The wind blew all night last night. The house groaned at times from the heavy wind loads. Lying in bed unable to sleep the brain, what little is left, needed something to ponder. Over near the town of Center we now have a new wind farm. Most of the windmills are about 1.5 megawatts. The blades probably sweep an area of one hundred fifty feet or more. How much horsepower is one of these machines drawing from the air,or more precisely wind? If no one proposes an answer, Lord Kadizzle will result to a google search. My curiosity got the best of me so I looked it up. There are about 1,350 horsepower in a megawatt. So that means each of those machines is drawing about two thousand horsepower from the area it sweeps. Of course the machine is not one hundred percent efficient, so that means there is actually more horsepower there. So it might be fair to say there is the equivalent of a three thousand horsepower fan blowing across our yard while I lay in bed unable to sleep. Just did more homework. A German physicist calculated a wind turbine at best can only get sisty percent of power from air, therefore I need to revise my estimate of the power running across our yard to a higher number. Six thousand horsepower now seems reasonable. Translate that into a oil driven system, and multiply that times three fifty per gallon, and you are talking some big bucks blowing all over the yard. If my car runs on a gallon an hour and produces one hundred horsepower, then the wind going through my yard must be worth about eighteen hundred dollars per hour. This is just a mental calculation, and could be way off.
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