Hatchet Ridge Time Lapse Turbine Video

This is way cool! Intermountain News made the video.

Hatchet Ridge Time Lapse Turbine Video, posted with vodpod

The ninth wind turbine is installed on Hatchet Ridge, west of Burney, California, June 23, 2010. The normally three-hour operation is viewed here in this 54-second time-lapse sequence comprised of more than 550 individual photographs.

Hatchet Ridge Wind Farm Sprouting

5 up...39 to go

With all the precipitation this year something should sprout. This was as of today, 6-18-10 at about 2pm. More pictures coming when I get a little time to put something together. Click on picture to enlarge.

T Boone Playing Dirty

It's all out war

He buys his own army of government officials.

He boasts his own self-declared army and the support of 13 governors, 53 congressmen and 180 mayors, along with the Sierra Club and the American Lung Association. He has plugged his cause on countless news shows and spent $60 million of his own money on a massive ad spree.

He tries to sell directly to our president and both candidates.

Mr. Pickens took his plan first to President Bush. The two men met in the Oval Office in April.

“The president sat and listened for an hour and a half,” Mr. Pickens says. “And then nothing happened. No call back. Nothing. So I decided to do it myself.”

He didn’t fare much better with the two presidential nominees. When he sat down with Sen. John McCain in August, the Arizona Republican chastised him for “trying to pick winners” by so openly favoring natural gas. President-elect Barack Obama seemed more amenable when the two met in a hotel conference room in Reno, Nev., a few weeks later.

Mr. Pickens sketched out his plan in series of pie charts on a white board. “He didn’t do any back flips or anything but he did seem to like what I was saying,” Mr. Pickens says.

He threatened the trucking industry.

So Mr. Pickens shifted his focus to the country’s truckers, saying that all new long-haul trucks should be required to run on natural gas. That didn’t sit well with former Kansas Gov. Bill Graves, who heads the American Trucking Association.

The son of a truck operator, Mr. Graves laid out his objections over breakfast recently in Mr. Pickens’s suite. Many companies, he noted, are already turning to diesel hybrids. Natural gas-run trucks are about a third more expensive than traditional diesel trucks. Nationwide filling stations for natural gas don’t exist.

“How do you just airlift in the infrastructure to make this happen?” he said.

Mr. Pickens has recently taken to labeling his critics as un-American. Mr. Graves got the full dose.

“Bill, I just want to warn you on this,” Mr. Pickens said, putting down his fork. “I’m going to make you look unpatriotic for supporting foreign oil. I just want to make sure you understand that.”

Taken aback, Mr. Graves pointed out raspberries and croissants arrayed before them. The foreign oil helped deliver the food, he said. “We wouldn’t have any of this here if our trucks hadn’t delivered it,” he said. “So what’s more patriotic, Boone?”

He declared war.

Mr. Pickens has recently taken to labeling his critics as un-American.

“This to me is like a war without guns,” says Mr. Pickens between a flurry of meetings one recent morning in his hotel suite across from the White House.

The collapse of the financial market, and the vote in California killed his wind turbine project. The drop in crude oil from $160 a bbl to $40 a bbl, killed his propane project. So now he will take a piece out of Al Gore’s Global Warming Playbook, and launch an all out propaganda campaign to spread his lies. I can’t figure him out. He doesn’t need the money, and with the price of crude oil where it is, we should drill here and drill now, before the next upturn in prices. It’s never been clearer. But he still wants government money to pay for his far fetched schemes. It must be the thrill of the chase. I guess it still falls into the Follow The Money category though.

Source

Octopus Destroys Wind Turbine (video update)

Damaged wind turbine near Grainsthorpe in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom on 08 January 2009. Locals reported seeing strange lights flying at speed in the sky at 4am in the morning GMT before awaking to the damaged 300ft electricity generator. Credit: Lindsey Parnaby / newsteam. 8/1/2009

Dozens of residents claimed to have seen bright flashing spheres is the skies near Louth, Lincolnshire, where a 290ft turbine was mangled in a mystery collision.

One woman said she saw the an object fly towards the wind farm, while others described the lights as being linked by “tentacles”, leading locals to dub it the octopus UFO.

Dorothy Willows, who lives a mile and a half from the crash site, said: “The lights were moving across the sky towards the wind farm. Then I saw a low flying object. It was skimming across the sky towards the turbines.”

Later on Sunday night, one of a turbine’s 65ft blades was ripped off and another severely damaged.

The Health and Safety Executive described the damage as a “unique incident”, and the energy firm Ecotricity which owns the 20-turbine site say it has no explanation.

“We are struggling to find an answer, yes, and it has been quite interesting to read the reports in the press about what people have seen,” Dale Vince from the company told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme..

“It sounds unbelievable but actually we don’t have any explanation at the moment.

source

!!UPDATE!! Here’s the video.

I have a clue for them.

In the Phoenix case, the UFO became an IFO, an Identified Flying Object. The 2008 Phoenix Lights case was a hoax, created by road flares tied to helium balloons. The hoaxer admitted it, and eyewitnesses reported seeing him do it.

In both cases, all the evidence points to a hoax: The lights moved independently like floating objects, not fixed lights on an aircraft; they moved together in the same direction as the wind; they did not show up on radar; and the lights extinguished in exactly the pattern we would expect from flares, going out one by one.

source

Freezing Temperatures, Ice, Wind and some Pranksters with a bit of technology. The “Octopus” just got in the wrong wind stream and….

There you go. Case closed. You’re welcome.

