Toadfish Monastery

Hi everyone. I though for sure my ability to access here had evaporated, but apparently not. ChowMein has asked (over at The Other Place) that some info be published here so the Siblings would know what's up. I'm not exactly sure of the complexities of his ultimate identity, but here are his posts from the last few days:
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Sat Jan 09, 2016 1:41 am

The PamAm Paralympic facility has bumped Will to the top of the list of 660 applicants , take it now or lose it .

We are taking the offer , I am going with him .
I will giving up all my assests to my eldest bro . My ten pound coin collection is with nef number three .Nefs one and two got my other collections and cash already , neices one two and three will recieve 20 g's each .
I am good to go .
Will has a year left maybe 18 months if the gods be so cruel .
The placement will let me sleep at night , the state of the art facility means i no longer have to lift him , he is gaing weight fast with me now .
I can feel the ateain in my spine , my MRI is in April , i hope i have not accelerated the damage .
I dont want to be paralysed too soon .
Also the last NMO attack caused minor atrophy in my remaining eye , cataracts are also beginning . *sigh*
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Sat Jan 09, 2016 5:42 am

Hairy Larry has grown , he is not a big cat , 8 lbs ?

We are best buds now , he kisses my face daily , climbs on my to hug me , still exposes his belly to me and Mad Dog .
Lots of slow blinks and love bites , i am his go to guy but will be leaving for a year or so to see my brother to the great beyond or oblivion ( whuchever it be ) .

I hope he does not miss me for too long , his crying at the door will give him away and he will be kicked out .
If tgat happens i hope to smuggle him into the Pan Am building with me .
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Sat Jan 09, 2016 5:49 am

I will be offline within a few weeks and do not know when i will return , if a toadfishmonastery member would write to the sibs for me to inform them of current status , i shall be forever gratefull

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Poor bastard has had a rough go of it. I wish there was something I could do to help him out.

Barkeep, a round of grog for the house.

ET

It's my understanding that the vertical axis turbines are less productive than the big pinwheels because of the shorter moment arm - they can't turn a heavy enough armature to generate MWs of electricity, only a few KWs. Colocating them with power pylons is an interesting idea, but I wonder about the potential for the vibrations to damage the transmission lines. I'm sure the power companies would be quite paranoid about it.

I'm not sure what the rest of the world does regarding worn-out grid-scale wind projects, but up here we require funding for decommissioning to be built into the business plan of a wind farm. Decommissioning means taking everything down - down to two feet below grade - and restoring the roads and pad areas to their original condition. Also, most operators allow themselves the option of replacing the nacelles when they wear out (20-25 years) with new ones, using the same towers, thereby dramatically reducing the overall cost of the project refit when compared to a new project.

I am considering requiring my current project (and likely all future projects) to curtail operations when winds are less than 5 km/s as a way to prevent bat mortality. I read a study today that shows an approximately 80% reduction in bat mortality with this level of curtailment, at a cost of approximately 2% of generation capacity for an 8 month annual curtailment period (no need to curtail when temps approach zero F).

Failures like the one in the video Bob posted are extremely rare. Another red herring that is enthusiastically championed by the professional NIMBYs up here is fire hazard, also extremely unlikely. Annually there are literally hundreds of thousands of forest fires started by human carelessness (#1) and lightning (#2). Turbines have caused fires, but the historical total is very small (can't remember the number, certainly less than a thousand and possibly less than a hundred. that research is back at the office). The technology in these things is constantly improving. GE just made a change to their 2.75MW unit within the last month or so that boosts its output to 2.85MW without changing its acoustic signature or maintenance schedule. Siemens introduced a 3.0MW unit within the last six months or so. I understand that there is a 6.0MW unit available for offshore applications.

Aggie, that is a fascinating point you raise regarding the potential mortality associated with coal and gas fired generation. I wonder if anyone has studied it enough to make a valid comparison of mortality per MW of capacity.

There are both offshore and tidal projects under review at work right now. Tidal looks promising on the face of it, but there are potential issues with fishing vessels and with "bottom rights" claimed by lobstermen. Offshore wind, as Zono and Swatopluk point out, is pricey and inconvenient. Risks to bats are eliminated for the most part (I am unaware of any migrating bats that cross oceans), but birds are still at risk. Typically regulators are only concerned with species that are either endangered or economically significant, and I'm not up on the prominence of those species offshore, as I have not been involved in the offshore project yet (though I'm sure that will change). Tidal power generation has huge potential, due to its predictability and to the much larger amount of energy available in a given volume of moving water. If the pilot project can demonstrate that the hardware is durable and reliable, we will probably have several megawatts of generation on line by 2017 or so, and if they can sort out the fishermen, significantly more by 2025.

DavidH, I'm struck by the intensity of your reaction. Wind turbines are damned, dreaded, bloody monstrosities. Is it just the potential visual impact that gets your blood up? I'm pretty sure that a location within 1 km of a turbine is going to be protected somehow, most likely by noise regulation, and possibly by a physical safety setback requirement as well. Our regulations for physical setback require a minimum of 1.5x(maximum turbine height) setback from property lines and publicly accessible areas. Noise is regulated based on modeled sound pressure at protected locations (like your house). Typically, in the mountainous areas I deal with, noise levels attenuate to below allowable standards within half a mile or less. However in my experience, wind turbines don't make enough noise to disturb me, even right up next to them. Of course, I lived basically under a runway at Logan International Airport for five or six years, so I'm pretty used to tolerating loud noise.

