windmills wind turbines

Windmills and wind turbines.

I am kind of fascinated by windmills and wind turbines. It is quite amazing if you think of it how it has evolved in the last couple of centuries from wind powered mills for multiple usages to the huge wind turbines we know today.

I am fortunate to live in a country with still a lot of windmills that are still working and maintained and restored by mainly volunteers. Just around the corner I have one runned by volunteers that produces flour, we buy that flour to make our bread. Great concept 🙂

We also have a few here with only one task, to keep the water level at a pleasant level so we don’t need to climb on our roof to keep dry feet. Of course this task is now down by big modern water pump stations. By the way we still have a old steam driven water pump station that is still kicked on when there isn’t enough pumping capacity.

Wind turbines are big, huge, massive, with giant blades. At least the new generation turbines. In fact they are so big that a lot people are complaining about the noise they produce the irritating shadows of the rotating blades and the landscape being messed up. Even though it is more expensive you see here more and more wind parks are built far away on the high seas mostly out of sight from land. There is one advantage to place them on sea: on average more wind than on land.

A big advantage of wind turbines is that to produce energy they don’t pollute the environment like the coal-fired power stations.

Let’s hope that these polluters are going to be the relics of the past, if the lobbyists of the coal industry are removed from this there podia . The dinosaurier of our age.