One of these turned up in our office today – the semi-legendary Lego #4999 Vestas wind turbine:
Operations guys need Lego too, y’know …
Category: Wind Things
Wind, water and sun beat other energy alternatives, study finds
AWS OpenWIND
AWS OpenWIND is a free wind farm design tool. It’s from people who know what they’re doing. I’m intrigued.
a big fan of picasa
I’ve just started using Picasa, and its ease of use is great. It does all you (well, okay, I) really need of a photo editor, with some nice effects. It also does cool things like handle raw images, and uses Google Earth to geotag images. Here’s one I prepared earlier:
lowville
(rhymes with how, not low, apparently)
I’m in Lowville, NY, tonight. I’m looking at wind turbines. In fact, if my room faced the other way, I probably would see them right now.
David Bellamy – Power From The Wind
Excerpt from the educational video made for the CEGB in 1989:
Local copy: David Bellamy: Power From The Wind (excerpt).
His views have changed a bit since then.
until next year
So CanWEA 2008 is done. The high point was the launch of WindVision 2025. See you next year in Toronto.
windy west
CanWEA 2008 starts here. Undecided whether I’ll twitter anything …
maybe I shouldn’t play with HDR …
the wind that shakes the barley
Mary Z. Cox alerted me to one of her videos which has both clawhammer banjo and wind turbines:
one of the wind turbines I operate
we’re generating
You’ve no idea how happy I am to see several of these little fellers on my SCADA system:
That means we’re up and running. Go Lake Erie!
operating (nearly)
We were testing wind turbines yesterday.
Not the best picture, but it is a running Vestas V82.
the long neck has arrived
I picked up my long neck banjo from Hugh Hunter today. It’s wonderful.
(The image links to some of Hugh’s work-in-progress pictures.)
propeller guy
Tasty noms with Kyle MacNeill
Meena Peruvemba (CanWEA), Kyle MacNeill and Derek Lim Soo (GE) prepare the veggies at The Urban Element
The CanWEA board, and as many staff who could make it, went to The Urban Element last night for a team-building dinner. I usually shy away from team building things (I’ve have too many There is no I in team sessions, to which I usually respond, “Yes, but there is me, and also meat, so I think that says something”) but this one was good.
The Urban Element isn’t your average resto. You prepare and cook your own dinner, with the direct supervision of chef Kyle MacNeill and his assistants. Now it helps a lot that they’ve chosen very fine ingredients, and measured them out just so, and also have a properly set up kitchen and utensils, but we had to do the mixing, marinading and cooking.
What we made:
- Grilled romain caesar salad
- Kerr Farms flatiron steaks with asparagus and Yukon gold potatoes with rosemary butter
- Toasted saffron couscous with chick peas, cashews, tomatoes and sweet peppers
- Crispy fennel flatbread
- Chocolate praline tart with frangelico sauce
It was good; very good. Really amazingly good. Great atmosphere and a very pleasant evening.
farewell to the 13th floor
Well, this was my last day at EPCOR. The last two and a bit years have been fun.
It’s strange to think that I can fit my entire desk contents into one file box:
I also made sure I didn’t break with tradition:
la belle province
Hydro-Québec announced their wind RFP winners yesterday. It’s a huge deal for the industry; more than 2000 MW of contracts awarded, with commissioning dates ranging from 2011-2015. Enercon and REpower won all the manufacturing; strict local content requirements mean that they will have to set up shop in Québec.
This is good for the Canadian industry. Now the real work begins.
let it all hang out
Ontarians free to hang clothes in yards. Yeah, I couldn’t believe that it was illegal to hang out the washing in some areas either.
wind turbine raccoon sees you
… and is unimpressed.
We encountered a raccoon last night. It was somewhat surprised to see us. Almost as much as we were to find it on top of the steps to a wind turbine.