Talk:Wind farm/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Offshore wind farm almost certainly going up in Delaware, another probably not in New England

Anything I posted in the actual article would be reverted, since I have only raw truth, and no citations. But perhaps someone who has no life beyond the computer will see this note and generously spend the ludicrous amount of time now required by Wikipedia. Thank you in advance, I'd do it if I could!!

Altamont upgrade

About the upgrading of Altamont's old turbines, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not agree that the larger assemblies are less dangerous to the raptors. --Kerberos 14:31, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Kerberos, a reference to that statement here would be good.

--scruss 15:30, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Insert non-formatted text here

Tax incentive POV

installed after the 1970s energy crisis in response to favorable tax policies for investors. It has been said that their primary product is not electricity but rather tax write-offs.

Has this been inserted by an oil industry spokesman? Could this be said of getting North Slope oil to the consumer market? --Not at Wikipedia it couldn't. If I were the type to apply tags, several might apply to this article. Can it be improved, though? --Wetman 00:26, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well . . . this part of it could be improved by striking the last sentence. It's true that the wind farms installed in the early 1980s resulted from favorable tax policies for investors, but the next sentence is just opinion. Tomgray 16:46, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Size of wind farms

This article says that California has the three largest wind farms in the world (sort of), but it doesn't actually say how big, and neither as yet do the articles at Altamont Pass and Tehachapi Pass.... I'm mainly curious as to how these compare to the Stateline Wind Project in terms of size. Andrewa 01:48, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

The other in California is San Gorgonio Pass in Riverside County ((photo). I found these comments in the Controversy section and moved them here:

a list of wind farms along with their output would be nice.... A start should be in a table, perhaps a "List of wind farms and their output...."

James P. S. 00:02, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Apparently there is a category with a list of them. Anyone want to try turning that into a table? James P. S. 06:28, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Info on the size of existing wind farms in the U.S. is available from the American Wind Energy Association at http://www.awea.org/projects/ . Stateline is still recognized by AWEA as the largest project. The wind farms at Altamont, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio passes in California are all far larger, but they are each assemblages of multiple smaller projects. Tomgray 15:33, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Windfarms in Canada

Is there a particular reason why Saskatchewan's Centennial Wind Farm Facility near Swift Current is not #1 now? Currently, it is generating 90 MW but when all turbines are operational later this year, it will be at 150 MW. RedWolf 22:20, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Wind farm effects

I intend to add a chapter on the arguments against wind farms-both on aesthetic and environmental grounds.

Appropriateness of Arguments

Is Wikipedia the place to argue for or against an issue? Articles should be as free from opinion as possible. Facts about wind farms, however, are appreciated.

We should not argue for or against the issue, but we should include the primary arguments for and against the issue that have been made by other people, reporting them in an NPOV manner. -Will Beback 22:08, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree that we should include arguements made by experts in the field, as this will help us to present both sides of the arguement and therefore actually help the article maintain neutrality. However, we should probably VERY clearly state that they are opinions and make sure we use citations. Whoever wanted to write the chapter on arguements, would you be willing to post your section here, first, so that people can evaluate it before it goes in the main article?

Also, I agree with the two statements below that the arguements currently in place need citation or they should be removed. Therefore, I am going to go ahead and remove what's there and add the text from the UWIG as a temporary measure. If anyone finds citations supporting the original arguements, I welcome you to put the arguements back in. Sadly, I recieved an error when trying to download the worldwatch report, so I will refain from adding that information until I recieve a response from the webmaster. I apologize for taking drastic measures like this, I'm only trying to be bold. - Âme Errante 00:01, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

NPOV dispute

Taken from the page:

The electricity generated by wind farms is much more expensive than conventional forms of energy production. For example in Denmark electricity prices are 13p a unit, compared with 7-8p in Britain (one reason for the Danish Government in 2002 to halt its program of building wind farms). Modern winds turbines tend to operate at around 25% of their total capacity, meaning wind farms often need to be backed up by more reliable and responsive power sources, such as coal or oil fueled stations, which run in standby mode ready to switch on when wind levels become too strong or too weak. As such, energy consumers have to pay for the cost of the back-up generators as well as the cost of installing and maintaining the wind turbines. On top of this if the standby generators are running on fossil fuels the CO2 savings made by wind farms are substantially, if not completely, diminished. It is for these reasons that wind farms can only operate through government subsidies or grants.

