The Pickens Plan

[adciv]

Advertising may not be viable, but I'm sure the fall on your own property rule could be easily sidestepped.

Not really. It falls into the area of legal liability. The only possible way to get around it would be to pretty much garuntea that if it does fall, it falls on your own property and not any other direction. This gets into state law, so I don't think you're going to get around it.

However, the rule on billboards not falling onto the road may be more of a military consideration sold as a safety consideration.

Uh, what?

Although, larger windmills at a distance might yield larger billboards that can be read from that distance.

which would increase costs of billboards.

The only windmills I can remember seeing in person were set back from the interstate by about a mile and were on a farm in Ohio or Indiana. The farmers love them for the extra revenue and they don't take up much ground space.

[Beware of the Leopard]

You are pointless.

Quoted for irony. My disagreement with you isn't a personal attack. But fuck it, you win the internet.

I don't have the delusion that I'm presenting my case in the best way. In fact, I'm not even attempting to be all that persuasive here. None of the "solutions" I was presenting were things I strongly back. My approach to group problem solving is to float all ideas and pick them apart. I don't have the ME or AE background to know the max stress of wings or why they can't be warped. I am a chemical engineer, so I can carry a conversation with these fields as there is some overlap, but I like to know when I'm wrong. I dislike, however, that an entire concept can be waved off because someone making a case for it gets a detail wrong or doesn't know the laws governing roadside advertising. Unless we all start drawing up plans and doing cost analyses in our spare time, I'd like to put to rest the idea that anyone's mind is going to be drastically changed by any of these posts.

I'm ranting here and maybe not making a lot of sense, and this is not the place for it. So, I'll just leave you to your witty retort. Please make it a good one. I'd be dissapointed if it was a simple name calling if I cared to come back here and read it. With any luck, one will be made by someone who, up until this point, hasn't been involved.

[Deacon]

My approach to group problem solving is to float all ideas and pick them apart.

There's your problem. Try floating good ideas before trying to pick them apart.

[Martin Blank]

I finally got a chance to read through this thread.

First, a point on windmills: The blades can be feathered. All windmills have a maximum wind speed in their design. Anything faster than that, and they are programmed to face into the wind and feather the blades to essentially stop rotation. If your design is meant to max out with 70mph winds and a major storm comes through with higher gusts, you don't want your generators overloading themselves and frying things, or possibly having a minor imbalance that has a negligible effect at design speeds to destroy the entire structure.

As to Pickens, I support his plan, mostly because it's being done with (mostly) private funding. I'm sure he'll find some tax breaks in there somewhere, and maybe some grants, but the fact that he's basically saying that he thinks the future of oil is a dead end and he's willing to invest his money in the follow-up puts him potentially in the same class as Henry Ford, someone who saw a future in something and went after it full-force.