Slashdot Mirror
First Town In US To Become 100% Wind Powered
gundar99 writes "Rock Port Missouri, population 1,300, is the first 100% wind-powered city in the US. Loess Hill Wind Farm, with four 1.25-MW wind turbines, is estimated to generate 16 gigawatt hours (16 million kilowatt hours) of electricity annually. 13 gigawatt hours of electricity have historically been consumed annually by the residents and businesses of this town."
Would the wind turbines be more efficient if they brought a bunch of politicians into the town?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Wind can't supply base load so even if the wind turbines are generating more power than the city consumes over a year, that power is being consumed partially by other cities.
They only need to produce 1.51 Gigawatts to travel in time, so I think they're really wasting energy here.
They might be a net generator of power, but they are ultimately using other power sources some of the time.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
DC was first!
wtf?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Is this slowing the earth's orbit, changing its rotational velocity, or what? Please don't tell me there's a 9-volt battery hidden under that cover.
Washington has been run on pure hot air for decades.
There's one big catch to this: the town isn't 100% wind powered. Instead, it produces more energy from wind power than it uses each year. Wind speed changes, and people use different amounts of electricity at different times, so a significant part of the town's electricity will still come from conventional generation through the grid.
Wind power is nice, but the rule of thumb for wind power is that it doesn't actually replace any conventional generating capacity, it merely reduces the utilization at times. Since there are times when the wind power doesn't do any good, you can't actually get rid of any of your conventional capacity.
To actually replace anything with wind, you'd need a tremendous overcapacity that was sufficiently distributed geographically to ensure that enough of it got wind all the time to meet your total power needs.
...what the hell is a Jiga-Watt?
It's a short article, FP isn't all it's cracked up to be:
"What we're celebrating is that the wind farm in Rock Port can produce more energy each year than what this community uses, and that has never been done before," Chamberlain said.
And that's why everyone showed up. From the celebration and speeches downtown to the city's power plant, the guy who made it all happen explained what it is all about.
"What we're showing here is the city is producing 2 megawatts more than they need, so in essence, this meter is running backwards," Chamberlain said.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Now, is there any place where a large number of our founding father's are buried? Because we could double our efficiency by putting the politicians over their graves and harnessing the founding father's spinning motion.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm sorry. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning. And unfortunately, we never know when or where they are going to strike.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I'm not sure what the metric is exactly, but it has to do with something like, megawatt-hours-produced-per-acre. This measurement is used when discussing power production by some engineering geeks somewhere...sorry, just trying to point the discussion down a path quickly here and not really set it up too much. :-)
In short, as cool as we all would like wind power generation to be, it just falls way too short in the aforemention critical statistic. If you've seen the wind farm outside of San Fran, you know how big they can get. The nuke plant between SD & LA (iirc) is but a postage stamp compared to that windfarm and it probably has about twice the power output.
Wind is not population density friendly. At some point, land costs wipe out any efficiencies.
Rock Port was certainly not the first town in the United States.
Ow. My brain hurts after trying to read that article. Did someone randomly select quotes and comments from a bag? Here's a better written version, though still light on the information (no figures for cost per kWh) http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1568/
The article sucked. Are the turbines really powering the town, or is that going into the grid in general? The article mentions that the power won't be free, but that the mayor hopes it will cost less because of lower transmission fees. So how much does it cost? The article mentions the landowner that set the thing up. So is it privately owned, or part of the city? Does the city actually buy electricity from this guy, or does he just make money selling to the power companies? What the heck does John Deere have to do with anything?
Better known as 318230.
Good to see that even though the country may be fumbling and lagging behind where it should be from an environmental point of view, individuals and sections of the community are taking up the slack and forging ahead.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
What are they using as their hot backup supply? If they were truly 100% wind they'd have to put up with regular brownouts.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Those poor birds.
Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. WHACK!
Camping on quad since 1996.
16 gigawatt hours ((((16 million kilowatt hours) 160 million centiwatt hours) 1600 million decawatt hours) 16,000 million watt hours)
This is not the first town to be completely powered by wind. Washington D.C. is the first town to be completely powered by wind. Mind you it is the hot air of all those lawyers, politicians, and lobbyists but it is all wind power.
