to the atmosphere.

4. Wind turbines are causing global warming.

"..but also from the heat energy expelled from the cars,(and maybe a 100,000 or more fans in the stands.)"

And if at least half of those fans are drinking beer and eating chili dogs the arctic ice cap would be gone within 5 years.

The UK Parliament has a special committee investigating the hoax...

People keep calling this a "hoax". It's not a hoax, as a hoax can be benign. "Scam" is a more appropriate word.

Very little science needs to be done re: Windturbines.

What they need a serious dose of Energy Economists so we can get on with making / engineering more efficient nuclear and coal plants

Agitator

You got it right. Water vapour is about 100 times more effective as a green house gas than CO2.

Having been involved it siting potential wind farms on ridge tops on Northern Vancouver Island for several proponents, the effects of down wind multiple siting were well known at least six years ago.

Leave it to Sask Power to waste money just to keep the eco nuts happy. This will help keep the bird population down though.

Not to put too fine a point on it but the moving blades or cars or airplanes only force water to condense OUT of the atmosphere ... the water vapor is already there.

Compression at the leading edge followed by decompression after which produces condensed water vapor followed by the same water re-evaporating into the atmosphere.

There is no increase at all in the amount of H2o in the air.

OMMAG, you should see the amount of water that is removed from atmospheric air after the multiple stages of an air separation plant's main air compressor (maybe you have). Next step is CO2 removal via molecular sieve adsorption (used to be done with reversing exchangers). I have no idea what any of this means, but it sounds cool, doesn't it?

There's a UN-imposed global limit on how many air separation plants can operate at once because if too many are online they would suck up all the oxygen in the world and all animal life would be asphyxiated.

:)

I have had extensive talks with Danny Glover, Al Gore and David Suzuki and they all think that the big giant propellers on the landscape will actually speed the reverse rotation of the earth with each revolution, and cause time to reverse to a better time, when we didn't have to listen to idiots tell us, that idiots know what is good for us. This can only be a good thing to spend trillions on, cause Fat Al and his merry band of SCAM ARTISTS need our money! Tell your elected officials "NO MORE" there can be no more money wasted on this "Puchauri scheme", it is reprehensible in these times of world needs like Haiti, etc. that any elected official (Renner), Prentice} should throw away TAXPAYERS money on the SCAM of the century.

It turns out the now infamous IPCC reports rely heavily on reports from activist environmentalist organizations like the WWF.

No potential for bias there, I mean these whacko environmentalist groups realized a long time ago that the scarier the story, the more pitiful the photo of the the animal - think drowning polar bear cub . . . the more money they can scam from a gullible public.

http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-dodgy-citations-in-nobel-winning.html

OMMAG, you should see the amount of water that is removed from atmospheric air after the multiple stages of an air separation plant's main air compressor (maybe you have). Next step is CO2 removal via molecular sieve adsorption (used to be done with reversing exchangers). I have no idea what any of this means, but it sounds cool, doesn't it?

There's a UN-imposed global limit on how many air separation plants can operate at once because if too many are online they would suck up all the oxygen in the world and all animal life would be asphyxiated.

:)

Sorry for the double post, Moveable Type barfed an error message at me.

Piper Paul I think scam is too mild. I like the criminal term embezzlement. They knew what they were doing and the expenditure already is massive. No country club prison though, coal mine with a pick and shovel. They should die out fairly quickly.

How about "naive but well-meaning widespread misappropriation of resources in the mistaken belief that science (global thermodynamics, i.e., physics and chemistry) can be manipulated by bureaucratic edict".

Does that work for you?

Sounds like a meltdown in our own Green Party here in Can.David Akin has column in NAtPost today,about 'Upheaval in Gr.Party over May leadership'..and they still owe approx 3mil after last election!

Piper ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w

Now that's bafflegab.

NASCAR... it's like spending sunday watching paint dry...except with the added socialogic entertainment you can only experience while doing that while surrounded by packs of mildly inbred lite beer swilling valveeta eaters.

Sammy @ 5:45, lets have an election real soon.

Furthermore, I hope to see some charges laid real soon in the AGW scam.

OMMAG @ 6:11, I had one of those, but the wheels fell off.

Different strokes for different folk, huh?. While my time in Texas has helped me appreciate the subtleties of stock car racing, I can understand that everyone is not a fan. Personally, I find baseball, curling and golf to be up there as the most boring events to watch on TV. Now participating in the game or watching it in person is an entirely different experience. Best ball I've seen is Pete Rose playing in Jerry Park and much later, Roger Clements pitch in Minutemaid Park.

It's a lot different experience live.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/bureau-blog/conservatives-lash-out-at-king-of-prorogues/article1442450/

Check out the kid wearing a CCCP (aka USSR) toque behind Bob Ray.