Hatchet Ridge Wind Project Gets Boost From PG&E

In a bit of belated news, our local wind project has entered into a long term contract with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for electricity generated from it’s wind turbines.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced today it has entered into a long-term agreement with Hatchet Ridge Wind, LLC, a subsidiary of Babcock & Brown, to purchase up to 103 megawatts (MW) of renewable wind energy. The project will generate up to 303 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy annually. This would be equivalent to the amount of energy needed to serve nearly 44,000 residential homes on an annual basis.

“This wind energy project will provide our northern and central California customers with clean, emission-free power,” said Fong Wan, senior vice president of energy procurement for PG&E. “Our agreement with Hatchet Ridge Wind is another important step to increasing our diverse renewable energy portfolio.”

The Hatchet Ridge Wind project will be located on a portion of Hatchet Mountain in Burney, Calif. Deliveries are expected to begin by December 31, 2009.

Computer Generated Image. Click to Enlarge

“We look forward to working together with PG&E to create a new, homegrown and sustainable source of carbon-free energy in Northern California,” said Hunter Armistead, head of Babcock & Brown’s North American Renewable Energy Group.

Since 2002, PG&E has entered into contracts for more than 24 percent of its future deliveries from renewable sources. On average, more than 50 percent of the energy PG&E delivers to its customers comes from generating sources that emit no carbon dioxide, making the company’s energy among the cleanest in the nation.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE: PCG – News), is one of the largest combined natural gas and electric utilities in the United States. Based in San Francisco, with 20,000 employees, the company delivers some of the nation’s cleanest energy to 15 million people in northern and central California. For more information, visit http://www.pge.com.

Source

This is the right way to utilize wind power. Private funding and selling the power into the grid. Plus the county receives the tax dollars, without anyone being forced to create “Green Energy”.

Background on the Hatchet Ridge Project

Supervisors Approve Hatchet Ridge Project 5-0

Hatchet Ridge Wind Project Approved

Enhanced Photo Showing Turbines on Hatchet Ridge (click to enlarge)

After you read this post, please see the update.

!UPDATE! 12-1-08 PG&E Buys Into Hatchet Ridge Project

First the good news.

BURNEY – Shasta County officials Thursday night unanimously approved plans for a 6 1/2-mile-long string of wind turbines along a ridge overlooking Burney.

County planning commissioners voted in favor of the 100-megawatt project atop Hatchet Ridge after listening to three hours of testimony during a public hearing that drew about 200 people to the Mt. Burney Theatre. Commissioners approved the electricity-generating project on a 5-0 vote.

“Overall we believe it is a good project,” said David Rutledge, the commission’s chairman.

The project’s developers were happy with the vote and will move forward in building the 43 turbines, said George Hardie, senior developer for Babcock and Brown, the project’s lead financier.

“We hope to start next spring,” Hardie said.

And of course the NIMBY’s must have their say.

But the project likely isn’t finished being reviewed by county officials just yet.

Opponents of the project, whose combined turbines and towers would reach 418 feet skyward, said just after the vote that they will appeal the decision to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors.

Ken Archuleta, a Burney man and project critic, said the commissioners’ quick vote after a short amount of discussion once the public microphone was turned off Thursday shows commissioners didn’t completely weigh the arguments against the project.

“They didn’t listen to a thing they heard,” Archuleta said.

The deadline for an appeal is Tuesday.

During his time before the commission, Archuleta questioned why the developers didn’t look at nearby ridges that aren’t visible from downtown Burney.

Other critics said the turbines would destroy land sacred to American Indians, wound and kill birds and simply be an industrial eyesore complete with red, blinking lights.

Among the critics of the project Thursday night were several members of the Pit River Tribe, who said the turbines would be put on ground they consider a “church.”

The tribe will look for a way to stop the project, possibly by filing suit in federal court, said Jessica Jim, the tribe’s former chairwoman.

“We already have an attorney,” she said.

Here’s the rebuttal.

The project’s developers want to build on Hatchet Ridge because it has the most wind energy in the area, Hardie said. They studied shifting the location to a spot on Hatchet Ridge not visible from town, but the amount of energy that the turbines would produce dropped 30 percent to 40 percent, he said.

“We cannot move the project down the hill,” he said.

Supporters of the project said the project would help the country address its need for renewable power, provide jobs in Burney and draw interested onlookers to the Intermountain area.

“I find the units fascinating to watch,” said Terry Hufft, who lives between Montgomery Creek and Burney with a view of Hatchet Ridge.

The turbines would be built on land owned by a pair of timber companies, Sierra Pacific Industries and Fruit Growers Supply Co., and would be most visible from Main Street, or Highway 299, through downtown Burney.

“I think the benefits far outweigh the negatives,” Planning Commissioner Shirley Easley said after her vote.

So here’s my take: The project is on private land, being built by private investors with their own money. It will bring jobs and money to town. That alone is enough to approve the project. Also, it is supplying extra electricity using already existing powerlines, not being used as a primary source of power. Burney needs the revenue and jobs. It’s a good deal. Oh, and did I mention, It’s on Private Land being built by Private Investors? No tax payer dollars will be harmed by this project. On the contrary, it will bring in much needed tax dollars.

And just in case you wanted to know, yes, it is virtually in my backyard. Hatchet Ridge was burned bare during the Fountain Fire in ’92. It aint much to look at anyway, the turbines won’t harm the view very much. (see photo at top)

Get the facts. Hatchet Ridge Wind