Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 07/20/18> Restricted area? No Trespassing? U.S. Government Property? …. I don’t think so.
I have seen an increasing number of wind farms going up in the valley, ten years ago there were a few of these large windmill power generators scattered about just north of Brownsville and east of Hwy.77 towards the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Now there are more of these three bladed windmills than you can shake a stick at. There are rows and rows of these tall structures, literally as far as the eye can see in some spots. I never have gotten a close up look at these structures but on Thursday I decided it was about time I did.
So, just south of Raymondville, TX. I decided to get off the highway and do some looking around. The first gravel road that looked like it would lead to the windmills I decided to take and it just so happened that the supposed area was restricted property. Just who is the US Government, and who are they to tell me that this is restricted property?
It is a good thing I know something about government, so I was able to determine that all I needed was permission to enter the restricted area and I would be good to go on about my business of checking these out. But just where am I going to find someone out here in basically nowhere land who could give me permission? I didn’t have to look very far, in my mind I have that authority, does the words, “government by and for the people” ring any bells? You bet your sweet ass it does, so I stopped to get a couple pictures of the sign and then headed on into the restricted area.
I had to drive about a mile and half down the gravel road to get to spot where I could get close enough to one to get some photos. If you have never been close to these things before they really are impressive in their size.
I went online to see if I could find out the dimensions of these wind turbine generators as they are called and while I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, I did find some interesting information.
I was 100% correct that this wind farming is become a bigger and bigger thing here in Texas. According to an article in the Brownsville Herald newspaper from three months ago there is another new wind farm under construction in the area of where I took these pictures that will have 46 more of these wind turbines at a cost of $200 million. It also said the new farm would have the capacity to produce about 145 megawatts of electricity.
I don’t know just how much that is or how to begin to describe it but I know that we pay for electricity by the kilowatt hour and Texas has some off the highest electric rates in the country despite leading the country in wind produced electricity which was right just below 13% of all the electricity produced here in 2016.
The kicker to this whole story is that it is a Spanish company that is doing the majority of these wind farms here in Texas. If this wind power electricity is such a great damn deal why isn’t some US companies leading the charge here on this? Another good question is the $44 million in lease payments for the land these farms are sitting on, and just how did the federal government come about acquiring this land?
Might as well also ask just how much kick back or campaign donations did elected officials at the state and federal level get from this Spanish company? I am pretty certain if a person were to really dig into this deeply there would have to be some rabbit holes to chase down when it comes to wind farms and power generating.
I also know that the toll roads in Texas have already been sold to a Spanish company and are being operated by that company right now, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the tolls have taken major price hikes since then, I see some even higher electric bills in the future for us Texans.
The only thing about this renewable energy I can say with any certainty is that it needs to be looked at further, by someone who is good at digging through the government documents using the FOIA requests. FOIA stand for Freedom of Information Act, which supposedly makes all government documents that don’t involve national security available to the public.
,I took a short video of these things in action to show my kids, I might even try and learn how to upload it into steemit so you can hear just what noise these things make. I would have to think that the continuous noise being generated will also have an effect on other wildlife on the ground nearby these structures. Did anyone stop to consider this before they started building these things? Where are the environmental impact studies? So many questions and so few answers…
I did not have any problems getting my photos, in fact, I never saw another vehicle the whole time I drove around back in the restricted area. If I had been approached by some government official I already had my story ready to go as far as not paying attention to the sign. “I thought the sign was for the illegals. I ‘m a part of the US government, a taxpayer.”
Until next time,
@sultnpapper
The photos are all property of @sultnpapper.
The photo quality is poor due to the speed of the blades and using my phone to get the shots, sorry they didn't turn out better.
When you say Spanish company, little bells go off. Ours is called FENOSA in this country but goes by other names in other countries. They are spreading like wildfire and I would assume it is the same group of people backing it...the King of Spain was a major shareholder. The prices start increasing and the service starts to slide. All the profits they make are taken out of the country not leaving any for further development of improvements to the service. We also have these wind farms here and yes, they are very noisy. Those blades stretch about 130 feet. There was a storm here last fall and one of the towers fell over causing a domino effect. Put a few towers out of action. It has been at least six months since we passed through the area, and they hadn't been reapired then.
I know that in Latin and South America along with here in the USA there is an increasingly amount of local government run utilities that are selling off their (our tax payer) owned infrastructure to foreign companies, water is the big one right now that is being gobbled up in the areas I mentioned. Cities have been so mismanaged that they are looking to sell of these items to pay past due bonds and to payoff retirement benefits that were to lucrative for the workers given they only had to work 20 or 25 years to collect for a lifetime. Some workers went right to work at these cities out of high school and by the time they were 45 they could retire with a life time pension. I know some folks like that who have been collecting their pension longer than they actually worked.
