Our Taxes, My Friend, Are Blowing -er- Standing In The Wind

On our little vacation to the dry side of the state last week, we went straight at Ellensburg, rather than turning right like we do when we go to the Tri-Cities.

A few miles later, something unexpected popped up on the horizon...



I'd heard about this big wind farm. In fact, a couple weeks ago they made local news as the very long blades were travelling through town on the back of a truck, going through our neighboring streets in Lakewood to wherever it is that they build them into windmills.



It made sense to me, actually. The thing with Central Washington is that sure, they have good warm temperatures, and typically sunny weather... but they also have near constant, always annoying WIND. I hate wind. But if they can harness this nuisance of nature and ultimately lower my power bill, who am I to complain?

As we drove on, it was really quite amazing how many of these things there are!







There were so many of them, and the overall sight was so cool, that I thought about switching to video mode and getting some action shots.

But one small detail kept me from doing that...

You see, the video would look exactly like these still shots.

Here, between Ellensburg and Vantage, where the wind is pretty much ALWAYS blowing, not a single one of these high tech green power generators was generating green power. Or any other color power.

As a massive art project installation, it was - as I mentioned earlier - very impressive. But my first face-to-face introduction to this big, environmentally friendlier way to power our communities, left me VERY impressed curious intrigued troubled by the amount of hype these things have generated verses the amount of power I witnessed them generating.

Hopefully I just witnessed an anomaly, and the winds were abnormally calm that day... Otherwise, that's a mighty big public art project.