WTF?

Just another example of how these protests were astroturfed, as usual, and had nothing to do with 'ordinary canadians' deciding to speak out. Also an example of Lenin's dogma about the young...

Popular Science is 'hobby fun science' and far from a reliable source..

Consider the claim of 20 to 30%.

Impossible, simply because winds are constantly changing direction and velocity.

So winds would have to be generated in one exact direction as if from a wind tunnel.

NEVER happens in nature. Ever seen wind patterns on you evening weather cast?

Every time the wind goes off the exact row axis the theory vanishes. Sorry.

sorry, this is psychosomatic ,but everytime I see a post from tonyguitar (TG) I hear duelling banjos.

which incidently I vote into the top ten most influential movies of all times.(for all the wrong reasons)

Merely uninformed opinion.

Where is your skillful debate?

I am conservative, but not a lock-stepper.

Every time the wind goes off the exact row axis the theory vanishes. Sorry.

Posted by: TG at January 24, 2010 8:27 PM

Not so fast...while what you say is true the long "tail" of disruption means that unless your turbines are spread really thin with great spacing, any reasonablyu dense windfarm is going to be interfering with itself. no matter which exact angle the wind is blowing.

NOT that it matters anyway because wind is such a piss poor, expensive, unreliable, and un-environmentally friendly way to generate electricity that it is in the interests of humanity to bann it unless there are no better local alternatives.

@ huh?

Gotta love the left's obsession with sterotypes. Whatever would you do without them?

I know how to spell velveeta. Some don't.

Probably some good money and a patent in it for somebody who was geometrically inclined enough to develop a staggered layout that would maximize output from any, or from a range of prevailing, wind directions.

It seems to me that simply orienting an evenly spaced grid to a prevailing direction would not only maximize peak output, but would minimize low output due to wind direction. A (seemingly) semirandom layout could probably be designed to lower peaks and raise troughs in output, while increasing average output. Even if the average was not raised, this would help to smooth the output...one of the big downfalls of windpower.

Any takers?

Car racing is meant to be watched live, not on TV. The Indy 500 has an attendance of around 300,000, and I suspect every one of them goes home satisfied.

If you consider wind is a form of energy, it stands to reason that when you tap into that energy, its potential diminishes. Unless, of course, you believe in perpetual energy.

Windmills are great for pumping water, grinding flour and, if there is nothing else small scale generation, find the data for the cold snap in the UK, as is usual when it turns real cold, or hot for that matter there are clear skies and no wind, maybe if the brains behind this scam (is there a common theme here?) looked at likely max demand and min output they might think of something that works, as with most things environmental ( there's a thing, that hackneyed word ends in mental!!) it is not thought out it stops at the idea, never ever are the, often simple, side effects bothered with.

Posted by: OMMAG at January 24, 2010 6:11 PM

In my 15 years or so of being on the net (including usenet when it was a good place to go), I don't think I've ever seen that one. I've put it up right under the Feynman one.

Merci Beaucoup!

www.pipingdesign.com

I'm pretty sure geese figured this out a while back....

The most important point out of this whole article is that it'll spoil the view from the Kennedy compound....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100125/ap_on_re_us/us_cape_wind_obama

We could always send the windmills to Haiti.

We could always send the windmills to Haiti.

Wait, you mean to tell me a bunch of latte sipping Liberal elitists have never seen a sail boat steal another boat's wind?

Come ON! These people all went to super elitist summer camp together, they know that at least.

TG, if you have a grid of windmills the ones in the center of the grid will -always- be in wind shadow of the machines on the leading edge of the group, no matter what the wind direction. That's why in places like Minnesota they lay the things out in strings, miles apart from the next string. Only an imbecile would use a 4x4 grid pattern except in a place where the wind always blows the same direction, like San Gorgonio Pass.

An imbecile or a government planning committee anyway, which is really the same thing. Divide the highest IQ in the room by the number of members.

Any blog mentioning NASCAR is a good blog.

Which only goes to show the photo is 'unsettled'.

I wouldn't call it the strongest link in the chain.

"True enough. Unintended satire is a seemingly exponential moonbat trait but the apex has to be close...No?"

Only if it's an asymptotic curve. But if it's exponential then we're going to reach a Singularity other than the one that Instapundit keeps writing about. =:O

Maybe someone can build a Golgafrinchan Space Ark B for all the moonbats. If they can believe Al Gore then it's small potatoes to get them to believe in a Giant Mutant Star Goat. :-D

it's "green" job creation when you have folks building the ginormous turbines and other folks running them around to "catch some air". Not very energy effecienct but the visual is hilarious.