If you’re a landscape painter, and if you’re looking in Texas for pastoral scenes to paint, you’d better paint them now. The landscape in changing rapidly.
If on the other hand you’re looking to paint wind farms, you’ve come to the right place. It seems as if just about every hill has one, or two, or even three — as many as can be crammed onto that particular hill.
They rise up from the ground like giant eggbeaters. They’re enormous, and they dominate what was once a vast landscape of flowers and tall prairie grasses as far as the eye could see. No more.
A bit melodramatic, Barry? seriously, we’ve got so much wide, flat, open land that it ain’t even funny. The only place in the world that Texas beat on open space is your own Australia. You can drive from Houston to Austin and see maybe a dozen windmills over the 150 mile run.
Don’t know Ben, never been there. Something you’d need to take up with the author I guess.
Ben, that’s not even halfway across the state! The biggest blighted area is from the Permian Basin towards the Cap Rock and panhandle. You can’t NOT see them around the Abilene area.
I had complained about a recent trip (in Texas) where windmills seemed to be on every high bluff – so I sort of agree. But they are not really any worse than oil rig towers used to be – and probably no more permenent. Once the true costs are obvious, and the damage to wildlife factored in, they may be the next “tear down the dams” project. I am not sure how anyone can justify a wind farm given the bounty of cheap natural gas available to us.
I was much more upset about the wind farms in New Mexico – that landscape should be declared a national treasure – windmills just ruined the beauty.
Yes about New Mexico. The contrast is especially jarring – and illustrative.
The oil rigs were only as long as they were drilling, the permanent installation was a rather low-profile/impact pump jack. The wind towers are for the duration, there is no low profile version!
If they’re going to run Houston and Austin on wind, the countryside in between – or on either side – will look a site worse than now. Think of the author’s cover photo as the wave of the future as the best the wind energy industry can put forth. Then factor in it’s limitations, huge subsidy requirements, and techonolgogical innovation all serving to render them obsolete. Now think of that photo multiplied by thousands and in various states of ruin and abandonment.
I know some skeptic Texans who are never the less somewhat proud of the way they’ve made money off of the current wind deal at only the apparently insignificant harm to the expansive and expendable countryside. I have an acquaintance working at a utility in charge of getting utility customers to use less. He believes the realistic approach is that people be allotted only so much energy because we can never produce enough via “renewable.” I think his solution is unnecessary, but it at least acknowledges that you can’t build enough turbines even if you plant the entire state of Texas with them.
To me, the push to wind is an urban fantasy that pushes urban blight out into the countryside. For so very litlle. For Texas businessmen building the fields, don’t get too dependent or overextended when the bottom falls out. Your profits are entirely due to artificial interference.
I hope that every company that is putting in a windmill, wherever it may be, is having to post a bond, or put money in escrow, for the cost of removing said windmill. That is especially important if the original company goes away, because tearing them down then is charged to public monies if there is no bond or escrow.
I live near Austin and have yet to see a wind turbine around here. West Texas, and to a lesser degree, the coastal areas are far more fertile areas for wind generation. I don’t think they’ll ever be economically viable, but I’m happy to let the investors find that out the hard way.
“I’m happy to let the investors find that out the hard way.”
And that stupid gadget the Wright brothers are fooling with will never amount to anything…
If the hard way means tons of cash flow, you got it right. It means more taxes.
Or ask the guys who leased their land, they stupidly think they are being paid very well.
“As of 2010 wind energy production was over 2.5% of worldwide power, growing at more than 25% per annum. The monetary cost per unit of energy produced is similar to the cost for new coal and natural gas installations” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
http://recenter.tamu.edu/speeches/pdf/JF020210S1166.pdf
First off, the Wright brothers didn’t require or seek gobs of tax money to create their aeroplane. The tons of cashflow is going to China where the things are made and into the pockets of the subsidy farmers who get the government to cough up other peoples money to install the stupid things and then evern more OPM to subsidize the extremely high costs to produce unreliable electricity.
As far as “growth” goes, the Germans are already shutting down wind farms because they are removing the subsidies. There’s a big farm in Hawaii that’s been down for a long time now. In point of fact, as folks and even governments realize what a drain on the economy these scams are, the things are getting idled one subsidy farm after another. A good thing too.
But Harold, with 2 centuries of natural gas why put sources of unreliable power ?
There’s a race on folks to see which of ‘global warming’ and ‘alternative energy’ will take the century’s award for ‘All Time Greatest Scam’. At this point I’d call it a toss-up. When it’s all said and done I am sure one or both of these will supplant Piltdown Man and Teapot Dome.