The biggest ones are so large they have helicopter landing pads on top of the nacelle.
Here’s a map of windfarms of the Northeast US., including one in Atlantic City.
http://www.newwindenergy.com/windfarm_map.html
Hmm, we have one a couple of miles from where I live (a wind farm, not just one windmill) but apparently it doesn’t rank to get on the list. Northwest Ohio by the way. They’re either adding to that one or building another one as I’ve been seeing blades getting hauled down the highway for months now. On 80/90 too.
I think they’re awesome and I’d love it if they slapped some up in my backyard.
35- 27’49.11"N 101-14’00.00" W I put a " - " where the degree goes since I don’t know the ALT function for Degree. It’s 35 degrees N, 101 degrees W.
Look for NW to SE diagonal lines that show up pretty good starting from 22,000 ft eye level. You can zoom in close enough to see the rotors and the shadows.
I used to work for a trucking company that shipped those things from Texas up to SoDak. The company had to specially fabricate the trailers as the blades are huuuuge. IIRC gross shipping charges were something like $13,000 per blade, including permits and fuel surcharge and return charges.
Now that I think of it, though, I don’t believe we shipped the turbine/generator part - just the blades.
I’ve seen these trucks heading west on I-90, just outside of Euclid, OH. I was wondering what they were for and where they were headed. I had 'em figured for windmill blades, but I didn’t know that Ohio had wind farms!
Cool.
Hijack:
recently an industrial dryer was shipped from Milwaukee to N Dakota.
The Truck is > 200 feet long.
http://www.wqow.com/news/articles/article_7200.shtml
Brian
Yep, I’ve seen 'em. Very impressive.
There are proposals for offshore wind farms along the Long Island and Cape Cod coasts, IIRC, which are fiercely opposed by (some) locals on aesthetic grounds and also due to concerns about impact upon migratory bird populations.
I think it would be cool if building in NYC had one of these on the top of the building. You could probably have a hundred or so of them.
Last summer I was living in North Dakota, and I worked for a company by the name of LM Glasfiber. We built 37.3m (122ft) wind turbine blades. This is a blade of similar size.
Each blade weighs 14,000 lbs, contains roughly 3000 yd of fiberglass fabric, and 3200 lbs of epoxy resin. A blade costs the company around $80,000 from start to finish. I can only imagine what GE was paying for them.
The completed blades would be loaded in pairs on telescoping trailers and driven down I-29 and then out west on I-94. The trailers were so long that the rear axles steered via hydraulic rams to help negotiate the on-ramps.
LM has factories all over the globe now, and the largest blades they build are at the factory in Germany, and they measure 61.5m (202ft) from root to tip. They are currently the largest in the world. For reference, there are workers standing on the scaffolding inspecting this blade.
As an aside, while it was an impressive operation (to say the least!), it was certainly not something I’d want to do for the rest of my life. Thousands upon thousands of yards of fiberglass fabric + millions of pounds of epoxy resin + tens of thousands of gallons gelcoat = nasty working conditions.
There’s one right in downtown Cleveland; near Brown’s Stadium, the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and the Science Center.
No pic though.
Uh… I don’t think so.
I’m no expert on windmills, but I can tell you that <rotor blades> + <windmill blades> + <randomly rotating landing pad> = probably not a good landing spot.
How loud are these big windmills during a good wind?
“When the maintenance engineers do have to call, there’s a helicopter landing pad on the nacelle, and inside the nacelle, there’s a six-tonne crane that will enable the removal and replacement of 95 percent of the parts.”
http://evolution.skf.com/zino.aspx?articleID=14871
I would imagine they stop the rotors before allowing a helicopter to land.
[Yet another slight hijack]When I was a young’un, I got to see one of those giant dump trucks in motion. Those are the ones used in strip mines. I can’t remember where the place was, but my dad had some business there and took my brothers and me along to gawk at the equipment.[/Yet anotehr slight hijack]