This paragraph takes a decidedly anti-wind power POV and cites no sources. It should either be improved, by citing sources and conforming to NPOV, or be deleted. --Clement Cherlin 03:23, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

The Worldwatch Institute recently came up with figures on "Costs of Electricity With and Without External Costs" in their free to download pdf entitled "Mainstreaming Renewable Energy in the 21st Century". This showed that Wind was as cheap as Coal and Natural Gas for generating costs in US cents per kilowatt-hour (Wind: 3-5, Coal: 4.3-4.8, Nat Gas: 3.4-5.0) and cheaper when external costs were added (Wind: 3.1-5.3, Coal: 6.6-21.7, Nat Gas: 4.5-9.5). The problems with the figures above are that they seem to be using old material, even though it is uncited, and that they do not include any external costs that society encounters when using a fuel like coal. Also, power companies do not run coal or oil fired plants on stand-by, they take to0 long to start up and get going, instead gas fired plants or hydro-plants are used, with hydro being the fastest. It is the primary reason for having pumped storage hydro-electric systems. The Worldwatch generating cost figures are referenced and I suggest therefore they should be used as opposed to the arbitrary unreferenced figures above.

Having not read the report yet, I would like to nonetheless caution you that numbers like this are easily manipulated by carefully choosing what to count, and other funny statistics. I am an engineer who has worked on hybrid vehicle research, and I've seen all sorts of numbers on ethanol from very reputable sources that tell us one one extreme that ethanol is not only better for the environment, but cheaper, and on the other that ethanol takes more energy to create than you get out of it, and to produce enough ethanol for our needs we would need to convert the entire U.S. to cropland. I have not looked at worldwatch's data yet (I recieved an error trying to download the .pdf), but I still urge you to find other sources which can verify this data. Do a mental check: do the numbers they propose make sense to you, considering the newness of a lot of the technology? - Âme Errante 00:11, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I have removed the contentious paragraph and included it below. Please see my reasons for doing so in my paragraph under 'Appropriateness of Arguements'.

The electricity generated by wind farms is much more expensive than conventional forms of energy production. For example in Denmark electricity prices are 13p a unit, compared with 7-8p in Britain (one reason for the Danish Government in 2002 to halt its program of building wind farms). Modern winds turbines tend to operate at around 25% of their total capacity, meaning wind farms often need to be backed up by more reliable and responsive power sources, such as coal or oil fueled stations, which run in standby mode ready to switch on when wind levels become too strong or too weak. As such, energy consumers have to pay for the cost of the back-up generators as well as the cost of installing and maintaining the wind turbines. On top of this if the standby generators are running on fossil fuels the CO2 savings made by wind farms are substantially, if not completely, diminished. It is for these reasons that wind farms can only operate through government subsidies or grants . - Âme Errante 00:15, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I must say that I think the front page reads far better and in a more unbiased fashion now than it did. In response to your request above to find further data that could verify the figures I gave from Worldwatch, I have found a report from the Sustainable development Commission , which is a UK Quango funded by the UK government to examine ways forward. Interestingly I downloaded this from npowers website, which is one of the UK's major electricity generators, running many conventional power stations so I would consider they see this as a relatively unbiased report - I donwloaded it from http://www.npower-renewables.com/technologies/pdfs/devprocess.pdf The report states on page iv that they see generating costs at 3.2p/kWh (+- 0.3p/kWh) for onshore wind farms and around 5.5p/kWh for offshore. At current US/GBP Exchange rates this gives a range of 5.3 - 10 US cents per kWh, which is slightly above the figures quoted by Worldwatch, but is looking at UK generation costs versus US in the Worldwatch report. The offshore market in the UK is very much in its infancy, and has no real economy of scale as of yet, so a majority of UK generation is onshore within the 5.3-6.4 US cents/kWh range. The report also gives a figure for the cost of integrating wind power into the UK national grid, which it puts at 0.17p/kWh for 20% of wind power on the system, which is remarkably low. It does give far more detail within the report itself.

