Wind Farms

May I ask all ASF members to consider voting in this poll.

I consider Windfarms abominable.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/poll/2015/jun/11/poll-visually-awful-windfarm-coal-mine

gg

Garpal Gumnut said:

May I ask all ASF members to consider voting in this poll.

I consider Windfarms abominable.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/poll/2015/jun/11/poll-visually-awful-windfarm-coal-mine

gg

Click to expand...

I consider Tony Abbott the most abominable.
If the GG had any stamina, he should dismiss the lot of them for gross incompetence, economic and ecological vandalism.

pixel said:

I consider Tony Abbott the most abominable.

Click to expand...

I'll bite ... which bit would you like me to bite?

Wind Farms eh? The technology is there to produce electricity but as your article states a corrupt business indeed.

*hear hear & clapping*

What's the meaning of this Garpal? Have you sold out to the basket weavers and gone Feral with a Namibian shell luck charm around your ankle? Wind Farms indeed?

Garpal Gumnut said:

May I ask all ASF members to consider voting in this poll.

I consider Windfarms abominable.


gg

Click to expand...

As opposed to what ?

Power stations of any sort ( except perhaps hydro) are not meant to be beautiful , they are there to do a job, and as long as they do that job I see no reason to overly consider their architectural qualities.

I suppose on those grounds we should consider a sailing ship abominable compared to a coal steamer.

GG,
you are in Queensland I believe:
as I work in the coal industry, i fly over the Bowen basin open cut pits relatively frequenly, and I see the 60km long scars of coal open cut mining with pile of sterile mountains of crap which will not recover in my lifetime, that is even before mentioning atmosphere CO2 or greenhouse gases
I so much prefer the rolling green hills with cattle grazing under the wind farms...
but eh,, i am sure some people would like to spend holidays on the moon..
Queenstown in Tasmania is a good enough approximate when considering mining landscape beauty
As for the crap about health effect, a PM should be sacked to utter such nonsense, next we will have the sun orbiting around earth: "it is true, i can see it..."

as per a different thread with Smurf knowledgeable input, wind has been providing more than 85% of SA power for the last week or so....
I see windfarm as a triumph of knowledge and technology and so serene and beautiful

SirRumpole said:

As opposed to what ?

Power stations of any sort ( except perhaps hydro) are not meant to be beautiful , they are there to do a job, and as long as they do that job I see no reason to overly consider their architectural qualities.

I suppose on those grounds we should consider a sailing ship abominable compared to a coal steamer.

Click to expand...

Read that Abbott was saying he's concerned, not with just the aesthetic of wind farms, but also with its health consequences. Health!

Coal is good for humanity, as God intended... but windfarm is bad for your health and he won't have it.

I mean sure, it's noisy for those living near it - one solution is to only approve them in isolated area or at sea.

luutzu said:

I mean sure, it's noisy for those living near it - one solution is to only approve them in isolated area or at sea.

Click to expand...

and if you compare this to the sounds of a freeway with millions of people living alongside
I also like how windfarms are considered ugly but high voltage poles present for ages are not a problem:
a beautiful addition to the landscape as they are required by power plants as well

Abbott the man who put the 'dolt' in adult.
In his 'love in' with Alan Jones did they broach the subject of Gay marriage?, I 'unfortunatly' missed the broadcast.
The whole RET to Capt Klown Shoes' is an anathema, God has given man( in particular rich white men) dominion over the Earth and it's commercially exploitable bounty and bugger the consequences. Or if you take the advice of Abbott's olde Mentor George Pell; there's a whole lot of other buggering you can turn a blind eye to while moving the buggerer to somewhere else, to go on buggering.
Stage two of the Nimmitabell wind farm is on the move $10k/yr for each mill to the land holder, haven't heard a complaint from any of them yet. nor from any of the holders housing the current 69 from stage one.

These bladeless wind turbines shake to generate electricity​

Farms dotted with the gigantic spinning blades of wind turbines have become a standard sight on long-distance road trips, but what if there was another way to capture energy from the wind? A startup out of Spain is working on that very idea. The company's called Vortex Bladeless, and its turbines look like stalks of asparagus poking out of the ground.

Instead of using the wind to rotate a blade, the company's pillars shake back and forth from the vortices created by the movement of air around the structure. Engineers look to avoid these forces when designing buildings and other structures, but the Vortex turbine takes advantage of this phenomenon to oscillate in the wind. Typically, a structure can only be optimized to oscillate at the specific frequencies caused by a certain wind speed, but Vortex says it is using magnets to adjust the turbine on the fly to get the most from whatever the wind speeds happen to be. Once the structure starts vibrating, an alternator in the base of the device then converts the mechanical movement into electricity.

Click to expand...

More on link below...

pinkboy

Neither a coal mine nor a wind farm are visually pleasing as such, but I'd take the wind farm over the mine any day for many reasons.

In a way I do see them as somewhat beautiful not aesthetically but for what they symbolise. Anything that cuts the need to burn coal, oil and gas has an awful lot of pluses and I'm more than happy to have the temporary and completely reversible visual impact of a wind farm or solar panels as a means of achieving that.

