Blowing in the Wind

Blowing in the Wind

After retiring from Bell Labs in 1989, I organized a 3-day short

course on modern battery technology. Last week my colleagues

and I presented this course in Amsterdam for the 8th time.

Before the course, my wife and I took a Baltic cruise on the

Holland America ship the Maasdam, departing from

Copenhagen. In the square across the street from our hotel in

Copenhagen we walked under what I thought was a huge piece

of modern sculpture that looked like an overblown airplane

propeller with three blades. However, on reading the plaque

nearby, I must confess to being totally ashamed of myself for not

recognizing that this “sculpture” was actually a rotor from a

modern Danish wind turbine (don”t call them windmills!). Even

more depressing was the fact that I show a picture of just such a

wind turbine in my course lecture on alternate energy sources!

But that”s not all. Some 15-20 years ago, we spent a few days in

Palm Springs, where there is a very large collection of wind

turbines that generate a substantial amount of the power for the

region. At breakfast one day, after first commenting to the

waitress on the delicious coffee (it was the first time I had tasted

cinnamon in my Java), I remarked that many of the “windmills”

were not turning. The waitress turned out to be Danish and her

husband was an engineer working on the wind turbines (she

corrected my use of the term “windmill”). She told us that it was

the Danish turbines that were working while most of the

American ones were in trouble. Indeed, back in the 70s, when

the oil crisis was in full bloom, the U.S. government provided

monetary incentives for installing wind energy generators and

there were entrepreneurs out for the quick buck with inferior

turbine designs. The Danes, however, were quite competent in

this field and even today control half the world market for wind

turbines.

A couple years after that first visit, thanks to an introduction

from a friend who owned a share of a wind turbine, I visited the

engineer in charge of the maintenance of the “wind farm” in

Palm Springs. A word about the origin of the wind is in order

here. There are now over 3500 turbines located in the San

Gorgonio Pass region near Palm Springs. What happens is that

as the desert area east of the pass heats up during the day, the hot

air rises, sucking air through the pass in the mountains and

creating strong winds. The winds are strongest during the hottest

part of the day, coinciding with the power needs of the air

conditioners in the Palm Springs area. Therefore, the power

generated by the wind can be fed into the power grid at just the

time of maximum need for additional power.

Well, I arrived for my visit at around 11 AM that day and when I

tried to open the door to the building housing the maintenance

offices the wind was so strong that it took all my strength to pull

open the door. Admittedly, I am not known as an Arnold

Schwarzenegger type, but I was truly impressed when the

engineer said that the wind really wasn”t particularly strong that

day. We had a pleasant conversation and I was surprised to learn

that certain environmentalists were campaigning against the

turbines due to such things as the noise of the turbines when

spinning and the fact that the rotating blades can kill birds. It

certainly seems to me that wind power is the most innocuous

alternative energy source and is now competitive in cost with

power generated by coal-fired power plants. Concerning the

noise problem, there are two sources of noise: the aerodynamic

noise, a “swishing” sound as the blades rotate through the air,

and mechanical noise from the gearbox or generator in the body

of the turbine. The mechanical noise has been virtually

eliminated according to a very informative Danish wind power

website, www.windpower.dk/faqs.htm, while the aerodynamic noise

has been reduced by improved blade design. Attention is given

to generating “white” noise as opposed to pure tones, which can

be very annoying. The size of these turbines is impressive

indeed. The rotors may be over 150 feet in diameter and the

height may extend to 200 feet from ground to the tips of the rotor

blades.

For comparison purposes, the average power requirement of a

typical European household seems to be in the neighborhood of 1

kilowatt (the equivalent of having 10 100-watt light bulbs

burning at once). I suspect that we wasteful Americans need an

average of 2 kilowatts or more to sustain our lifestyle, especially

with our air conditioning and/or heating facilities. The total

energy is expressed in kilowatt-hours (if those ten light bulbs are

all burning for one hour, that”s 1 kilowatt-hour). Your electric

bill is based on the number of kilowatt-hours and, depending on

where you live, will be roughly 5 cents a kilowatt hour, give or

take a few pennies. Today the cost of wind power is quoted to be

in the 5 cents a kilowatt hour range and therefore is as cheap as

your normal electric power from coal or nuclear sources. There

is a lot of controversy, of course, about the true costs to health

and environment of coal or oil generated power and the costs of

nuclear waste disposal are barely beginning to be addressed.