Dealing With Wind's Variability

"Modern winds [sic] turbines tend to operate at around 25% of their total capacity, meaning wind farms often need to be backed up by more reliable and responsive power sources, such as coal or oil fueled stations, which run in standby mode ready to switch on when wind levels become too strong or too weak. As such, energy consumers have to pay for the cost of the back-up generators as well as the cost of installing and maintaining the wind turbines. On top of this if the standby generators are running on fossil fuels the CO2 savings made by wind farms are substantially, if not completely, diminished."

These statements are almost wholly without foundation. See Utility Wind Integration State of the Art at http://www.uwig.org/UWIGWindIntegration052006.pdf, a brief report issued recently by the Utility Wind Integration Group (UWIG), in cooperation with the three major U.S. utility trade associations--the Edison Electric Institute, the American Public Power Association, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. The UWIG report summarizes five articles on wind that previously appeared in Power Engineering Magazine, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Power Engineering Society. With respect to the issue raised in the paragraph above, the UWIG report comments, "The addition of a wind plant to a power system does not require the addition of any backup conventional generation since wind is used primarily as an energy resource. In this case, when the wind is not blowing, the system must rely on existing dispatchable generation to meet the system demand. . . . The addition of a wind plant to a power system increases the amount of variability and uncertainty of the net load. This may introduce measurable changes in the amount of operating reserves required for regulation, ramping and load-following. Operating reserves may consist of both spinning and non-spinning reserves. In two major recent studies, the addition of 1,500 MW and 3,300 MW of wind (15% and 10%, respectively, of system peak load) increased regulation requirements by 8 MW and 36 MW, respectively, to maintain the same level of NERC control performance standards." In other words, 8 MW of additional reserves was sufficient to cover the added variability induced by 1,500 MW of wind. The added cost to consumers would be trivial. Similarly, the amount of emissions offset by wind generation is reduced only slightly.

As a substitute for the biased original paragraph, I would suggest using language from the UWIG report with appropriate credit:

"The addition of a wind plant to a power system increases the amount of variability and uncertainty of the system's net load. This may require changes in the system's operating reserves, which are used to deal with variability. In two major recent studies, the addition of 1,500 MW and 3,300 MW of wind (15% and 10%, respectively, of system peak load) increased regulation requirements by 8 MW and 36 MW, respectively, to maintain the same level of control performance standards."

--Tom Gray, American Wind Energy Association, http://www.awea.org

Tom Gray, you could improve the statement by adding footnotes to the references you cited. WVhybrid 00:36, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Technical details

I'm an electrical engineering student and I'm trying to learn about the technical side of wind generation, particularly from the point of view of someone educated in traditional power sources, and found there's been little attention to this in this article. Would this article be the right place to tackle this? In particular, I'm curious about frequency control: obviously a wind turbine can't be tuned to directly generate an accurate frequency the way a hydroelectric generator can. How is this addressed? Frequency conversion? DC generation then an inverter?

There have been turbines with an async generator that operated excactly in sync with the grid
Today, 2008, most new windturbines use AC-DC-AC converters, and the generator works at its own designed frequency range. Windturbines are now well developed, mature products, with the most economical choice for generator and power electronics. Two area's show interesting developments:

• to reduced the need for manned service, this is especially importand for windturbies at sea that cannot always be entered in stormy weather, when required.
• a direct drive generator, most older turbine designs have a gearbox between the turbine axis and the generator axis. The gearbox is a relative service intensive component because it also has a oil cooler and constantly degrading oil. The direct drive generator has a larger diameter and many more "poles" to generate electricity at a higher frequency, more near the grid frequency. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Henk Daalder (talk • contribs) 18:27, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Edit

Edited to remove vandalism: "HI EVERY BODY IM LIKO, Y DOES KATRINA BE WIERD" was at the top. --EvilTeuf

Three blades?