Watch the up coming election process to see just how much over capacity can be generated by the wind bags in D.C.
At $0.11 on average per kWh, the savings is $1.7m annually, plus another $300k from the energy they sell to the power company. That's 45 years to recoup the investment ($90m), not including maintaining the turbines for 45 years (more info here)
Still, I think this should be the new standard for sustainable living and development.
And to put 16 gigawatt hours into perspective... the average household in America uses around 11,000 kWh annually. See Official Government Website
Rock Port, MO needs to add their watts saved to the total. It's like they switched out 64,000,000 incandescent bulbs for CFCs!
I wonder how much pollution other industrial centers put out in transporting supplies for, building, moving, and installing the windmills.
I read somewhere that the standard windmill takes around 13 years to put out the amount of energy needed to construct and install it. That energy has to come from somewhere - and chances are, for at least a decade or so (after which they'll probably need more energy, anyway), this town is responsible for more pollution than they otherwise would have been.
"The $90 million Loess Hills Wind Farm" .... "is eventually expected to generate 16 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year"
...without maintenance costs.
$90 million for 16 million kWh/year.
Lessee... over 5 years that's $1.12 per kWh, ouch.
Over 10 years... nah, still a bit much.
Over 30 years (can you still get mortgages that long?) it's 19 cents per kWh.
Or interest.
I hate to say it, but this smells like fail. Yeah, a nice feel-good project perhaps, and certainly green, but it's not looking economically viable, if that $90 million number is accurate.
And speaking of $90 million for 4 windmills... 20 million+ per windmill? No. Freakin'. Way.
I disagree, Talked to a nuclear plant engineer working at a plant with a gas turbine auxiliary plant. They are thrilled when the turbine powers up, because they get paid more for that energy because their willing to fill peak demand. If that plant was put into constant production they would get paid the same rate as the nuclear plant, so reduced joy overall.
Aren't the old windmill pumps still around? Can they devise some kind of generator that could use the spare turns from them into a little bit of electricity? I think some of those things have been around for quite a long time...
Task Mangler
funny, funny stuff.
thanks.
How many birds have the wind turbines killed so far?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-04-windmills-usat_x.htm/
My comments here are my own; I do not speak for my employer.
A bit off topic, but it is really a nice little rural town.
They also have a regional office for Rural Source (http://www.ruralsource.com). So there may be some area IT contractors that are working off that wind power.
So if we wanted to power say, California, which as of 2006 has 36,457,549 people we would need something around (36,457,549/4=28044 so 28044*4=) 112,177 wind turbines. That is stupid ridiculous!
Why would we not have 2 or 3 nuke plants and achieve the same goal with way less environmental impact, better impact on the tax payers wallets and we wouldn't kill all the birds in the state!
Wind power 'feels good' but when you start running the numbers it gets dumb real quick.
Last time I licked my finger and stuck it up in the air, those winds were predominantly Westerly ie coming from the West. I wonder if those turbines you were talking about will speed up the Earth as much as, say, a few dozen skyscrapers?
It is not fair to compare unsustainable power sources to sustainable ones. It is like comparing prices of Walmart to Fair Trade! The externalized costs being ignored. When you add up the externalized costs the benefits are not so great; furthermore, if you place value on things like pollution they lose their cost advantage. Nothing is free in the long run.
Nukes are the MOST energy dense power source (you sure picked the most extreme one.)
It all depends upon cheaply harvesting STORED energy from the sun. Solar is realtime direct harvesting; no billions of years involved. Wind is realtime indirect harvesting.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Where do they get their power when there's no wind?
San Gorgonio Mountain Pass in the San Bernadino Mountains contains more than 4000 separate windmills and provides enough electricity to power Palm Springs and the entire Coachella Valley.
Way, way overpriced. Four 1.25MW turbines for $90 million, or $18/watt? That's far too high. Compare the Cedar Ridge project, with 41 turbines of 1.65MW capacity each for $180 million, or $2.6/watt. That's a real not-to-exceed number. The American Wind Energy Association likes to talk about $1/watt, but that's seldom achieved.
$18/watt is either wrong or a rip-off.
Ok, US average according to wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption is about 12,000 kWHr per person per year. But this average would include industry and government consumption averaged over the whole population. Would Rock Port, Missouri have significant industry to make it's consumption only slightly less than average (about the same as AU average)? 10,000 kWHr per day per person seems far too much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Port,_Missouri Wiki says that there are about 650 households, so each consumes 55kWHr/day - Csn this be right?
Which, assuming high winds, will provide about 1/3 the power output of one of the Diablo Canyon reactors. Their own estimates are closer to 1/6 that load on average. That works out to being able to supply power for about 180,000 people (Diablo Canyon's two reactors supply for about 2.2 million homes).
To put this in perspective, all the wind power generating capacity currently deployed in California is about 3/4 of one reactor at Diablo Canyon, and that's assuming the wind is blowing constantly at the average, or about 2.5 times what Cape Wind plans on deploying, if it can get regulatory approval, and prove negligible environment impact from the construction and deployment both.
That isn't a small amount of generating capacity, but the fact that this is going to take building 130 generating stations to achieve, and a huge area (as you pointed out: not chump change, with regard to ocean acreage). It's also going to only end up supplying about 75% of the overall usage of Cape Cod, and the two islands of Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket - not a lot of people.
To put that figure in perspective, that's 4.5 x 5.4 nautical miles square, or about 30 square non-nautical miles, to supply 135,000 people.
-- Terry
Diablo Canyo powers 2.2 million people with two reactors, so you are talking 17 more installations of a comparable size to power California.
I'm pro-nuclear, and I can't see that happening in California, even if the price of natural gas goes up at the California/Nevada border again, as it did under Enron. California is all about NIMBY. Now build them in some other state and run wires, and California would likely love the idea.
-- Terry
Is anyone using these kinds of turbines to drive production of fuelcell fuel as storage (and discharge) more efficient than batteries? Is there any mechanical alternative to electrolysis that uses say, pressure, to charge the fuel that gets discharged and then recycled back into fuel by the turbines?
--
make install -not war
They're still driving gas cars!!
Go electric - www.diyelectriccar.com
In the Findhorn Eco-Village http://www.ecovillagefindhorn.org/renewable/wind.php they use a variety of power sources to maintain constant power. But they are investigating a way to disseminate information on the availability of power so that additional wind resource can be utilised without the transmission losses of using a grid. If only a Web 2.0 geek with a electrical engineering bent could invent a FireFox plug-in (sic) to allow off-peak heating to be topped up this way... Do you have projects which are power intensive but not time sensitive?
-- NSY - SY OOT - Doric signs on local shop doors.
A LAN party with 20+ participants took place last night in Rock Port, Missouri. The result: widespread rolling blackouts. Story at 11.
They might be a net generator of power, but they are ultimately using other power sources some of the time.
So what exactly would you prefer?". . . estimated to generate 16 gigawatt hours (16 million kilowatt hours) of electricity annually. 13 gigawatts hours of electricity have historically been consumed annually . . ."
WHAT THE HELL IS A GIGAWATT?!?!
about the loss in energy of the wind? If a butterfly flapping it's wings can cause a hurricane halfway around the globe...
...the French are powering the entire fucking country through Nuclear.
Seriously, wind power is just a waste of money unless you do some real fudge counting Greenpeace style. Over here in Sweden we have strong winds most of the year, wind power is heavily subsidized, nuclear power is taxed, and STILL people using wind turbines without it being some feel-good government project is the exception rather than the norm. Unless you are going to argue that nuclear power is unacceptable (which typically involves some serious truth-bending with regards to putting things in perspective ) wind power simply isn't worthwhile.
I think the main problem is people don't understand the scale of things. A large wind turbine ( and when I say large I mean the blades are several meters long ) can produce maybe 1MW at peak wind speed, 300kw on average. In comparison a single nuclear power plant can produce between 500MWe - 3000MWe with a capacity factor close to 90%, and in some plants a single reactor can produce more than 1000MWe, and then there is some 2000MW of spill heat you could use for district heating on top of that. Thus if you are planning on replacing nuclear generating capacity in a country such as France, you will literally need hundreds and thousands of wind turbines at the very least, and likely millions or tens of millions if you are to guarantee an adequate supply around the year. Now keep in mind, this is not "one on each rooftop" millions, this is giant offshore, interferes with marine life and shipping routes millions. This is before you start considering the energy needed to replace petroleum in our cars, oil used for heating etc...
Now, given that the only way to make these things actually survive is through large subsidies ( typically around 100% of the electricity price or more ) start trying to figure what this will mean when you have not 0.1% wind power, but a large share of your electricity supply from it. Somebody is going to have to pay for that, and that money will have to come from elsewhere.
You spoke too soon.
If this windmill town becomes popular and more small towns start taking lead, one of the following will happen:
1. Tax credits on windmills will be stopped. http://www.iht.com/articles/1999/06/24/rwind.t.php/ the article states is to expire June 30, '08 while tax credits for Oil and Coal continue forever.
2. The PETA will come down on the town and shut it down because it killed a few dumb birds and stuck down a donkey.
3. The project would be SWIFT Boat'ed; meaning the mayor would be Spitzer'ed and the new mayor would scrap it.
4. The company that makes the windmills would be taken over by Blackrock or other Private Equity Groups, the prices of windmills increased by 300%.
5. A "concerned" citizen moves the Supreme Court for scrapping the project on economics ground stating that it is cheaper on the Grid.
6. The Oil & Coal companies drastically reduce prices of electricity to make the project unviable.
7. The Federal Government, re'zones the area as a Federal Protected Territory to Save the Spotted Owl, thus killing the project.
8. The Federal Government finds the project was financed by laundered money because one drug-dealer donated $10. The whole project is sold for scrap.
9. Mobile companies, Verizon and AT&T gang up and file a suit with "expert" testimonies that the windmill destroy reception of mobiles and hence the kids can't dial 911.
10. The whole town is Gitmo'ed as a lesson.-:)) OK, this one is far-fetched, but somebody please help me add the 10th point.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
There's a reason it always comes up, and namely because it actually matters.
Yes, they _could_ use peak storage, but they don't. They're on the grid. It does matter.
So they produce 5 MW all the time (wind non-stop). If yearly production is barely above their yearly usage, let's say they use, say, 8 MW peak and buggerall at night. So someone else has to build the extra capacity to produce the extra 3 MW for them.
But wait, they may have a calm day, or a _storm_. During storms you don't make more power, you align the blades so the turbine doesn't spin. So someone else has to have the capacity to produce an extra 8 MW for them, for those cases.
The point is that someone still has to be able to cover the peak power, so just as many power plants have to be built as before. Only now you have to keep some of them idle at peak time, so you don't recoup your investment as quickly.
The total power produced maths are also a bit mis-leading. They use more power at peak, they give some power back when noone needs it. The problem isn't producing enough energy at 1 AM, the problem is producing enough energy at peak times. That's when those brownouts some years ago happened. The rush to build more power plants, and dealing with NIMBY syndrome, is to be able to supply the whole use at peak hours, not at night.
Because wind can and will occasionally fail you, someone has to build the same capacity again as some other kind of power. Only, again, keep it idle a bunch of the time so they won't get their money back as fast.
Essentially, they just passed someone else the cost of building the peak storage for them. They get their peak storage (and more importantly: backup power) all right, only now "Town B" from your example is the one who gets the bill for it.
Now I'm not saying it should be a hanging offense or anything, but it _is_ a problem worth mentioning. If you want to willy-wave about being all green, then actually be all green on your own money.
Otherwise it's a bit like Liechtenstein not having an army or military budget, because their big neighbours get to deal with defending it. Or about how they do great with a lean government and low taxes... by being a tax heaven for guys who made their riches in other countries' economies. It's just passing the bill to someone else, not being the perfect example of a smart conservative government.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, its not going to be wind powered at all. What is in fact going to happen is that it will be connected to the grid. It will generate enough electricity to power the town, but not in a form which is usable by the town or anyone else, because it will be too variable. So, they will draw power from the grid like everyone else, exactly as before, the same amount at the same times, and also go through the motions of selling back wind generated power which is useless to the electricity company connecting them to the grid.
If everyone did this, the only result would be that the utility company would have to raise prices. Its demand would not change, its generating capacity would not change.
But we would all feel an awful lot better.
