Fronty Owner

grab a pair of ear plugs and go find a comfortable spot between the gennys...

Don M

Driving South from the Okla border on Monday night I saw a ton of flashing lights heading North. I thought maybe Dallas was blown up or something. Then I figured out they were bucket trucks and line workers heading toward the expected storm in Okla and Missouri. Here about 60 miles north of Dallas, many are iced in. Most cant even get out of the neighborhood without risking a crash in a non 4x4. I pulled half a dozen cars out of the frontage ditch in 2 days. Schools are closed for the third day now. Thank goodness I cut enough firewood this year to last until the end of time! Two neighbors have no heat. We have their kids and they are toughing it out in front of their fireplace with some of our loaner wood. LOL Its a weird thing. About an inch of sleet fell on top of maybe a 1/4 of ice, but it just wont go away/melt. The temp today only reached 19. 10 tonight. More snow Friday. The highway is a ghost road. I took the boys hunting tonight. May have seen 1 truck go by as I rode down the frontage for a few miles. The coyotes are den'd up and sleeping, btw. not a creature was stirring.


Last week we had 3 days in the high 70's.

high bid

Expect the same today 2/3/11 as ERCOT will override/manage the entire grid. Even here in SA were expecting 2" of snow tonight. Stay warm.

wyododge

I'm just south of SA, Poth to be specific. Before I came out my boss said it's beautiful here!!! don't even bother with your winter gear. It'll just take up space!

I'm walkin around with just a long sleeve shirt, all the guys think i'm crazy. Little do they know I'm just stoooooooopid!!!!

Bout to go disconnect and thaw all the water lines now. Heat Tape??? What the heck is heat tape???

annabelle

[QUOTE=wyododge;2918039]I'm just south of SA, Poth to be specific. Before I came out my boss said it's beautiful here!!! don't even bother with your winter gear. It'll just take up space!

I'm walkin around with just a long sleeve shirt, all the guys think i'm crazy. Little do they know I'm just stoooooooopid!!!!

Bout to go disconnect and thaw all the water lines now. Heat Tape??? What the heck is heat tape???[/QUOTE

SA considers 29 a "HARD"freeze........they thought I was crazy for walking around in a T shirt at that temp. Just what you get use to......I'm sure I will melt with the humidity I'm not use to.........They say we are through with the rolling black out from El Paso Electric.

bigfoot

Sure they will give you money back just like us …………as long as you use 600- 850KW the rest of the year.

Normally the bill for this place is about 30K this time of the year and in the summer about 50K.

By us doing some pre planning and having the water towers full we can accomplish two things.

1 help keep the power on at your house so you have heat.
2 save the tax / rate payer a little money.

AkTallPaul

Well first off the turbines are hooked to the grid same as any other power plant....
Second...Maybe some of the REAL people you might want to talk to live in remote villages that have been paying 10+/- dollars a gallon to run diesel powered generators now they are getting cheaper energy and far less dangerous to their environment...the less fuel they require minimizes the hazards of spills trying to get fuel to them....

rattlerbob5.9

Paul,
I know they are hooked to the grid and they do use (consume) 3-6k watts when the are not producing to keep the systems live and in this area to keep the gear box oil heated.

And yes in an remote area that is running diesel generation they might make a little more sense but you cannot depend on them for a constant DEPENDABLE source of electricity. At a cost of 3-5 million each.

I have done my homework on these and have also taken the sound measurements on them. In most of the rest of the world they have setbacks of 1 or 1 and 1/4 miles and finding they may not be far enough so then why are we being stupid and stuffing them in here in the USA at 1000 to 1500 feet from home's ????????

That is just plain insanity I have measured sound pressure levels at homes of 67 dBA in the normally quiet country where without them it is normally 23-28 dBA !

So you think this is no big deal ??? Not loud ??

Every 10 dBA increase is experienced by a human as being twice as loud and is actually 4 times the sound pressure !! The sound emitted at the hub height is 103- 107 decibels or in other words the same as a chain saw running wide open under load.

My friends have been driven from their homes and you cannot stand to be there at times.
Is this moral,decent,right or fair ?

Just a little food for thought.

