Oklahoma Windmills

Chriscrawfordphoto

Chriscrawfordphoto

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Wind power is becoming a big business in the southwest and the great plains, where the wind blows almost constantly. These windmills stand along I-40 just west of Weatherford, Oklahoma. This was the last photograph that I made that day, as the sun was setting.

8-17-11
 
Nice photo. I'm from Oklahoma and travelled I-40 lots, and always loved the windmills. It's even more impressive to see one blade alone on a flatbed truck, as long as an 18-wheeler.
 
sooner said:
Nice photo. I'm from Oklahoma and travelled I-40 lots, and always loved the windmills. It's even more impressive to see one blade alone on a flatbed truck, as long as an 18-wheeler.
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Agreed. These are massive, impressive mechanical beasts when in action as is most noticeable if you get up close to them when the wind is really blowing. This seems to be a "green energy" solution that's getting legs now as far as economic viability.
 
David Murphy said:
Agreed. These are massive, impressive mechanical beasts when in action as is most noticeable if you get up close to them when the wind is really blowing. This seems to be a "green energy" solution that's getting legs now as far as economic viability.
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Yeah, they're much larger than they look from far away. I've never been able to get close to one, but have seen TV shows where they show how they're built. The box on top of the pillar that the propeller is attached to, which has the gears, and generator, is the size of a mobile home! Looks so small from where I am.
 
Nice photo. I like the cooler evening colors in the sky.

I got "schooled" on this on a fishing forum. They are actually wind turbines. If it is used for pumping water or grinding meal, or some other mechanical action, then it is a windmill.

None around here, but sometimes I see the blades on trucks. Impressive.
 
Nice colors, Chris, and I like the slight blur on the blade ends to give a dynamic element.

We think of this as a new emerging technology, but already there are abandoned wind farms. This one is at South Point on the Big Island of Hawaii in 2008, but it looked like this in 1998 too...

081129-38.jpg
 
Doug said:
Nice colors, Chris, and I like the slight blur on the blade ends to give a dynamic element.

We think of this as a new emerging technology, but already there are abandoned wind farms. This one is at South Point on the Big Island of Hawaii in 2008, but it looked like this in 1998 too...

081129-38.jpg
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Wow, I didn't know any had already been abandoned! I looked up that wind farm online and it was actually built in the 1980s. I didn't know any had been built that long ago in the USA. It was probably abandoned because newer ones have a much larger power output and refitting them with newer generators probably cost more than abandoning them and building new ones elsewhere.
 
Then it may have had only about 10 years' service life. You could very well be right about the reason, since when this was shot in 2008, there was a newer wind farm visible about 2-3 miles away, toward the left in this pic. I hope these old turbines will be removed and recycled.
 
There's been an astounding amount of wind turbines that have been installed in the past decade or so here in the Pacific Northwest. They're concentrated on the eastern slopes of the Cascades, downwind from major gaps in the mountains; such areas tend to be persistently windy. Back in the 1980s before the wind power boom, I always suspected that such areas would be full of wind turbines someday.

It's typically hard to appreciate how huge they really are, because they tend to be a long distance from any public road and in sparsely-populated treeless areas which offer little for scale.
 
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