Wind energy - A drive in the country

I went for a drive in the country a few days ago to get some pics of a few windmills.

Here's one...

Don't know how, but I think I took a photo from the 70's 

And some more...

They weren't as thick on the ground as I expected, so my drive took me quite a way into the outback. I ended up going from Adelaide to Marree, then turned left, and drove along the length of the Oodnadatta Track* until I got back on the bitumen at Marla. Then I continued north to Kings Canyon, Uluru and the Olgas. There was nothing much in central Australia in the windmill department, so I headed home via Woomera (my birthplace (thanks/sorry mum (I hear giving birth is ouchie))).

There were some more windmills on the way home.


View 120 Things In 20 Years - A drive in the country in a larger map


I left at dawn on the 2nd, and just got back yesterday on the 8th. I'll blog on about it soon, under the thing "Epic Adventurer". I'm new to adventures of epic scale, but this was quite a start. These past few years, I had become known as the last of the great indoorsmen, now I think I need to get outside for a bit.


An odd thing about being on an epic road trip, is that you have a lot of time to plan your next epic trip.


This drive was a little over 4000km.


To put that in perspective, that's nearly 2/3 of the way to the centre of the earth, or a little over a one point one million times the distance I walked this morning in my kitchen, measured from the fridge. (to make my first decent coffee in a week)


Sleepy now.


*This is a dangerous stretch of road and some thought and planning needs to be done before driving it. People run out of life on it. Being dead from thirst, ranks right down there, very close to the bottom of my list of things in order of their fun quotient (fun stuff at the top). On one day there was only one other car to wave at. It's not impossible for there to be no other cars for days, and the road is often closed for days at a time. Plan for extended overnight stays in one horse towns or the front seat of your car at best, and the local morgue/general store's deep freezer at worst. It was 48 degrees c in the shade the day before we left (118.4F), and overnight temperatures were predicted to be 28 deg c at 5am (82.4F). I have no idea what the overnight temperatures actually were, but the days were 43-45c in the shade. 


There is no shade. 


None.


You pass the tree half way through day two.


.

Wind energy - Furling

One of the problems with windmills is the wind. Too much of it can turn a DIY windmill rapidly back into the junk from whence it came.

Wind is the enemy of the windmill. Who'd have thought it. When there is too much wind one of several things can happen depending on the application. You can generate too much electricity and over cook your batteries, you can pump too much water and all your cows get bloated or something, you can grind so much flour that you feel a bit like a magician's apprentice with all the bucket work you find yourself having to do, or the whole shebang can just blow over and come crashing down on your neighbour's chicken coop causing an unnecessary spike in insurance premiums.

"But humans have opposable thumbs, the Apollo missions, monorails, trans fats, canned cheese, and Oprah, so surely we have a solution." I hear you exclaim.

And, luckily for me, it seems we do.

The solution is furling.

Generally speaking, "furling" describes turning your windmill away from the wind when the wind gets too strong.

If my memory of my grade 4 project serves me, rather than furling their windmills, historically the Dutch used cloth sails over the wooden frames of their windmill blades. If there was a storm, the sails could be adjusted or in the worst case would just blow out and no damage would be done to the main structure of the windmill. The sails could be adjusted in varying winds to maintain a reasonably constant speed of the grinding wheel or pump.

So, short of the old Dutch option of risking partial destruction, it seems there are a few other methods of furling we might employ to automatically regulate a windmill when it's humans are absent. 


I'll cover them each in detail at some stage. Some of them are particularly clever. 


In fact, I've turned fractionally greener than my regular shade of envy as a result of learning just how clever the simple solutions that these inventors have found really are.

Wind energy

There's a lot of wind about of late. It's got me thinking.

Quite a few years ago, I was talking to my two year old friend Sarah, when the subject turned to wind. I asked her where it came from. She looked at me as if I was a bit of an idiot, but then, to my delight, she patiently explained it to me.

It turns out trees make it by waving from side to side.

Obvious really.

Other than a bit of sailing experience, and a decent understanding of where the stuff comes from thanks to Sarah, I don't know much else about wind. I'm about to rectify that. I'm going to learn how to make a windmill. And then, once it's made, I'm going to do something with all that wind energy I collect. There are a few things that spring to mind that I might do with some wind power.

• Grinding flour is one, but I tend to get someone else to pre-grind my flour. 
• Pumping water. I do a lot of that at the moment in aquaponics, so that could be useful. 
• Or even generating electricity. I really need to learn about the stuff, so windmills might be a good introduction to electricity. 

Whatever I end up doing with my windmill, it should be an interesting learning experience.

The weather has been too rainy and windy to put much of a dent in all the things I need to do on the new aquaponics system, so I'm reading everything I can find that has anything to do with wind energy.