Sunday, January 28, 2007

The Answer My Friends...


At least a few times a week I drive through a few of the wind farms south west of Abilene. The Horse Hollow Wind Project in particular is the largest of it’s kind in the world. I have always been fascinated by these giant structures. The tower itself stands around 275 feet tall with a school bus-sized hub on top from which fan blades over 100 feet long extend. A few of the towers are so close to the road that they cast whirling shadows on the vehicles whizzing by. Even though they appear to be moving rather slowly, the tips of those shadows are traveling much more quickly than the 70 mph traffic. Yesterday as I drove by the cloud deck was so low that you could not see the top of the tower. It was so cool to see these blades suddenly appear knifing through the mist with no visible means of support. It is amazing to think that something so huge (and they are incredibly huge) can be moved by a mere breeze of 6 mph or so. Of course, the number one tourist attraction for the Abilene area in my opinion is Jacob’s Dream on the ACU campus, but after that I recommend the windmills although they are getting harder to miss.

1 Comments:

Blogger Darren Duvall said...

Texas produces more wind power than any other state in the union.

They tend to be rather hard on the flying wildlife. If you're not into shooting dove, chances are that if you hang out under the windmills with a dog during dove season you can give Fido a workout and collect plenty of dove.

Article here

It would probably be cheaper than a dove lease if you knew the right people to ask, and you don't produce any CO2 from the combustion of shotshells.

Thursday, March 01, 2007 1:57:00 PM  

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