Smoky Hills Wind Farm I-70 Kansas

The Smoky Hills Wind Farm (Phase I) is a 100.8 megawatt (MW) wind farm in Lincoln County, 140 miles west of Topeka in Kansas, north of Ellsworth. Highway K-14 and Interstate 70 pass through parts of the wind farm. The project uses 56 Vestas V80 1.8 MW wind turbines and produces enough electricity to power some 37,000 average Kansas homes annually. Phase II is under construction with 99 GE Energy 1.5 MW wind turbines for an additional 148.5 MW, to bring the total nameplate capacity to 249.3 MW

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• wind
• farm
• windmill
• generate
• Kansas
• green
• energy
• electricity
• turbine
• power
• large
• Smoky
• Hills
• I-70
• GE
• Vestas

[lordbemylight]

Windmills: new source of power for today to counter rising electric rates. Rely on it.

[HomeWindTurbines7]

That's a pretty cool clip. These giant turbines are wasteful though. 7% of the power is lost in transmission. We have home windmill installers doing home windmills in Kansas. Click to see on our channel. I have three home windmill systems installed in Kansas now. It's a great state for wind power and people are saving on their home electric by putting in home windmills in Kansas.

[westkan]

A certain amount of energy is required to build any electrical power plant. Also there is an energy input to produce the fuel for coal, nuclear, an Natural gas power plants. Cost that wind, solar thermal, and photovoltaic. Though I'm not promoting photovoltaic. There is a value to less pollution and fuel conservation.

[emineid]

1. It cost certain amount of BTU in energy terms to build each wind turbine. Any analysis should start with how long it takes to get that energy back.

2. Even if there were economical means of storing excess electricity, it may be far cheaper to just crank up our nuclear plants and split the output to base load and peak load than to build wind farms.

[emineid]

3. We are debating the pro's and con's of wind farms here on youtube precisely because there is NO RELIABLE DATA published out there. The only "data" are either environmental advocacy speculations or "white papers" from wind turbine manufacturers. Let's have some real numbers to debate, please.

4. There's acres of decrepit solar plants in California because it turned out not to be economical to repair them. Let's learn from history, not just project our environmental hopes.

[westkan]

Not that I really know, this is my guess. When the wind is available, it will supply peak load, when not available, natural gas fuel peak power plant will be fired up. The more we plan to use wind, the more coal and natural gas there will be for future generations. In the mean time we could be working in viable storage solutions.

[joudheus]

Yes, this is why diversity is very important when developing our infrastructure.

[emineid]

From what I understand, you can't economically save excess generated electricity. So do these wind farms help with the base load or the peak load? The peak load is what is so expensive on hot summer days, and yet that's not necessarily when the wind is the strongest. In other words, if we were to produce the vast majority of electricity from wind mills, wouldn't we need a lot of peak load plants for when the wind dies down?

[joudheus]

5 months ago was when we opened Phase II. We started production towards the end of feb.

[joudheus]

I remotely run this windfarm at night. This park is in 2 partitions SHI and SHII and it is a process to get everything up. Also depending on market prices, we do not also run at full capacity, due to the fact that it can actually cost us money to produce. So you will not always be seeing 100% of the park running. Plus if winds are low, the computers read this and put the turbine into pause to let it rest. It is stressful and will lessen the life of the turbine to let it run full cap 24/7.