At any rate, I'm wondering if you are the only one here who lives in a place where you might end up seeing some of these from your front yard? Are there city-dwellers here who don't consider the visual impact because compared to a city, these things are a minor to nonexistent scenic blight? Also, from a lay perspective, what sources do you consult for information about wind turbines? Are any of you already impacted by them?

I had no luck getting even the front page to load. Might have been something in my computer - I have a new work computer now, not a laptop, and have inherited my wife's old (really, really old) tablet for my midnight ramblings at home. For a long time I would take m work laptop home with me as my only means of internet access.

As with most things, the more I learn about these projects, the more questions I have. They do kill birds and bats - but no one really seems to know how many. They make electricity, but not at 100% of their capacity, since wind is variable. They don't actually replace coal/oil/gas fired generation, but they probably help offset the need for new plants to keep up with growth in demand. They are subsidized by the government, but the money spent subsidizing big wind is a fraction of the money spent subsidizing the incredibly profitable oil companies. To build them, it is necessary to cut down a bunch of trees and build roads - but logging does that in spades up here. The pads and foundations have to be pinned to ledge, which requires blasting and leveling some area around each turbine - but large-scale metal mining (and even good old granite quarries) do that at much larger scales. They make noise - but so do ATVs and snowmobiles and chain saws. They certainly are visible on the landscape. Some people like the way they look, some don't, others don't care.

So, I suppose I might know something that might turn your view around, but chances are it would be a two-sided coin, and you'd have to balance a gain against an adverse effect.

Well, apparently I'm back. For over a year, maybe more than a couple of years, I have been unable to access the monastery. For some unknown reason I got a topic reply notification at work Friday, and when I clicked the link, I was stunned to actually be brought here. I hope everyone is well and feeling fine. The missus and I have had a rather nasty two years, all of our remaining parents have passed away, and a few other unpleasant things involving siblings and tenants have gone over the dam as well. But work is still fun, and most of the kitties are still with us (down to 25 now), so all in all it's still good to be breathing. I hope to be more visible going forward.

Also, there's a whole bunch of lovely beer in the fridge!

Hi, kiddos

For the first time in a long time, the interweb godz have allowed me back into the monastery. I trust everyone is well and happy.

At my job, I'm pretty heavily involved with grid-scale windpower projects. They are pretty controversial up here, at least among a certain portion of the population who are convinced that windpower will be the end of civilization as we know it. These projects can be pretty impressive. I had some preliminary discussions about a project the other day, that if it goes through to completion will have over 60 turbines at 3MW each. The towers would be around 90 meters tall, and the blades would add another 50 meters or so to that at the top of the circle. This is fairly typical of the projects that are coming in these days, though the number of turbines is highly variable. Complaints typically center on visual impacts, noise, and environmental impacts, with environmental impacts further divided into bird and bat mortality and forest canopy/topography alterations.

I'm curious to learn how you folks view these projects. There are something like 165,000 functioning grid-scale turbines worldwide, with more going up almost daily. They are pricey to construct, but cheap to operate. They don't pollute while generating electricity. (arg, I'm biting my tongue here) I don't want to go into detail about the way we look at these projects from a regulatory standpoint or anything else, because I don't want to color your views with any of my inside knowledge. I'd like to get as much information as I can about how they are perceived by rational people around the world (that's you guys) as opposed to the single-topic screamers that I get at work.

Anyhow, I'll greatly appreciate any feedback, and I'll try to answer any questions you might have about these things.

Boy, was I ever born on the wrong side of the tracks.

What cute lil fellers, Pieces! I bet mosta my cats are bigger than them.... 

I thought scareware was the electronic gizmos they sell for you to put out on your porch on Halloween.

http://www.halloweenmonsterlist.info/

Milk.

In an attempt to sober up a bit.

It looks like we'll be going over to their pile of charcoal tomorrow. It's probably going to be a rough day.

http://www.num.nagoya-u.ac.jp/database/palaeont/rad1/Rad_pt_4/B1661.jpg

Fortunately they have really good insurance - they are in a hotel right now and the insurance will be setting up a mobile home on their lot for them to live in while their house is rebuilt. All the material losses will be covered - new cars, collection of chess sets, gun collection, furniture, etc. Nothing will replace their lost pets, though. They were their babies. I've told John to tell me whatever he needs done, he's helped me out in the past and I hope I made him understand that all he needs to do is ask and I'll do it. This really sucks.

Dammit dammit dammit. One of my best friends had his house burn down the other day. He lost all 12 of his cats, and 23 of his chickens. He and his girlfriend ar OK physically, but mentally they're beyond devastated. His crohn's disease is now kicking back into high gear and he's just a mess. Why is it that the worst possible things happen to the best people?