All of the photos show three-bladed turbines. I'm curious why they all seem to have the same number of blades. Different kinds of airplanes use 2, 3, 4, or even more blades, depending on the engineering tradeoffs specific to that type of airplane. It seems odd, that you would not see the same kind of variability with wind turbines. It would be great if somebody could address this issue in the article. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:11, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

The are exceptions to the 3 blade rule: Bergey windmills [1] only have 2 blades. From what I've read, (and don't make me find the reference, please), 3 blades provides an optimum between capital cost and generation efficiency. I recall the US DOE had a 1 MW 2 blade turbine in the late 70's near Blowing Rock, NC. s I recall, there was some sort of harmonic that kept everyone with 10 miles awake for about a year before it was torn down. During the Carter Administration the US did a lot of research into wind power. After Carter left office, all of the ended, and the Danes picked up the research results and used it to provide a pickup to their shipbuilding industry. The result of all that is the Vesta wind turbine. Of course, Zond, now GE, grew up during that same period. But I think they got derailed a bit into the investment tax credit era of the 1980's. If you look hard enough on the web, I think you can find some nice histories of that period of technology development. WVhybrid 00:36, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

During the first phase of the danish wind energy research initiative at Risø [2] all kinds of types were tested. Until recently they had a whole park of all kinds of strange wind turbines. I think the three blade standard was established there.194.255.112.30 09:10, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Pic of Tehachapi actually of Altamont?

The pic captioned "Numerous small and fast turning wind turbines at Tehachapi Pass. (U.S.) Today's turbines are larger and spaced farther apart, as that has proven to be a more cost-effective approach" is, I think, actually a picture of Altamont, at least according to the jpeg's name, which is altamont-cr.jpg. Anyone have any info on this? Mjl0509 02:37, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I uploaded the picture, thinking it was of Altamont Pass. Later I learned it is a picture of Tehachapi Pass, but we're stuck with the wrong name on the picture file. Kerberos 17:51, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Section on issues / problems - propose to delete

The entire section on wind farms seems to repeat coverage of the topic in wind energy and intermittent power sources. I propose this be deleted, since the issues do not seem to be specific to the wind farms listed here, and are better covered elsewhere. Reactions?--Gregalton 18:39, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. A reference to the section at wind energy and the intermittent power sources article would be better than repeating much of the same things. --Kerberos 17:53, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Deleted today since little objection.--Gregalton 06:49, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Grateful more opinions. There seems to be some who would prefer to keep the discussion here. I believe it is redundant in an article entitled "wind farms" when covered more completely elsewhere.--Gregalton 16:10, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

• OPPOSE. Funny enough, up to this point all entries save one for this proposal are from the same single user. Wind farms are a respectable technology that deserves a full article, regardless of the "intermittent power sources" category. --AVM 17:48, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

mini edit war?

I tried to make the intro less pov and also keep it short - reasoning in my edit comments, regards sbandrews (t) 17:53, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I'll assume it won't get to that ;). Thanks for your edits, there was no attempt to be POV (but of course there never is...). The issue is not so much POV or otherwise, simply that this article is primarily a list of wind farms, whereas the subject of variability/intermittency is treated in depth in the other two articles. I also have no opinion on the content of the link you added, but it is currently below (in this article), and probably makes more sense there rather than in the intro text. I in fact left a note on JdH's (sp?) talk page to the effect that I have no issues with the content, so he/she might want to look at the intermittent power sources article in particular; and also that I wouldn't attempt to integrate his text there - since presumably he/she knows the subject and context as well or better than I do.--Gregalton 18:37, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

