We’re back in California this evening and plan to stay for a couple of days. On our way in to the coast, we passed the Banning Pass wind turbine farm.
Despite having literally thousands of these expensive (to build AND to run) bat-killers, there seems to be a number of new ones under construction. Damsel took this photo of some of the construction we passed. Click on the image to enlarge.
I wonder if the companies building this enormous (and unsightly) wind farm are somehow capitalized by the same money-wasters responsible for the Solyndra debacle. I wonder how far this is going to go. The turbines already stretch for over twenty miles along both sides of Interstate 10 from Palm Springs to past Whitewater (going west).
Yeah, I passed a few of them coming up here on the Antelope Freeway, a few miles outside of Lancaster.
They won’t expand much farther. They pretty much have filled the useful wind field. The new construction you see is replacing some old ones that wore out, and were torn down.
Liberal Pollution
One of the speakers at the seminar I’m attending this week was telling us about a customer he has who’s doing a study on how the local bat population is interacting with these things.
Considering the cost of the equipment and software, he said this was a $300,000 project!