“I was in Boone, North Carolina, from 1977 through May 1983 at Appalachian State and, trust me, we got many laughs out of this windmill. Especially how it generated one MW of reliable electricity and, somehow, did so without the blades ever turning.” – Victor Culpepper
On social media, environmental scientist Victor Culpepper remarked (above) about an early wind project with reference to an article, Ill-Fated Windmill Just Outside Boone (July 11, 2016). A previous MasterResource post recounted the 1940–45 Grandpa’s Knob grid wind power project in Vermont; the article below from North Carolina’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources summarizes a 1979 wind project.
…On July 11, 1979, Boone celebrated “Windmill Day” with a street festival to dedicate NASA’s Mod-1, the world’s largest megawatt industrial windmill on Howard’s Knob.
The windmill was installed on the 4,400-foot peak as part of a program run by NASA and the U.S.
“… the UK Health and Safety Executive has defined safe CO2 limits for the workplace. The limit for long-term exposure is 0.5% (5,000 ppm) but for shorter encounters it is 2% [20,000 ppm]. Anything over that figure is regarded as a risk to human health.”
Skeptical Science, advertised as “getting skeptical about global warming skepticism,” posted recently on the question: Is CO2 a pollutant? Interestingly, they made the point that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant in any sense of the word. Yes, very high concentrations in confined spaces (they provide an example) is deadly, but then so is water in a drowning. But water is not a pollutant either.
John Mason and BaerbelW [Baerbel Winkler] wrote:
…If you look up the definition of pollution in a dictionary, you will soon realise it’s rather subjective.
“If you had to take a life-saving medication that had to be refrigerated, would you want the energy source to be reliable fossil fuels or literally leave it to the wind and the sun?” – LTE, below
Don’t expect the Houston Chronicle editorial team, much less the conflicted, climate-religionist business editorialist Chris Tomlinson, to forthrightly explain how a once reliable grid in the Lone Start State became wounded. They will blame it on the weather (too cold, too hot). But the real story is wind and solar reliance at the expense of thermal generation, as well as central planning of the wholesale grid by regulators/politicians (ERCOT/PUCT).
I have long complained about how Houston’s newspaper of record went from biased to uber-biased on many things political, particularly climate change/forced energy transformation.…