Never Seen It?
it is an engineering marvel
Tales from my travels.
The California Aquaduct: It’s deep and wide and goes for more than 600 miles.
That’s from an overpass on I5.
70 percent goes to urban users and 30 percent goes to agriculture. 32 storage facilities, reservoirs and lakes; 17 pumping plants; 3 pumping-generating plants; 5 hydroelectric power plants; and about 660 miles of open canals and pipelines. *
Here’s your new power source. [note the stillness of the machines]
These are out by Travis in the Central Valley [near Sack-a-tomatas]. Last year there were a couplafew of these monsters [about the height of a large transmission tower] scattered about the cow/sheeep pastures and this year they stretch for miles toward Mt Diablo in the distance. Lotta bux been dropped there in a short time. *cough*Pelosi*cough*Pickens*cough*federaltaxbreak*cough* Dang - green empty wind gives me such a cough.
Pretty, huh?
These are at the top of the Tehachapi [teh-hatch-a-pee] Pass and run all the way down onto the Mojave [moe-ha-vee] Desert. Note, also, their stillness.
And here’s another, largely gratuitous, more uplifting example of human engineering…
We call ‘em “Dirt ‘n’ Fire” cuz that’s what they’re made of: dirt, fire, and human ingenuity. They make my jaw drop ever’ single time.
Beauty, eh?
Every now and again we drive from the LA area to New Mexico. Just this side of the border there’s another wind farm. Most of the time, they’re spinning away, chopping the heads off little sparrows. I think I read that they generate about 1% or 2% of Southern California’s energy.
Never could figure out why they’re called “wind farms”. Farms are places where your grow stuff, not suck it up. Those wind farms don’t make even a teeny little bit of wind. They should call them something sensible, like “aerial energy conversion fields”.
Posted by ZZMike on 03/04/09 at 01:50 PM
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