Thanks for sparking a little debate most people are have no clue until after these carpet bagger's come to town and get as many officials hooked and then (lie) tell people your neighbor is on board so you should be to.

By the time people become educated and aware of the truth it is too late.

Colo_River_Ram

Good information there Rattler,

My concern with wind farms is the number of eagles they kill on an annual basis:

http://www.wind-watch.org/alerts/200...y-kill-eagles/

I know of people who have lost their jobs/retirement in the patch over one dead eagle (electrocuted) yet the wind farms eagle deaths are brushed under the table..

annabelle

Wind Farm......as one little girl said on the way to a horse show, when she was told to check out the wind farm we were passing.............." Who is stupid enough to make wind."

Shorts

^^ LOL



And wind farm? Anyone been down to San Patricio county in the last year or two?

annabelle

Well, they are back at it. Asked the major university, all school districts and large customers that could if they would close.......also having gas and water utility problems.

Shorts

What kind of burns my butt, and I'm normally a fan of the business man, is how Jerry Jones has Cowboys stadium lit up like the fourth of July 24/7. Ohh, and the grid that is hosting the NFL teams are exempt from the blackouts. My husband's office is just a half mile from the hotel with the Packers and they've maintained power.

I suppose its a comedy of errors and DFW has to put it best foot forward and do everything it can to keep it's guests happy. But sheesh, us poor residents get to feel the pain for it. Can I get a free superbowl ticket for my effort?

SoTexRattler

Yup! I see them every day. HUNDREDS of them... Even on clear nights with a North wind, the red marker lights all blink in synchronism to indicate a contiguous field of obstructions to air traffic.
The many miles of red blinking lights across the horizon is impressive. (North wind points the blades away from the viewer which can see the top-mounted red lights better without the blade roots occulting the lights. )

They have even installed one field of turbines RIGHT across Hwy 181 just NW of Gregory, Tx. So close and imposing, I am very surprised folks haven't rear-ended other cars while they are rubber-necking the huge turbines so close to the highway.

The wind farms even show up on our local NEXRAD Doppler Radar displays. They present a HUGE moving target and look like rain except they are long and rectangular in shape and don't "move" off the map like the other storm clouds do.

The Port of Corpus Christi is where they've been imported and major parts are stored all around The Port area until installation. I drove up to some of the stored cylindrical steel tower sections and saw on the covers they were fabricated in Vietnam...

Many, many "permit" loads originated out of The Port area of Corpus Christi with specialized pole type trailers taking one huge blade or one tower section to it's installation site.
There's still quite a new pile of them stored right now so quite a few are going up "somewhere"...

One early turbine installation here became newsworthy when a turbine construction crewman climbed up the tower into the generator nacelle and was bitten by a rattlesnake that had gotten in there while it was sitting on the ground prior to being lifted up with a crane.


All I gotta say is: Wait 'til a hurricane comes along...

RTillery

I did some number crunching and was amazed at what I came up with. I went to a website with most all the wind farms in the U.S. and got an average spacing for megawatts generated. Tell me if I am wrong.

The average land mass for a wind farm is somewhere around 65 acres per megawatt/hour generated. Could we use wind to generate a significant portion of our nations electricity?

We use a little over 4 billion megawatts in the U.S. per year (Dept of Energy). If I multiply 4 billion megawatts times 65 acres per megawatt, I come up with 260,000,000,000 acres required to generate America's electrical consumption. If I take that acreage and divide by 640 (acres per square mile), I will get square miles required. 406,250,000.

America's land mass is about 3.7 million square miles including Alaska. Alaska is about .6 million square miles (I'm rounding some of these numbers) and no one wants to try to build big wind farms up there anyway, so if we drop that, we wind up with about 3.1 million square miles in the lower 48.

OK here is where I need somebody to check my math. If I divide the 3,100,000 million miles of lower 48 land mass by the 406,250,000 square miles of wind farm acreage required to produce our electrical consumption, I come up with .00763, or less that 8 tenths of one percent (.8%). So if we covered the entire lower 48 from coast to coast, San Diego to Maine, Seattle to Miami, with windmills at the spacing average in wind farms now, we could generate less than 1% of our required electricity.

No wonder they are P.O'd in Texas about having to buy electricity from Mexico! I think we are being sold a bad bull boys!