Right now, I’m in a secure, undisclosed location in the state of Wyoming. (A hint: The partial pressure of oxygen in my lungs right now is about 120 torr.) Several observations from my journey:
1. There is a lot of wind. Maybe we should do something with it.
2. Oil refineries smell terrible, but are startlingly beautiful at night.
3. Sinclair has the best logo for a gas company:
#2 has occurred to me so many times. Back when I lived in Santa Cruz and looked at Moss Landing (not an oil refinery, but similar at night) and this past weekend driving to Anacortes. Dangerous, globe-warming, unpleasant places… beautiful at night.
Sinclair was a joy to find upon moving out to Denver. There’s even a Sinclair station just outside the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs that has a little brontosaurus statue out front. I’ve seen parents taking pictures of their kids riding it.
I compare the Sinclair sign with all those barbecue joints with anthropomorphized pigs on their signs, and smile.
We’ll never forget their sacrifice.
My guess is you’re on I-80 somewhere near the Little America refinery. I grew up with all that wind, and remember the first three wind generators being built outside of Medicine Bow.
Rawlins!
I used to work at the Howard Johnson’s in Iowa City. It had a sinclair station next door to it. Talk about Americana. All gone now, unfortunately.
Wind is a wonderful resource, especially on a large scale. But, like solar, it’s transient in terms of generation (i.e. on one minute, off the next). Also, it tends to blow the most at night, when demand is lowest. But with electric cars coming on, and (presumably) most of them being charged at night, that might change things.
My guess was I-80 b/w Evanston & Green River/Rock Springs. Big empty country. Lots of new wind turbines. & yeah, the Sinclair since is and has always been fantastic. I think that logo dates back to the 50s or 60s? Maybe longer?
I do love the logo –even though it’s plants, not animals that we’re burning…
@Catalina: I thought about wind power a few years ago, and came to several of the same conclusions.
I’m excited by new forms of wind collection getting much quieter and easier on the birds. Delightful stuff.
Isn’t that where hydrogen comes in? We use the surplus juice at night to split water, and in the morning when the wind dies we stick it back together in fuel cells.
Btw, Wyoming is much more interesting when crossing it by train.
But that train doesn’t run anymore.
But sometimes they detour the California Zephyr over it.
As Catalina points out, the intermittency of generation is an issue. But so is tranmission. You have to size the transmission for the surges, even though the best wind farms deliver on average only about 30% of their capacity. Storage is the solution. Pox is probably correct that we need to focus on something like hydrogen. It’s difficult to integrate a lot of wind into our current resource mix because thermal plants are generally most efficient at high temperatures (i.e., they can’t be backed off efficiently when the wind is blowing), and we can no longer turn hydro on and off with the flick of a switch (which we used to do) because it makes downstream flows so volatile. New power source, new massive transmission lines (that no one wants going near them), entirely new distribution network, new engines that can use the new fuel . . . it’s all great in theory, and maybe that’s where we’ll be in 50 years, but it will take a hell of a lot of investment and commitment.
@13 or we could do what worked for Hammurabi and just pump water up an incline.
But that’s proven technology and allows water turbines to shape the output, so we can’t do that …
Let’s see, assuming your respiration is 250 ml/minute, and your alveolar ventilation is ~5 litres/minute that should put you around 5200ft. Unfortunately, I think this is really too much of an assumption to make that guess much better than +/- 1500ft. That puts you just about anywhere in Wyoming, aww…
Perhaps if I knew your age and FEV1 I could narrow it down a bit.
You’re going over Elk Mountain and about 45 minutes from Laramie. The only town with a 4-year college in the state of Wyoming. Those wind towers are in Arlington. Thank god there is not a late season blizzard or you would have been stuck in Rawlins. Saratoga is nice though. Free public hot springs.
Our you could be heading west. Then Green River/Rock Springs is probably it.
“Kansas has high potential capacity for wind power, second behind Texas. The most recent estimates are that KS has a potential for 950 GW of wind power capacity yet has only about 1,000 MW installed. KS could generate 3,900 TW·h of electricity each year which represents nearly all the electricity generated from coal, natural gas and nuclear combined in the US in 2008.”
And yet Sebelius had to fight over and over again to stop more coal-fired power plants from opening in Kansas. Kansas has no coal.
Farther north near Caspar, America’s biggest nuclear energy company, Duke (36GW), just brought a 66-turbine, 99MW farm online. They now have 700MW wind online. And the US DoE just gave them another $22M to play with in Texass. Cuz they -need- the money, man.
I live on I-80, but thank goodness nowhere near Sinclair or Rawlins, which are truly depressing. The wind here is often so strong the wind farms have to turn off the turbines. My house shakes and it sounds like a train is running right past my yard. More and more farms are popping up here in Wyoming, but it does create issues with all the power lines that get in the way of animal migration and ranch land. What I hope to see is large-scale solar collection here; it’s sunny 300 days a year and seems like a no-brainer, but what do I know?
@20, it’s Casper.