Where the wind (farms) blow

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I used to work with another engineer who was involved with an initiative to build a wind farm offshore in Lake Erie east of Cleveland. The plan never happened. There are a few wind turbines in the area today and it is interesting to see how they differ in catching the wind.

The oldest and largest is the machine at Lincoln Electric. It is the western most wind turbine of the 4 in that area. The eastern most turbine was a fairly small unit where the blades were mounted in a circular ring. That one has been taken down in the past year.

They very seldom all spin at once. They are in a span of a half mile or so. I go past there a couple of times a month and it is always unpredictable which turbines will be spinning. Probably why the wind farm plan fell through.

The Lincoln Electric turbine is doing well:

“The wind tower, measuring 443 feet tall, was constructed in June 2011 at the Lincoln Electric world headquarters and manufacturing campus in Cleveland, Ohio. This installation is the largest known urban wind tower in North America, and is capable of producing 2.5-megawatts of electrical energy, or approximately 10 percent of the requirements for Lincoln Electric’s main Cleveland manufacturing facility.”

2

Here is the small wind turbine I mention in the OP. I really liked it and it spun at a fairly high RPM.

3

Here in the Corpus Christi area those things are everywhere. My work takes me to areas to the northwest, northeast, and southwest of the city, and most of that area is farm country. Pretty much every farm is covered with windmills. I probably see at least a few hundred on my weekly commute. A few of them are fairly close to the highway. On a sunny and windy day the shadows of those particular windmills can make the drive interesting :open_mouth:.