Our little band, while back in the Tehachapi Mtns were fortunate to be 'slack packing' a good deal of distance. One of the sections was an 8 mile stretch between Willow Springs road and hwy 58---dripping in moonlight. Also there was a great bulk of wind generators (part of a 6,000 generator farm....6,000! (most are 250kw, but a growing number, and the bulk of those were in this short section, are the new, bigger 1 and even 2MW generators....the one's with the 60 foot blades). I joked that these actually generate the wind we feel across the country, not power.
So, it was a surreal experience---hiking directly beneath some of these gigantic windmills...the shadows of the blades in the moonwash would swish past every half second or so creating an effect of being on another planet or fantastical reality of a science fiction novel....so amazing, and weird. The wind was such, that we were constantly being buffetted about, and would have fallen if not for our trekking poles. Standing immediately beneath on of the big generators, I could see that the blades were flexing as much as 10 feet or more back---impressive in the force of the wind, and the strength of whatever composites these things are made of. Vestas is one large French owned company that manufactures much of these parts and has indeed just opened up a new plant near Ft. Collins, CO
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment