Be careful next time you approach a windmill...

 

Holy Crap! I drive past hundreds of those turbines on my way to Palm Springs/Rancho Mirage. I never thought they could blow apart like that! Though I must confess, it WAS pretty cool to see! It was a "Mythbusters" kind of moment!

 

But I thought renewable energy was going to save us?

There is a reason that wind, solar, ethanol, and the like have not been a substatnial part of our energy mix - they suck.

In California during the Summer of 2006 heat wave, wind power there (at the time the largest capacity in the U.S.) was able to deliver a whopping 5% of its capacity to the grid. Thanks for the help, Al Gore ... now move along and go plant some trees.

And there was this power emergency in Texas (now with the largest wind capacity in the U.S.) yesterday - caused when wind supply dropped suddenly.

 

pretty scary, never thought that could happen

 

Just to give you some background info:

The company responsible for this windmill, Vestas, had warned before hand that something like this would happen (I mean, you really need to be a nutcase to be standing and filming a windmill on the countryside without purpose) as the brakes had collapsed. And the sad part is there are at least two more windmills in Scandinavia (Vestas again...) that has suffered the same sad fate.

Everyday I pass the bridge to work, or going home, I see in the distance a windmall park where some 100 windmills stand proudly in the water (and polluting the view in my opinion), and I cannot stop thinking that if one of those.... hitting the others.... domino effect... Jeez! or

 

Dang, that was spectacular. The countryside here is littered with those things, and it gets pretty windy too, but thus far all of the ones I have seen in high winds have been locked down.

 

i was just thinking of that area as i watched it, remembering as a kid how cool it was to see a bunch of white windmills together. cool to see, but it is pretty scary.