The Spanish company involved in the Texas wind farms is Acciona Energia from the story in the Brownsville newspaper I read online.
The farms here don't look to have the a potential for a domino effect if one topples, they are spread out about three football fields away from each other at the closest, possibly even farther but it is hard to say exactly the distance.
I have a tendency to be a sort of greenie when it comes to energy production, so I look at these things pretty carefully. The energy produced by wind farming isn't economical at this point. If it weren't for government subsidies there wouldn't be very many because there is no way to pay for the damn things with power generated at current price levels. Simple as that.
Who gets the subsidies? Good question. You can bet the Spanish Company did just fine by the time they got them spinning out electricity between outright cash and tax deductions. Boeing makes the turbines and they seem to be doing just fine with it. You see, with the subsidy program there is no real competition so they can basically charge what ever they want AND take some of the tax bite because they are helping the environment. The list goes on.
Birdies are just like most everything else. They learn where cousin Fred died last week and avoid it. They will do ok with the whole deal. I wonder if anybody has ever considered herding pigeons out of the city and into the wind farms? Probably not.
Always good to read your posts. I don't get them all answered while I am riding, but I get most of them read sooner or later... Thank you.
Well Tom I am glad that I was able to hit on a subject today that prompted you to be able to respond, I know it must be hard when traveling with Connie to comment on all the post you read so I am honored to have your words of wisdom chime in here today.
I didn't know that Boeing is making these turbines, I do know that there are a bunch of them coming in by ships to the ports along the Texas Gulf coast especially Brownsville and Houston. My guess would be the ones coming into Houston get trucked up to the panhandle of Texas because that is the other large area of concentration here in Texas for wind farms from what I have read, and I also see a bunch of them heading up I-45 past our town on semi-trucks on a pretty regular basis.
For some reason I figured they were being made off shore but it might be that the ships are loaded and then sail down the west coast and come through the Panama canal and up through the waters to the gulf of Mexico. Trucking those huge blades all the way across the country would be very difficult I would think especially through the mountains out west.
I'm pretty sure that there must be some hefty government subsidies to get this going like you said but that begs the question of why foreign companies and not US to do it as for as building, owning, and operating?
I wonder if the US companies aren't building wind farms in other countries and being subsidized in those?
Could it be that at some point infrastructure in all countries will be owned by foreign companies from other continents and the only way to make sure everyone in every country is getting a fair shake would be a world government to oversee it? Maybe a NWO plan that is in the works?
I would have to think that some US companies would have jumped at building the wind farms if there were government backing in order to guarantee or insure that they came out smelling like a rose in the deal.
The other point about pricing, where they can charge what they want, that is and will be the scary part. It may come a day when all we earn goes to pay the electric, water and food bill and there might not be any discretionary income left for the enjoyment of life. It is that way right now for a lot of the people here in the US, I'm not that for from that point myself since we went from a two income household down to one so that we could home school the 3 that are still school age.
That may just be the conspiracy theory person in me raising the question but it is worth consideration and not just dismissal of it. We don't think like the people who want to rule the world so it is hard to imagine sometimes just what they could plan and implement in order to achieve their goals. Even former piece of shit president Bush, said their that there will be a NWO but people didn't know what he was talking about and probably took it to mean that the US would be an even bigger world power than we already were, I know at the time that is what I thought it meant. Talk about how naive and ignorant I felt when I learned what NWO was really about.
Take care and safe travels buddy.
I like your excuse there at the end mr Papper! Only four birds killed annually? Wonder where they got that from, I really do not believe that story!
It would be interesting to see who really owns that property, here in the Ethekwini Municipality one can find ownership on the municipal GIS database which anyone can access. The USA is the forerunner in GIS, surely that kind of info will be there? But that's besides the point, like you say, have the EIA studies been done?
There are wind farms here in SA as well, will check out what's being said here about the affect on the environment.
Thought provoking post as always!
Please let us know what you can find out on SA and what is going on there, I would be curious as hell to know if there are Spanish or US companies building wind farms there, my conspiracy hairs are starting to raise up on the back of my neck for some reason.
Haha! I love your excuse at the end! It would have been interesting to see how someone would have responded to that.
Could you smell the dead birds lying around?
I remember in high school, a group of girls did a report on wind turbines, and they stated they only killed 4 birds a year. I think I remember the whole class laughing at them.
I’ve seen those blades being pulled behind the back of a semi quite a few times. They are massive!
It might have four birds a year back then, but the devil is always in the details. How many wind turbines were there then? Was that 4 per year per foot of blade length?
I will admit I couldn't smell any dead birds, but the coyotes might have been eating them for all I know, it might be like buffet for them, all you can eat and don't have to hunt them, they just fall from the sky.
I watched a video on how they also can catch fire, that was something to see them on fire and coming apart.