CO2 aside, the landscape around a coal mine in most cases won't recover in our lifetimes if ever. But we could decommission a wind farm and remove virtually all trace of it ever existing quite easily if they are no longer needed.

The people have spoken via that poll, with 96% preferring the wind farms over coal.

How the community perceives wind farms also varies a lot with location. Eg in Victoria there's quite a bit of opposition to them whereas in Tasmania the level of public support is high and there's even a private operator running regular tours to Woolnorth (and at Musselroe anyone can drive in and have a look).

As for visual impact of power stations generally, some degree of thought has gone into the power stations themselves for quite a long time now. You can't hide a huge stack and cooling towers, but you can certainly design the plant to have a streamlined look and make it as attractive as possible and that idea isn't new.

So far as hydro is concerned, here in Tas we were messing about with the colour of transmission towers as far back as the 1970's in an effort to make them less obtrusive running through otherwise undeveloped parts of the state. It's not perfect but it's reasonably successful and they're still that colour today.

The other big thing with hydro is manipulation of storage levels so as to enhance fishing, boating, scenic or ecological values. It's not always possible to achieve, but a huge amount of effort does go into coming up with workable operating strategies which maximise overall benefits to all users, not just power generation. There's numerous examples but they generally involve maintaining the water around a set level so far as practical either all the time or during certain times of the year (eg during the fishing season).

There are also water releases for recreational purposes. That is, water released so as to facilitate rafting, canoeing or some other activity that wouldn't otherwise be released in the normal course of business. How that's done varies between sites but it takes the form of either running a particular power station at a set load in order to achieve the desired water flow or in some cases basically "pulling the plug" on the dam and letting out a huge flood (eg for white water rafting).

None of that stuff is profitable in a strict engineering and power generation sense but it's important to balance the varying needs of the community so far as practical.

They should disguise the windmills by making the trunks look like a tree and the blades like moo cows.

I wonder if Tony minds the look of the old skool windmills:

Tisme said:

They should disguise the windmills by making the trunks look like a tree and the blades like moo cows.

I wonder if Tony minds the look of the old skool windmills:

View attachment 63022

View attachment 63023

Click to expand...

So true, Tisme

... and have you heard the racket that one of those old Southern Cross pumps makes when in full flight? It may not scare the cows, but must be very offputting for morons and Liberal front benchers

The Vortex Bladeless Wind Turbine



https://herox.com/news/354-the-vortex-bladeless-wind-turbine

Ahhh Windmills....

pinkboy said:

View attachment 63012


pinkboy

Click to expand...

What an amazing bit of engineering !! Surveyor in charge has an incredible eye for detail.

And the mine produced how many Megawatts of power to run your computer so you can ask the Don Quxiote' to tilt at windmills ?

"I come in a world of iron ... to make a world of gold"

trainspotter said:

What an amazing bit of engineering !! Surveyor in charge has an incredible eye for detail.

And the mine produced how many Megawatts of power to run your computer so you can ask the Don Quxiote' to tilt at windmills ?

"I come in a world of iron ... to make a world of gold"

Click to expand...

Nice quote, but it is the past we desperately need to move to the future sooner rather than later and wont do that by digging bigger holes and saying how bad wind turbines are.

I understand wind turbines are not the answer but nor is vested coal interests running our federal government.

trainspotter said:

What an amazing bit of engineering !! Surveyor in charge has an incredible eye for detail.

And the mine produced how many Megawatts of power to run your computer so you can ask the Don Quxiote' to tilt at windmills ?

"I come in a world of iron ... to make a world of gold"

Click to expand...

The meme is facetious in case you didn't know. Top left, if you look closely, there is a wind turbine.

And I own and operate a business in the coal industry, so for me it was in jest.

pinkboy

IFocus said:

I understand wind turbines are not the answer

Click to expand...

Prior to the late 1950's if you went to anywhere in Australia then pretty much all electricity came from a single source. Coal in most states, hydro in Tasmania, diesel anywhere that wasn't on the main grid. That was it.

The trend since then is very much one of greater diversity. First it was adding a lot of hydro to NSW and Vic and oil to WA, SA and some in Vic too. Then Tas built an oil-fired plant. Then gas came along, most notably in SA where it soon became the dominant source. Now it's wind and solar.

I'd be very, very surprised if in 2050 there is a single technology supplying the entire load, or even the vast majority of it, anywhere in Australia apart from small remote systems (which will use whatever works locally) and in the absence of major load growth also Tasmania (hydro isn't going to disappear anytime soon). But for the main grids in most states, we're almost certainly going to end up with a mix of energy sources, far more diverse than in the past, and wind is likely to be part of that mix for the foreseeable future.

To the extent that the aim is to put non-fossil energy into the grid and cut the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation, wind is presently the cheapest non-hydro means of doing that. And since hydro isn't an option in many places, wind is the obvious answer up to a point where technical limits start to be reached.