"BJ Conner" wrote in message
oups.com...

I have read of lots of wind farms but none in water that iced over.
Maintenance would be a bitch. even the offshore ones you could get to
in a boat. I wouln't want to drive the service truck out on a Frozen
Lake Erie to fix a wind turbine. A truck maby but not a crane big
enough to replace a blade.

I guess my basic arithemtic skills are about as good as the next
guy's.....but sometimes my typing and copyediting leave something to be
desired. At a hundred per square mile, Lake Erie would be home to nearly
1,000,000 wind powered generators! So, a few hundred go down between the
middle of January and early March every year. Big deal. Leave 'em till
spring.

The ones in Iowa, North Dakota and other
places are going to subjected to ice build up. So far I haven't read
of any windmills with deicing systems. I suspect there going to let
you sit around in the dark if the wind farm ices up.

So far, I haven't read anything (aside from this) about them icing up. At
ten rpm, or thereabouts, I suspect it wouldn't generally be catastophic
anyway. But, heck, let's assume that it is. How to get around this
problem? Well, we could probably achieve a great deal by having excess
generating capacity......put a few in places where they aren't likely to ice
up....say, the Gulf of Mexico, for example. Well, sure, but THOSE would be
subject to hurricanes! Yeah, but in hurricane season, Kansas ROCKS! Then
too, I don't think it stretches credulity to suppose that some especially
bright engineer somewhere could invent a defroster or something......if only
there were a reliable source of electrity or something to power it.

The western Dakotas, Nebraska and Alberta have wind fields rich enough
to power the whole country. One of th eproblems is getting it out of
there.

Well, in the case of Alberta, there's always extradition.

To get the power the east coast would need would require a
swath of transmission lines 5 or 6 miles accross. One proposal is to
convert it to hydrogen and ship that back in a pipe. Hydrogen fuel
cells would convert it back to AC power. The fuel cell would be
located in distribution subs ( there is one within 10- 12 miles of
your house) and you would not see any difference from what you have
now. You would notice something on you elelctric bill , but thats
going to happen anyway.
They will also find ways to pack the pipeline or otherwise stroe some
hydrogen so if they wind didn't blow you wouldn't have to stay home
from work.

Assuming that the estimate of a 5-6 mile wide corridor of transmission lines
is correct, so what? That's nickel-dime engineering in today's world.
Besides, except for urban areas, which are easily bypassed, it wouldn't (or,
at least shouldn't) have any significant impact on current land use policies
or practices beneath the wires......except for small patches around the
tower bases, which would serve the function of micro-habitat refuges for all
kinds of critters and plants that are currently plowed, poisoned, trapped,
burned, shot or otherwise obliterated in the desperate effort to kill every
living thing that is not corn, wheat, oats, barley, soybeans, timothy or
clover in every fictionally arable hell of salt pan, clay, hard rock, road
bed or bog in North America. In any case, the declared potential of this
region for electrical generating capacity sufficient to meet the needs of
the nation does imply (much less assure) that all of it MUST be done there.
Other places can (and WILL) carry part of the load. There will be no need
to transmit electrical power from a single location halfway across the
continent.....in any direction.

As for hydrogen (regardless of application or miracle dependent scheme), it,
like solar, looks pretty much like a non-starter sans some unforeseeable
technological breakthrough. Both of them, and methane and other fuel cell
technologies, show tremendous potential for powering cell phones and perhaps
even stereo systems capable of provoking campground neighbors to entirely
justifiable homicide (and, yes, all those cute, although as yet
non-existent, nano-machines too), but neither of them is going to be turning
much bauxite into aluminum any time soon. Bank on it.

Wolfgang