It's always nice to see some people, at the very least, are willing to embrace green ideas.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Hopefully this media coverage doesn't cause people to move to the town in droves. Since only 1,300 people live there now, you wouldn't need too many new residents to make it only 50% or 25% wind powered!
could probably poduce enough fuel for several years.
You would have to collect the depleted uranium from the 'non nuclear arsenal' but grouyoping that and using special generator to transfer the uranium into plutonium and then using it again. It can probably last a relatively long time.
Another point. Are all the residents of the town use electric car?
How is it that they get 1 million kilowatt hours to be 1 gigawatt hours? Last time I checked then 1 million was 1 giga and that should then be 1 giga kilowatt hours or 1 terawatt hours.
But I would go with the first digit there and forgett their conversion to kilowatt hours.
"Last time I checked then 1 million was 1 giga"
If you check again you might see that 1 million is 1 Mega.
FRA: STFU GTFO
If we keep harnessing wind power, won't we run out of wind? The same thing goes for water power. Could we kill our atmosphere? I think solar power is the most sustainable... but then again if we block all the rays the earth could cool down.... we're doomed!!
No. Wind is essentially solar power in a different form. We'll run out of wind when we run out of solar power. That's in a couple of billion years. Earth is going to be fried to a crisp earlier than that.
The same thing goes for water power.
Which is also solar power in a different form. We're going to run out of water power when the suns luminosity has increased enough to evaporate all water on the planet. That's about a billion years in the future. We're going to run out of tidal water power when the moon escapes Earths gravity field, which also won't happen for quite a while.
Could we kill our atmosphere?
Yes, if we keep dumping enough crap into it.
The interesting one is tidal energy harnessing. I mean, that one is powered by the gravitational potential of the moon - if you extract more energy from it, then the moon slows down just a little bit. So, it's not 'as free' as harnessing the masses of solar energy poured down every day. Scale wise though, it's about as likely to run out as the sun is though.
I have never been in a Generating Plant and not seen dead birds...the buildings are huge and hot and usually between that and the windows birds die fairly regularly in Coal, Gas,and Nuclear plants.
While alternative energy is expensive, I have to wonder what happens to conventional energy costs when you start factoring in trillion dollar wars to keep the fuel sources available. Imagine how many solar panels, hydro plants and wind turbines could have been purchased with one iraq?
The energy produced is being ported half a state away!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Port,_Missouri
Excess power will sold to the Missouri Public Utility Alliance in Columbia, Missouri.[3]
Rock Port is way up in the far north west part of the state. Columbia sits smack dab in the middle half way between Kansas City and St. Louis on I-70.
Columbia is buying the excess because it can't make it's own wind power yet, and has a law in place that requires they use some form of natural energy. No stipulations in that law says they have to make it themselves.
Nothing you said in that mess actually supports what you said. The poster you're replying to mooted all your points, and yet you think by restating them that it makes them "matter".
Nothing you posted changes what GP said.
It's also paying someone else's share sometimes, and those times outweigh the times someone is paying for them. It's not hard to understand, so why is it hard for you to understand?
Living life Off the Grid!? They're mad, I tell you, MAD!
Someone in Corporate Authority has to step in to Save These People from Themselves! Their living some twisted commie dream, I tell ya!
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Pumped storage is not without problems--environmental, that is.
Many resevoirs are designed to operate at a constant level ("head" for us, the difference in height between the surface and the exit of the turbine). Of course a drought could push you out of wack if this is your regulation goal, but, in general, you're going to be sticking to pretty much the same level, and, as a consequence, coast.
With resevoirs which vary according to demand, there can be large head changes over the year and with different demand patterns (and rainfall)--which translate into DRAMATIC changes in the coastline of the resevoir. As you know, the vegetation and soil developement is most at the coast line. When all of this living matter is suddenly put under four meters of water, it dies and is replaced with anerobic systems. This decay produces hydrogen sulphide (generally nasty) and methane (a greenhouse gas IIRC 400x stronger than CO2). This is the origin of concerns about how much greenhouse gas production that hydropower offsets.
Then, when the water level dives down, you kill the anaerobic systems, leaving a barren coastline (both just above and just below the waterline at the coast) which is less hospitable to fish and terrestrial animals whose life is based around this environment.