All I am asking is to give it a chance. If people like it (as I expect them to do) they will expand & strengthen it; if not: so be it.
The problem as I see it is that Wind farms have not (yet) shown that they can compete with conventional power stations. Private investors with shy away from it until Wind farms can compete in terms of Cost of Energy with conventional generating plants, and until that happens they will remain a curiosity. Right now there is political support for alternative energy in the EU, and countries like Australia & Japan, but in de US it is much more controversial. But I expect political support to evaporate once consumers realize that their tax money is being spent to support technology that is not competitive, especially when they see their utility bills go up as a result. More importantly, if we are to convince emerging countries like China & India to turn to alternative sources of energy then competitiveness is essential: Their foremost concern is to grow their economies, and to raise the standard of living for their people; environmental concerns are secondary.
So the real issue really is: What does it take to make Wind farms competetitive? Obviously, issues like variability and converson efficiency are essential. I was pretty distressed when I notice the following statement in this article: For example, an Oxford University study of the wind over the past 35 years found that UK turbines would have produced 27% of their maximum possible energy, compared with 20% in Denmark and 15% in Germany. [3] What that means is that tax money has been wasted on technology that is not ready yet. It would have been far better to use those tax monies to provide grant support for research groups at universities and small companies to help push the technology, rather than invest in obsolete technology.
To make a long story short: I strongly believe that the supergrid belongs here, right here in this article. The article I quoted specifically talks about Wind farms, and proposes a way to address one of the limitations. We need to move in a direction that Wind farms replace conventional generating plants, and not merely supplement them. Only when that happens do we stand a chance to convince private investors to invest in it, and to maintain the political momentum for it. JdH 14:33, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. I have no specific concerns with the content or discussion; I just think that the discussion will be more lively and specific at the other two articles, particularly intermittent power sources. (Honest question: have you looked at them?) This article (wind farms) is, at present, mainly a list of wind farms with some specific local history. I'm seeing the other articles as conceptual (which is certainly the thrust of your comments), and this article as more a collection of info, more or less by region and country. Put another way, the supergrids idea could apply anywhere with lots of wind (and to other aspects of electricity trading and production); do you want to limit the consideration of this important issue to a section on Wind Farms in Europe? If, of course, you feel strongly, let's see what others think; I'm not trying to impose a particular viewpoint. (Perhaps the lists should be moved to other articles). Regardless, please do visit the other two articles and contribute there too. Best regards.--Gregalton 15:19, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

The way to address that concern is to put in wiki links to those other articles. A short paragraph like the one I wrote is entirely appropriate for this article, as it may help people to think about these issues and look for more detailed information elsewhere. JdH 15:37, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I think a short section on supergrids is appropriate in this article - either very short in the intro as present or as a longer section at the end of the article - its important to realise that *the positioning* of info like this in an article conveys POV - if you hit readers with a big spiel on the problems of windfarms right at the begining thst's negative POV and not right. As for the 30% of maximum possible energy thing its well known and included in the costings per kw/h - its no big deal - although it would be appropriate to mention it as is done in the Wind power in the UK article. Regards sbandrews (t) 19:23, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

OK. I misread the phrase "maximum possible"; I thought it stood for "conversion efficiency", but I take it stands for "peak power" instead. I will change it accordingly. JdH 06:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

There are, of course, several different ways to address a concern, not just one way. The links are now there (after occasional deletion). SBA: there is no intention to hit the readers with a "big spiel on problems" - there were two short sentences, one of which simply referred to other pages. It is at the beginning only because the rest of the article structure has a geographic structure, whereas the issue applies to all. This is why I still believe that having the detailed content on general issues does not make as much sense in this article, but that is just my opinion. Or perhaps the article needs a section on wind farms in general, and geographic separate.--Gregalton 09:53, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

You may want to compare how related articles are organized. Photovoltaics has lists of PV power stations, and Worldwide installed photovoltaic totals similar to the list here, but also addresses a number of issues such as Current development, PV in buildings, PV power costs, Grid parity, and Financial incentives. The technology itself is described in a separate article on Solar cells, similar to the article about Wind turbines. While the Photovoltaics article makes a cluttered impression and might be improved by reorganizing it I do think it is on the mark by having a broader scope.
What I would like to suggest is divide this article in two main sections. The first section could be devoted to the list as it is now, the second section would address a number of relevant issues, such as: Financial incentives, Variability, Grid integration, Cost of Energy, and Environmental concerns. JdH 13:33, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Splitting into two sections sounds eminently reasonable, although I would probably do general first, then specific country/regional info further down. There is an issue of repeating information in other articles, and potentially having different information/'syncing' the info - a work in progress. The wind energy and intermittent power sources articles have quite a bit of information on each of the issues you mention (although they could use cleaning up, more detail and references - contribs welcome). There are also a lot of individual pages on wind energy in specific countries that could use syncing with info in this article, a thankless task. Be bold. Gregalton 13:47, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Repeating information that is already present in other articles is not necessary; what I was thinking of is using a similar approach to what is used in Solar thermal electric power plants, i.e.: introduce the subject in one or two sentences, and provide a link to the main article. JdH 18:18, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

