333.7 It's Isn't Easy Going Green...

...or using technology inside our district many days! A presentation I was part of today to a very influential group of educators in my circle turned into a nerve-wracking mess because the internet, the intranet, the network, the tides, the sunspots, the WHATEVER that affected everything decided to have a major meltdown...it was SO F-R-U-S-T-R-A-T-I-N-G! And mostly because we had such GREAT stuff to show to folks who are hungry for great...quick...fun, yet important school stuff technology-wise!

For those of you in the know...Read: 23 things-type fun with educational purpose and value! As Lucy in Peanuts often says...arrrggghhhh!!!!!

So...because the intended audience did not get to see the timely Earth Day Animoto that I had prepared in order to demo the simple process of creation and the fun of the results...I will share it with you, my loyal and fun-loving blog readers! Found the great pictures on Flickr Creative Commons (another thing we were going to share--a copyright-friendly photo source.)

I was thinking back to the first Earth Day...38 years ago! My senior year in high school and the environment and all the issues related to it were in the news and on people's minds WAY BACK when! I try to do the best I can to save, reuse, reclaim, and not waste...growing up in the desert you understand the need to turn the water off when brushing teeth and how to conserve it as best you can elsewhere!

So with only a few hours of the special day (did you check out the Google artwork) left, I hope it was a good one for you...green or not! And I promise to let the technology "mess" go and live to "fight" another day!

333. 9 Wind Farm: Update

Can't help it...this wind farm project fascinates me and I counted a few hundred turbines up and going this trip throughout the area. The last time I saw a couple of dozen...look at the new pictures and you can see the developers have been very busy the last couple of months.

Coming southeast towards Sterling City, you can now see some from the opposite end of town that you couldn't earlier in the year...in fact one lines up with the yellow strip on the hiway that goes straight through town and looks like a beacon! [O, by the way, DN, it goes way up China Valley as well as up hiway 87 ]


View Larger Map

I have "doctored" a couple of pictures so the turbines show up better...as you can see it was very overcast and the wind was blowing up a gale and making the camera bounce around as I tried to snap the pictures and not get blown away or run over!! ( Promise there IS a turbine right in the center of this picture...you can see two on the left side!)

China Valley

333.9 Texas Energy: It's Blowing in the Wind

I took these pictures of the newest wind farm in West Texas...just north of San Angelo and outside of Sterling City along Hiway 87. The turbines look closer than they really are...the first picture gives a better perspective as to how far from the double-lane, divided hiway they are.

And yes, I stopped the car to take the pictures! I was interested in taking a picture or two because I drive this road pretty regularly and NEVER saw the construction of these HUGE objects (see facts below) until July...and I was almost past them before I "saw" them. This time I was watching carefully... and when they were wrapped in a beautiful early morning ground fog like a bride in yards and yards of tulle, it took my breath away! Friends and family often wonder why I enjoy the rather lengthy drive from Houston to the area...well, wonder no more...this is just one reason! It was a beautiful late summer morning.

I saw my first wind farm years ago in Southern Cailfornia along I-10 as you cross from Arizona into Cailfornia and was pretty impressed then too. I have seen a couple of older locations in Texas, but no matter how often I see them, I am always impressed with the size of the turbines. From a recent San Angelo newspaper article:

Sterling County’s first wind farm has:
- 415-foot turbines that stand taller than the Statue of Liberty, which is 305 feet tall from the ground to the tip of the flame.
- Each generates 2.3 megawatts of electricity. A megawatt, or 1 million watts, can power 400 homes at any given moment.
- The housing for the turbine atop the pylon, called a nacelle, is the size of a school bus.
- The generating equipment inside the nacelle weighs 25 tons.
- Each blade weighs 14 tons. Its tip speed of 220 mph powers a drive shaft through the three-stage gear box that produces 18,000 revolutions per minute.

If you would like some more information about wind farms and wind power, check out this site. It includes a video clip, a powerpoint presentation, and lots of photos from another wind farm site near Abilene, Texas. Found this slide interesting!

Ironically, as I was making three return trips from the Dallas area going south on I-45 in August, coming north on the freeway were oversized trucks carrying these huge blades. I wondered at first what in the world these items could be and then the light bulb came on...blades for these turbines headed somewhere north...not sure where, since they were travelling up I-45, but anyway, figured they must have come by ship from somewhere and were off-loaded at the Houston port. According to the article, it looks like my theory was correct...and they are constructed in Denmark.

ANOTHER reason I love my various road trips that I take! I just get to see all kinds of interesting things and learn "new stuff"...did you know the Texas rest stops have wireless internet? !!!

Anyway... do you need some new books on wind power for your renewable energy collection?Wind power of the future : new ways of turning wind into energy / Tecco c2003
Wind / Naff, ed. c2007
Wind power / Petersen c2004 Children's Press
Generating wind power / Walker c2007 Crabtree
Wind power / Morris c2006 Smart Apple Media
Wind power / Sherman c2004 Capstone

Key words/Subjects: wind power, wind farms, wind power plants. Other call #s 621.31, 621.45