Climate and energy

EDIT: ENTRY HAS BEEN UPDATED WITH ADDITIONAL PHOTOS!

All these trips – CEP’s carbon footprint is stinky lately. Yes, we buy offsets, but you still don’t feel good about the travel and the carbon dioxide. I’ve been thinking about stealing my husband’s truck and burning the bio(diesel) for these little jaunts.

The drive to Omaha was lovely, though (if you ignored the flooding) – blue chicory and orange day lilies are blooming all along the ditches.

Anyway. Getting pictures of wind turbines makes it all the carbon worthwhile. These are from Rock Port, Missouri. Rock Port (pop. 1,395) plans to be the first city in the nation to get all of its power from wind turbines.

Rock Port is much like any Midwestern small town along a major highway – it has the gas stations and fast food over by the big road, and you have to drive a little bit to get to the real town. They have their Casey’s General Store, the farm/ ag implements store, more churches than you can shake a stick at, and a cute tiny downtown hanging in there for dear life. A liquor store on the edge of town. Lots of pragmatic looking Morton buildings.

Rock Port has installed four Suzlon wind turbines of 1.25 megawatts (MW) each (5 MW total). The development is called the Loess Hill Wind Farm. There were plenty of cows grazing under the turbines but somehow I didn’t get any of them in the image.

It really, really did look different than Kansas wind development - I can’t explain it. Seeing turbines so close to trees, maybe that was it. Plus their ridges are closer and tighter, running along the bluffs of old river valleys formed from much harder rock than our limestone. KS ridges come from old prairie rivers (ie, broad and sweeping) and the pressures of ancient sea beds atop limestone. Just different.

According to the EERE website, construction of the wind farm was by the Wind Capital Group of St. Louis, which “specializes in small-scale wind developments for communities in Missouri and the Midwest.” John Deere Wind Energy out of KC handled the financing.

The Loess Hill Wind Farm is right close to the Cow Branch wind farm, which is 50 MW. This is a crummy picture, sorry, but (a) I didn’t want to get run over or trespass to get a better/ safer one, and (b) I was running horribly behind.

Technically, I think the Rock Port Loess Hill Wind Farm would probably get called community wind. That’s accurate on some level – but I really think “municipal wind” would be a better term. Muni gives a better sense of the forces behind it, as well as how they have to fit the development into their existing utility structures and relationships. Also from EERE:

The Missouri Public Utility Alliance in Columbia will purchase excess electricity from Loess Hills when the output from the wind power plant exceeds consumption in the town. This alliance provides electricity to Rock Port Municipal Utilities, which distributes to customers in town. The wind farm is sized to provide enough electricity over the course of a typical year to match electricity consumption in the town.

Community wind or muni wind, whatever you call it, both wind farms are small enough to be good examples of distributed wind. This is where you shoehorn small installations into the existing grid.

The advantage is – hopefully – that these many small locations add stability to the grid, versus the grid depending on so many large and centralized power sources. Small wind farms also offer additional energy resources so that big utilities can back off fossil fuels more often.

And in Rock Port, it also gives them an additional sense of being more energy independent, and making use of local resources.

UPDATE: More (and better!) images of the Loess Hill and Cow Branch wind farms. These come courtesy of Brian David of EPA Region 7, who toured the site as part the Region’s Energy Tour just a week or two ago. Forty-five EPA staff members attended.

On this one, you can get a sense of the roads that connect wind turbine sites – these roads are part of the farms, and are necessary for construction as well as the daily operations and maintenance.

What a Suzlon 1.25 MW turbine looks like from the underside -

I think this is actually the skyline of Cow Branch wind farm. Whether those lines were pre-existing or added later (or were upgraded) – don’t know.

thank you for the photos! :)

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org