TICK TOCK I: [technical oil crisis] ]technical interest crisis[:... consider the tangiers that now holds these companies affected including that 'microwave chicken'; they are all there pleading ignorance of accountancy: they say "no-one can help us out of this mess" and they look to the iniquities of false-ministry, saying how seperate they are from there. But is it only so they avoid paying taxes that are eloquently postponed by them with such former integrity, now it seems they are all in one place according to this administration - they are like one single tax-evasion-unknown; in this way they are given four months (@S) to establish that wind farm & then will they be charged tax... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.170.77 (talk) 11:31, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Update on Wind Farm Capacity

I'm reading this page for the first time and I notice Stateline is still listed as the world's largest individual project. As of late 2006 the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas is the new largest farm in the world with a capacity of 735 MW. http://www.fplenergy.com/news/contents/090706.shtml --Berzgt 04:36, 25 March 2007 (UTC)berzeliusgt

How many windfarms are needed to supply 75% of the power in USA?

The following paragraph was put in 13:57, 30 April 2007 by Lookinthestars (Talk | contribs), and taken out because of WP:NOR:

A modern wind turbine can produce around 2.5 MW. That is under optimum wind conditions. It will produce substantially less at lower wind speeds.

I know of one wind farm that has never produced more than 90% of its theoretical capacity.

In 2005, the net generating capacity in the US was 978 GW. For easy math, let's round this up to 1000 GW. 75% would be 750 GW.

750 GW = 750,000 MW

750,000 MW ÷ 2.5 MW / wind turbine = 300,000 wind turbines.

The typical wind farm is between 50 and 100 wind turbines. Let's use an average of 75.

300,000 wind turbines ÷ 75 wind turbines per wind farm = 4000 wind farms.

JdH 13:11, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Average annual output of wind turbines in the U.S. in 2005 was 21% (EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2007), so 750,000 MW/.21 = 3,570,000 MW

In any region, wind facilities produce at or above their average only a third of the time. They are essentially idle another third of the time. So inter-regional redundancy to guarantee a somewhat steady supply increases that 3x: over 10,000,000 MW. --Kerberos 15:52, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Is Europe a "country"?

The table "Wind capacity installed and under construction by country" lists Europe as a single country. That is, to say the least, bewildering. Can anyone please fill in the figures per each European nation? --AVM 17:55, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

(10 months later...) I wholeheartedly agree. I suggest either a true split country by country, or a re-organisation on a regional basis. The latter would have the advantage, that it would be easy to make references to main articles on various parts of the world. Actually, the USA section right now is out of proportion large; the reference to the main article should allow it to be much shorter.-JoergenB (talk) 12:28, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Changed to "European Union" - the eletrical grid is so tightly interconnected, that it might as well be one country for the purposes of this article. Also moved some of the details of US wind farms to the US article,and promoted the "See Also"s to "Main Articles" to give the idea of where to keep the low-level details. --Wtshymanski (talk) 22:15, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Controversy

Shouldn't there be some discussion of NIMBYism in relation to windfarms? It is a recurring issue in Britain. The article only seems to point to the benefits of wind power and the technical stuff about it. 62.49.23.145 07:50, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

There should be a criticism section on wind farms, afterall theyre a blot on landscape, seascapes, inefficient and block radar ie. they are a poor method of gaining renewable energy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.199.31.226 (talk) 21:05, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Buried wires

Most photos of wind farms are unmarred by any unsightly aerial wires. Where are the wires? Are they buried in the ground? Do all land-based wind farms bury the wires? -69.87.203.158 13:43, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

In my limited experience, yes, underground cables connect the turbine into the collector system. Sometimes the whole collector network is buried, but in wind farms which I have been involved with, usually there are overhead pole lines which run along the public roads several kilometres to the collector substation, and only the "dip" between the pole line and the turbine tower is buried (say, a few hundred metres). It occurs to me that I don't know *why* they do this because a pole line right to the turbine base would be cheaper than buried cable (and more reliable and easier to fix - 35 kv buried PE cable splices have been a problem at the St. Leon Manitoba project, for example). Each turbine has a driveway up to it, as well -maybe it reduces the total land footprint because the cables are buried under the roadway instead of a pole line taking even more space. --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:48, 23 January 2008 (UTC)