Environmentally benign energy generation

By Neil Case

Modern windmills — electric power generating windmills — are huge. Each is a tall silver tower with an immense three-bladed propeller at the top. We drove past two windmill farms, collections of these giants, on our recent trip west, one in western Iowa and one in western Kansas. I tried to count the windmills in each farm but we didn’t stop and I could only get an idea. If they’d been in rows, but they weren’t. They were approximately evenly spaced but scattered, not lined up in any way. The farm in Kansas was the bigger, however, with 100, maybe even more, windmills.

These modern windmills, and solar panels, are billed as one of the energy sources of the future. Both are called environmentally benign, that is, not harmful to the environment. They require no digging, no drilling. There is no smoke or other discharge into the air. There is no waste to dispose of as there is from a coal-fired or nuclear-powered generation plant. Finally, there is no chance of a spill as there is with oil.

Windmills, or course, are not new. They have been used in Holland for hundreds of years. Settlers to the plains of North America used windmills to pump water from wells. On a personal note, a man who lived a block away when I was a boy, a friend of my parents, had a windmill on his garage that turned a generator to make electricity. That windmill had two blades, each less than 2 feet long, and the fellow had made the generator from an electric motor. The windmill and the generator supplied electricity for the man’s shop. There he repaired radios and electrical appliances.

Many of the water-pumping windmills still stand on the American plains. Some of them still run. Some still pump water, filling water tanks for livestock.

At Kendallville’s Mid-America Windmill Museum, there’s a Dutch windmill. There are many old farm-style windmills. There’s one of the new towers with the three-bladed propeller. That windmill is the biggest at the museum, towering over all the others.

We’ve seen the modern windmills before, even fields of them, windmill farms, in southern California and in Arizona. Two things strike me about them, their size and the speed the blades turn. Their size was really brought home to us on our recent trip when we passed three trucks, each carrying a single propeller blade for one of those windmills. We parked that night in a truck stop lot and those trucks also stopped there that night. The trucks were semis and they were extra long, each half again as long as any other truck in the lot.

As for the speed the blades turn, they’re slow and they all appear to turn at the same rate. The speed of smaller windmills, old-fashioned windmills, varies with the strength of the wind. When the wind is strong they turn so fast the blades appear as a blurred wheel. Not the new giants. Each blade of every windmill was clearly visible as we drove past.

I have read two concerns about the new windmills. As a bird watcher I share one. What hazard are they to flying birds? None during the day, I assume. If I can see those blades birds can. But what about birds that migrate through the area of a windmill farm at night?

The second concern is about appearance. A proposal to erect a windmill farm in the water off the coast of a tourist area was opposed because local business owners thought it would detract from the scenic beauty of the coast and reduce the number of tourists and that, or course, would reduce business.

Hazard to night flying birds and altering scenic beauty are problems. But they seem minor compared to the problems of other methods of energy generation.