… it’s time for the CREST Wind Energy Summer School.
It’s about the best way to start out in the wind industry. I went there back when it was at Imperial College. So many of my friends and colleagues in the industry have attended.
I wish the same course were run in several locations. Loughborough isn’t on most people’s travel plans.
From Real Goods, who’ve been doing the sustainability thing for almost 30 years:
We generally advise that a good year-round wind turbine site isn’t a place that you’d want to live. It takes average wind speeds of 8 to 9 mph [3.6-4 m/s, or 12.9-14.5 km/h] and up, to make a really good site. That’s honestly more wind than most folks are comfortable living with.
— Solar Living Sourcebook, 12th ed., p.80
We stayed over in St Thomas the other night, and on the way back came through Erie Shores Wind Farm. I spent a lot of time working on the layout design for this project, but up until now I’ve never seen it built. Sure, I saw some holes in the ground, but nothing higher. Here’s my gallery of mediocre photos: Erie Shores Wind Farm (and man, I must clean my D70’s sensor).
There’s clearly good local acceptance of the project. The beach washrooms have been repainted with a mural that includes a wind turbine, Bayham’s building an interpretive centre, and in downtown Port Burwell, there were cars with Support Wind Energy stickers. It made me happy.
The conference was good (learnt a lot about wind integration and forecasting), but I was most taken with the little Richardson’s Ground Squirrels that lived in burrows around the hotel.
I’m attending the CanWEA / AWEA Wind Integration & Forecasting seminar in Calgary. While the hotel is very nice, I should’ve pegged there might be trouble when the room next door to mine is marked Crew Lounge. And yep, between 0100 and 0300, the crew was there. And they lounged loudly.
Winds Of Change :: Stories of a dawning Wind Power Industry is Danish wind pioneer Erik Grove-Nielsen’s story of the early years of the wind industry. It’s very much a work in progress, but it shows very well how things have come on since the 1970s.
I took this a while back (June 2004), but forgot about it.
A modified AOC 15/50 wind turbine at a Honda dealership in Vaughan, ON. If you click through the link, you should be able to get to the full-sized image.
… and I wasn’t expecting to, but I ended up back on the board of directors of WindShare.
… and I got to sing with the Raging Grannies!
I’m going to Energy Matters for the next couple of days.
Happy first birthday, Kingsbridge Wind Power Project - commissioned a year ago today(ish). I hope there’s cake …
I don’t particularly understand why my industry gets singled out for killing wildlife, and having to carry out lengthy studies where other plants and installations don’t. But apaprently, radar ’saves bats at wind farms’.
So, if this is really true, and it were installed, would it be a bat mitzvah?
Well, I talked myself hoarse (must learn to project!), and I think it went well; no-one feigned death or sudden illness.
The ATI Remote Wonder performed flawlessly. It may be ugly, but it works.
I’m giving my wind talk to the Lambton Chapter of the PEO tonight: Wind Energy for the Perplexed.
If all goes well, I’ll be able to use my ATI Remote Wonder to control the slides, as I found an OS X driver for the Remote Wonder. Yay!
Forrest S. “Woody” Stoddard passed away last week. He was a pioneer of wind energy in the USA, first working on the UMass Wind Furnace, then dedicated his life to the industry.
Without people like Woody Stoddard, there wouldn’t be large scale wind energy today.
Tories announce $1.5-billion renewable energy plan. Which would have been nice if it hadn’t just been the old Liberal WPPI program (which the Tories cancelled) renamed, and claimed as a whole new thing. And there was highly qualified rejoicing.
Given that the UK had some horrible wind storms this week, I wonder how the wind farms stood up?
What are my pictures doing here: http://www.thewindpower.net/103-windfarms-canada.php?
