Re: Wind energy a boon for farmers - tenfold returns !

From: Patrick Powers (frisbieinstein_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/25/04 

Date: 24 Nov 2004 21:20:27 -0800

"the turbines can function in a Category 4 hurricane,"

news:<418155f5.7038821@news.clara.net>...
Knight-Ridder via Kansas City Star - Nov 24, 2004
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/10262296.htm

Towering windmills to cut costs for Navy at Guantananamo

by Carol Rosenberg
Knight Ridder Newspapers

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - (KRT) - New York has the Statue of
Liberty. Paris has the Eiffel Tower. And early next year, four colossal
windmills should tower over this remote U.S. outpost - new landmarks
that could someday supplant the Pentagon's prison for terror suspects as
the symbol of this Navy base.

The glossy white windmills will be visible to distant ships in the
Caribbean's Windward Passage, detainees at this base's terror prison and
even Cubans separated by miles of minefields from this 45-square-mile
U.S. enclave.

Environmentally friendly, the $11.6 million project is designed to
decrease the consumption of diesel fuel here by 25 percent. Under the
plan, each windmill should generate 950 kilowatts of energy, save
650,000 gallons of diesel fuel annually and cut air pollutants and
greenhouse gas emissions by 13 million pounds a year.

Best of all, the project requires no special taxpayers' outlay because
of a decade-plus payback agreement with NORESCO, the Westborough, Mass.,
contractor building it.

Under the deal, the Navy will pay the firm with the annual savings from
the Pentagon budget for diesel oil here, about six cents a minute,
meaning it should be free and clear by 2020.

"It's an ancient philosophy combined with state-of-the-art technology,"
said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey M. Johnston, a Seabee responsible for all public
works here - from the electricity inside interrogation cells to the
toilets at the elementary school for sailors' children.

The project is so huge that the Navy brought in a crane and about 500
tons of steel and fiberglass parts on barges from the United States to
assemble it.

Today they are piled, like pieces from a giant's erector set, in the
parking lot of the Lyceum, an open-air movie theater up the road from
McDonald's.

In coming weeks, workers will assemble the parts atop John Paul Jones
Hill, the highest point on the base, where the 270-foot-tall wind-driven
generators will replace a U.S. flag and "dominate the skyline," said the
base commander, Navy Capt. Leslie J. McCoy.

The flag will fly elsewhere.

As Johnston describes it, the project blends centuries-old science that
has harnessed the winds through the ages with leading-edge sensing
devices that rotate and swivel the mills' blades in the winds.

Thanks to the sensors, the turbines can function in a Category 4
hurricane, said NORESCO project manager Dan Ingold, but will typically
work hardest from morning through afternoons, when the trade winds and
air conditioning consumption are greatest.

They should be fully functioning in April, a fusion of wind and diesel
power producing 25 megawatts to emerge as "the largest hybrid power
system in the world," Ingold said. Today's largest hybrid system is in
Australia, making 15 megawatts.

Because of on-again, off-again winds, this base can never become
entirely fossil-fuel free.

But the goal is to clean up the output at a plant built at the height of
Cold War tensions, when the base cut the water main from Cuba in 1964
and began producing its own electricity and water.

) 2004, The Miami Herald.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.