One of these turned up in our office today – the semi-legendary Lego #4999 Vestas wind turbine:
Operations guys need Lego too, y’know …
work as if you live in the early days of a better nation
AWS OpenWIND is a free wind farm design tool. It’s from people who know what they’re doing. I’m intrigued.
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:
(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.
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.
So CanWEA 2008 is done. The high point was the launch of WindVision 2025. See you next year in Toronto.
CanWEA 2008 starts here. Undecided whether I’ll twitter anything …
Mary Z. Cox alerted me to one of her videos which has both clawhammer banjo and wind turbines:
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!
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.)
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:
It was good; very good. Really amazingly good. Great atmosphere and a very pleasant evening.
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:
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.
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.
… 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.