Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 07/20/18> Restricted area? No Trespassing? U.S. Government Property? …. I don’t think so.

There are certain things that I just won’t accept as being factual or correct and signs are often misleading and meant to scare people. So on my way out of the Rio Grande Valley I had decided I was going to investigate a couple things that I had seen on previous trips and on my way into the valley on this trip.

I have seen an increasing number of wind farms going up in the valley, ten years ago there were a few of these large windmill power generators scattered about just north of Brownsville and east of Hwy.77 towards the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Now there are more of these three bladed windmills than you can shake a stick at. There are rows and rows of these tall structures, literally as far as the eye can see in some spots. I never have gotten a close up look at these structures but on Thursday I decided it was about time I did.

So, just south of Raymondville, TX. I decided to get off the highway and do some looking around. The first gravel road that looked like it would lead to the windmills I decided to take and it just so happened that the supposed area was restricted property. Just who is the US Government, and who are they to tell me that this is restricted property?

It is a good thing I know something about government, so I was able to determine that all I needed was permission to enter the restricted area and I would be good to go on about my business of checking these out. But just where am I going to find someone out here in basically nowhere land who could give me permission? I didn’t have to look very far, in my mind I have that authority, does the words, “government by and for the people” ring any bells? You bet your sweet ass it does, so I stopped to get a couple pictures of the sign and then headed on into the restricted area.

I had to drive about a mile and half down the gravel road to get to spot where I could get close enough to one to get some photos. If you have never been close to these things before they really are impressive in their size.

The other thing that is really noticeable is the noise they make, those blades displace a lot of air when they spin and they make a low whooshing sound, it is no wonder these things are out in the middle of nowhere since the sound would drive you crazy if you were within earshot of these things for hours on end.

I went online to see if I could find out the dimensions of these wind turbine generators as they are called and while I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, I did find some interesting information.

I was 100% correct that this wind farming is become a bigger and bigger thing here in Texas. According to an article in the Brownsville Herald newspaper from three months ago there is another new wind farm under construction in the area of where I took these pictures that will have 46 more of these wind turbines at a cost of $200 million. It also said the new farm would have the capacity to produce about 145 megawatts of electricity.

I don’t know just how much that is or how to begin to describe it but I know that we pay for electricity by the kilowatt hour and Texas has some off the highest electric rates in the country despite leading the country in wind produced electricity which was right just below 13% of all the electricity produced here in 2016.

The kicker to this whole story is that it is a Spanish company that is doing the majority of these wind farms here in Texas. If this wind power electricity is such a great damn deal why isn’t some US companies leading the charge here on this? Another good question is the $44 million in lease payments for the land these farms are sitting on, and just how did the federal government come about acquiring this land?

Might as well also ask just how much kick back or campaign donations did elected officials at the state and federal level get from this Spanish company? I am pretty certain if a person were to really dig into this deeply there would have to be some rabbit holes to chase down when it comes to wind farms and power generating.

I also know that the toll roads in Texas have already been sold to a Spanish company and are being operated by that company right now, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the tolls have taken major price hikes since then, I see some even higher electric bills in the future for us Texans.

The only thing about this renewable energy I can say with any certainty is that it needs to be looked at further, by someone who is good at digging through the government documents using the FOIA requests. FOIA stand for Freedom of Information Act, which supposedly makes all government documents that don’t involve national security available to the public.

Anyway, the blades on these things have to be at least 100’ long if not more and these turbines are probably a good 150’ tall or taller. One other thing I learned was that these wind turbines are real dangerous to the bird populations as the birds have a tendency to fly right into the path of the blades, it is almost kind of funny that green energy could be wiping out the bird population as time goes on, just what does the Audubon Society think of these big bird killers? My guess is over a period of time that more birds will die from the blades of these wind generators than will have died from oil spills but no one is really going to notice since the evidence will end up rotting away in the fields.

I took a short video of these things in action to show my kids, I might even try and learn how to upload it into steemit so you can hear just what noise these things make. I would have to think that the continuous noise being generated will also have an effect on other wildlife on the ground nearby these structures. Did anyone stop to consider this before they started building these things? Where are the environmental impact studies? So many questions and so few answers…

I did not have any problems getting my photos, in fact, I never saw another vehicle the whole time I drove around back in the restricted area. If I had been approached by some government official I already had my story ready to go as far as not paying attention to the sign. “I thought the sign was for the illegals. I ‘m a part of the US government, a taxpayer.”

Until next time,
@sultnpapper

The photos are all property of @sultnpapper.
The photo quality is poor due to the speed of the blades and using my phone to get the shots, sorry they didn't turn out better.