Quote:
Originally Posted by alexamenos
One very small example of the problems.....
there's been quite a push over the last decade to build wind farms in W. Texas -- take a drive through Scurry or Upton or Pecos or Sterling County and you'll see what I mean.
...wind generated electricity is great with one small problem --the wind is stubbornly insistent on blowing most when electricity demand is the smallest and hardly blowing at all when electricity demand is the highest. Wind blows much stronger in the late fall and the early spring than it does in the heat of summer. If folks could be pursuaded to run their AC's in the late fall and the early spring and then shut off their AC's in August then wind would be a much better resource.
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well, there is always somewhere that the wind is blowing...
second, if you've lived out in the high plains you know the wind never stops blowing (or, as the natives say, it never stops sucking...)
here's the amarillo monthly avg wind speed:
12.8 13.8 15.2 15.2 14.5 14.2 12.7 12.0 12.8 12.8 13.0 12.7 13.5
here's lubbock:
12.0 13.2 14.6 14.7 14.2 13.6 11.4 10.1 10.5 11.2 11.7 11.8 12.4
plenty of wind to keep those turbines turning 12 months/yr.