Europe, with its much greater reliance on nuclear power than in

the U.S., seems as uncertain about nuclear waste disposal as we

are and, according to one of the participants in our course, they

are just shipping their waste around from place to place. So the

attractiveness of wind power, which is really another form of

solar power, seems even greater. The latest generation wind

turbines are capable of generating about 1,500 kilowatts (1.5

megawatts) of power, enough for roughly a thousand homes.

Well, after my humiliation at not recognizing a wind turbine

rotor, we embarked on our cruise and spent two days docked in

St. Petersburg. We were in what then was Leningrad in 1973

and it was interesting to compare our impressions. We restricted

ourselves to tours, one the mandatory tour of the Hermitage,

arguably one of the preeminent art museums in the world. On

the way to the Hermitage from the ship, we encountered a New

York style traffic jam, taking over 15 minutes to cross the bridge

over the Neva River. There were obviously more cars than we

saw in 1973 but the main problem seemed to be that the streets

were just not built to handle a large number of vehicles. There

were obvious signs of decay in many of the buildings on the way

to the museum but in general the people on the streets seemed

reasonably well dressed. One building we passed was pointed

out as being a scientific or engineering type academy which had

been restored to an impressive appearance as a “gift to the city by

the workers themselves”, according to our guide.

Our introduction to the Hermitage was a bit on the down side.

Because of the traffic delays, many in our group needed to visit

the restroom facilities. For me, it is still somewhat disconcerting

to stand at the urinal with a woman mopping the floor a couple

feet away. For the ladies, who had no rubles, being charged for

toilet paper in their facility was solved on an individual basis.

The museum itself was as impressive as we remembered it but

there was one difference. Each room in the museum contains a

chair occupied by a woman serving as a watchdog over the art.

In 1973, these women were typically older women who looked

like the poorer, stereotypical Russian babushkas. Today, the

women we saw were almost all rather well dressed with

relatively sophisticated coiffures. Some were younger and one

or two even smiled! We couldn”t decide whether this was the

result of a desire on the part of the Hermitage to upgrade the

quality of its staff or an indication that upscale women have to

accept more menial jobs. Perhaps a sign of the times is the fact

that everywhere we stopped in St. Petersburg, as we got off the

buses we were besieged by hordes of very aggressive vendors

pushing everything from Russian dolls to hats to books for

dollars.

The young people on the streets looked like young people

everywhere and the women were for the most part well dressed.

There was however, a definite contrast with Tallin in Estonia,

once again an independent nation. We visited Tallin the day

before docking in Russia and that city was much more vibrant

with chic fashions prevailing.

In St. Petersburg the loving care devoted to the restoration of

many buildings after the horrible damage inflicted during the

900-day siege of Leningrad by the Nazis was evident. A prime

example is the Peterhof Palace with its many gold statues lining

the beautiful gardens and the newly opened rooms beautifully

restored to their former glory. The Church of the Resurrection,

also known as the Church of the Spilled Blood (where one of the

czars died after being wounded in the street) was also reopened

very recently. It is easily one of the most impressive buildings

we”ve seen, with the interior virtually completely lined with

small mosaics and an exterior fatade that is more interesting than

the well known St. Basil”s on Red Square in Moscow. A

fascinating story concerned a Nazi bomb that had lodged just

under Christ”s arm in the mosaic depiction in one of the domes.

The bomb went undetected in the dome for 20 years and was

finally discovered, cut out gingerly and blown up by the bomb

squad!

I was interested in finding out how our Russian guide felt about

the Kosovo situation. Tania was a woman my wife estimates to

have been in her thirties. Her opinion was that the bombings will

go down in history as a terrible mistake and that a possible result

could be a return to power of the Communists in Russia. She

said they have been telling the Russian people all along that

NATO is an aggressive force set on an eventual conflict with

Russia and now they are saying, “See, we told you so! Russia is

next.” This feeling echoed the article by Chernomyrdin in the

Washington Post to which Brian Trumbore referred some weeks

ago.

Back to Palm Springs, that waitress effected a change in my

lifestyle and I still start off my mornings with cinnamon in my

coffee or Postum. (To the uninitiated, Postum is a caffeine-free

drink made from grains and molasses and was the first packaged

“instant” drink, preceding the instant coffees of today.) More on

the wind later, after I digest the 30+ pages of material I”ve

printed out from just a couple websites.

Allen F. Bortrum