Up in Sweden, where we have considerable such resevoir regulation, which results in lakes banked by bleached stone for many km in each direction. It has also completely changed the distribution of fishlife in these valleys.
Slashdot has sunk to an incredibly new low.
Rockport is a tiny town adjacent to a nuclear facility (Cooper Nuclear Station). Without Cooper as a job magnet, Rockport would shrivel and die (along with several other nearby small towns).
This is just a PR stunt.
Yes, you use someone else's share at peak time (i.e., at the time when it matters), and give it back to them at night, when they don't need it. (And, depending on the place and applicable laws, probably even making them pay for energy they don't need. Because a power company usually _has_ to buy energy that individual users pump back, whether they want it or not.)
In lay man's terms it's like me using your space heater during winter, and in exchange letting you use mine during summer. Or using your umbrella when it rains, but, hey, you're free to have mine too when it doesn't. I'm sure you'll see that trade as perfectly fair, right?
I'm going to ask the exact same: It's not hard to understand, so why is it hard for you to understand?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Uhhh... no CO2 footprint for the town? You need to do a little research, say at wind-watch.org for starters. Wind turbines actually INCREASE the use of fossil fuels.
Hmmm... you seem to be misinformed about fossil fuel based generators. I suggest you google "spinning reserve" against site:wind-watch.org and see what it's all about.
I think the point of misunderstanding is that you are treating this solution in isolation while everyone else is thinking in terms of a fabric of similar plants scattered across the country. They don't all have to be wind farms, btw. Some can be solar, some nuclear, etc.
The point is, if you're on the grid, you share capacity with everyone else. Peak usage will vary by timezone, so if the grid is large enough, no problem from having to build too much overcapacity in any single plant.
Make sense?
Tell that to the raptors at Altamont Pass in California.
"16 gigawatt hours (16 million kilowatt hours) of electricity annually"? Thats an odd measure of power. Why not measure it in horsepower, or catpower? How many library-of-congress*m^2*sec^-3 is that?
For the record:
(16GWh/year) * (1day/24h) * (1year/365.25day) * (1000MW/1GW) = 1.825MW (average generation)
4*1.25MW = 5MW (max nominal generation)
13GWh/year = 1.48MW (average city consumption)
1.48MW * (1341hp/1MW) = 1984.7hp
I will leave the library-of-congress-meter-squared-per-second-cubed calculation as an exercise for the reader.
...your Quixotic reference :-) Perfect amount of subtlety there.
This is one example when the natural resources can be used effectively. San Diego, on the other hand, could be the first city powered by Solar energy. And by that same logic we could be driving cars fueled by some other natural resource. Except that the greediness of a few people has to spoil it for the rest of us.
Not to be a troll, but if you're seriously concerned get yourself an eeePC, draws 13 watts most times. Now if you hook up an external keyboard/mouse/ monitor you've got a darn decent setup for web/email/light compiling for probably around 35 watts (if you get a low power monitor). I love my little eeePC, I'm always surprised by how decent it is for my tasks.
On my planet, energy storage is a solved problem.
You can pump water uphill, like the big hydro stations do with their excess capacity, or you can use these amazing things called batteries to actually store and recover energy.
Some of these marvelous devices can last over a hundred years without any degradation of capacity - there are many different formulations.
When one sizes a wind generation facility one incorporates energy storage to meet the base load for the served community. We call this "engineering" and it is remarkably effective.
10. Wind power gets a nasty stigma from all the undeserved bad publicity and is rarely ever used again...like nuclear. Oil & Coal company execs rejoice!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This is the most reasonable thought experiment I've ever come across. A day in the heat of summer where there is no wind anywhere not just on the west coast, but the whole of the western states, while the eastern seaboard is being rocked by perfect storm II. It could happen people. If only we had a way to transmit power many hundreds of miles, like from the great western dams to civilization, alas, this is for greater minds than I.
Rock Port is 5 miles from the Cooper Nuclear reactor in Nebraska.
Am I the only one who really wants to play SimCity after reading articles like this? I also get this feeling when flying in airplanes looking down at the ground. Weird or not?
Peak Oil: Oil crash in the USA soon ?
www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net