If you are ever driving through the middle of Colorado, South East of Denver, it's worth a slight side trip on Highway 71 to a ridge line outside Limon, Colorado (the red dot in the lower right hand corner of the graphic above). There you will get a chance to drive through the Cedar Point Wind Farm. The first time I saw Cedar Point was last year driving from Taos, NM to North Platte, NE on Highway 71. When we crossed over Interstate 70 and drove out of Limon, there it was: the biggest wind farm I have ever seen.
The video above (taken on our drive down Hwy 71 to Taos today) doesn't really do justice to the scale of the Cedar Point Wind Farm but it does give you an idea of why the turbines are located here: it is a really windy spot!
The amazing thing about driving miles and miles through this wind farm is that Cedar Point is, by far, not the largest wind farm in the US (see the list here). Cedar point has 139 Turbines (the Vestas V90s) each with a 1.8 MW rating for a total installed capacity of 250.2 MW (information obtained from the developer, RES America here). The largest wind farm in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center in California with 1548 MW of installed capacity!
The video above, from the History Channel, gives a better inside look at the Alta Wind Energy Center than I could ever provide. Just one quote: "Think about them as Wind Mills on steroids!"
The video doesn't cover how sites are chosen for wind farms. The geography of Cedar Point makes it pretty clear why the site was chosen (lengthy ridge line, rural agricultural area, always seems windy, etc.). However, the process of wind mapping in the US is quite interesting and often involves computer simulation of candidate sites (read more here).
Estimates of wind generation potential for the US (here) suggest that about 10,500 GW of onshore wind capacity could be produced which is nine times larger than the current total US energy consumption--that's an interesting fact to think about!
No comments:
Post a Comment