Will Obama make fun of these jobs, too?
The AP reports:
Construction of a $138 million wind farm is underway in southeast Nebraska, and the work is already starting to benefit the area.
A series of flatbed trucks loaded with sections of the 262-foot-tall wind turbines will begin arriving soon, the Lincoln Journal Star reported (http://bit.ly/13JnMFq ).
The 75-megawatt project is being built by NextEra Energy Resources in southwest Gage and southeast Jefferson counties. When the wind farm is complete later this year, it will have 44 turbines.
“We can build a wind project in the same time a person can build a home,” said David Farkas, the project’s civil/mechanical superintendent.
The Nebraska Public Power District has agreed to buy all the power from the site. Most of the power will go to communities and utilities NPPD serves statewide, but spokesman Mark Becker said some of the power will go to an unnamed industrial customer.
More than 120 workers are building the wind farm. When it’s complete, five full-time employees will operate the site…
If the government is subsidizing them, the shape will have to be something else. Even crosses paid for by private funds have become problems on government land.
14000 Abandoned Wind Turbines In The USA
There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird choppers, the blight on people’s lives of noise and the flicker factor and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these blots on the landscape.
The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it’s too cold or the wind speed is too high.
The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about the abandoned wind farms.
The US has had wind farms since 1981:
Rest on link: http://toryaardvark.com/2011/11/17/14000-abandoned-wind-turbines-in-the-usa
As stimulus, it would be more productive to just build 44 262-foot tall white crosses and pay six guys to paint them. It’s all about belief. Use the savings to build a couple of reliable 75 megawatt conventional power plants that are more reliable and useful and cost efficient (one would have to be built anyway for base load back-up) and employ more people for useful things.
To the extent that the wind farm actually produces electricity, it’s better than employing Team A to dig a hole and Team B to fill the hole in, then repeat. A lot of WPA/PWA jobs of the Thirties were little better than that.
To the extent that the wind farm rents (subsidies and mandates) diverted resources with better uses, the wind farm is harmful because it reduces real wealth.
The wind farm will change the skyline and noise signatures. So do lots of other infrastructure elements. Conventional generation occurs in buildings, which means the sound signature can be reduced greatly, and produce a lot of energy in smaller spaces so their landscape footprint is much smaller.
If wind and solar were reliable and cheap, the incidental (meaning on the side rather than trivial) changes might well be acceptable. Since they are neither, the trade-off is very hard to justify.
Sure as heck, the direct jobs are way too small to justify this and the secondary jobs supported by the energy produced are almost certainly fewer than the jobs lost because of the rents.
“I don’t know whether it’s going to benefit us or not,” retired farmer Dick Bugee said. “It’s sure going to be different to look to the east and see all those.”
Wait til he hears them.
Wow! Think of it! $138m invested providing five whole jobs. If this is Obummer’s idea of putting people back to work, Eastern Nebraska and the rest of the country are in real trouble.