I don't know if this has anything to do with T. Boone but over the last few weeks here in North Texas, I've seen a number of blades for a wind turbines going down the highway. Every time I've bumped into one its been just one mind bending huge blade on what looks like a stretched 18 wheeler.

There must be a lot of them being made or put up around here because I've been running into them in areas at different ends of DFW.

Aaron. Most of the ones you're seeing are probably headed for the big farms out by Sweetwater. It's SO cool. We have family out that direction and so drive through there fairly often. The only down side I see is all those FAA lights on the towers are not my favorite thing on the night skyline...but that sems a small price to pay.

Aaron. Most of the ones you're seeing are probably headed for the big farms out by Sweetwater. It's SO cool. We have family out that direction and so drive through there fairly often. The only down side I see is all those FAA lights on the towers are not my favorite thing on the night skyline...but that sems a small price to pay.

The turbine blades are made up in Gainseville. The facility is on the West side of I-35 just south of town. I know MFG (Molded Fiber Glass) is up there, but I'm not sure if they are the ones making the blades.

I'll bet they are a lot more attractive than a nuclear power plants or even a coal-fired power plants with their attendant rail yards and coal heaps.

I'd like to see all that bare ground in between carpeted with thin-film solar cells too. Something for the quail to hide under.

Aaron, there is a place in Gainesville that has something to do with finishing the blades. I think they paint them there. I bet that's why you may be seeing a lot of the blades on the highway - especially 35 North.

They are very impressive.

The oil guys might not discuss it in public, but they know. Privately, the oil producing countries know to. Why do you think United Arab Emirates, which still has lots of oil, derives only a few percent of its GDP from oil (when last I checked)? It is because the leaders there realized they had maybe a couple good decades left, and that after that they had nothing. So they found a *gasp* more sustainable economic solution so that a desert country could remain wealthy after the oil was gone. Now the place is a tourist's paradise.

As a world, we've good a few more decades of oil left. And by then, we'd better have another energy source. It can be coal- there's a good amount of that around. It can be natural gas- especially as the melting permafrost starts belching out the couple of trillion tons of methane they've got stored up. It can be nuclear- which with modern reactor design (i.e. what is in use in much of the world) would produce less radioactive waste than coal does (70 million tons of radioactive fly ash annually) and no carbon emissions. Or it can be renewables, which are getting cheaper and cheaper as fossil fuels get more and more expensive.
Here is my take on what is most feasible. Build nuclear plants. lots of them, enough to generate all our energy. Thinks it is crazy? We'd need to build 400 more in the U.S.- at a cost of $2.5 billion each, which is what they usually cost, it'd cost $1 trillion- about the same as the iraq war+ the "economic stimulus package" passed this year. Another 600 would be enough to power all our vehicles from the grid, assuming we switch to serial hybrids, in which case the fuel for the non-electric stage of the car or truck could be supplied by synthetic fuels made using water, atmospheric CO2, and electricity.

And by the time that generation of power plants is ready to be decommissioned, solar and wind will be far, far cheaper than any other power source. Renewables will emerge as the natural, economically favored choice. And since we'll have already moved most all our power usage on-grid, cleaning up the grid will be equivalent to cleaning up all our energy consumption.

The more oil people move to wind and solar the better and the fact that they think it's viable should convince the laggards of the fact.

My daughter and I saw three large trucks carrying turbine blades on the interstate between Las Cruces, NM and El Paso, TX. They were waiting out a windstorm. We were so fascinated that we stopped to take some pictures (regrettably, we only had a cellphone camera) and talk to the drivers.

The blades were made in Spain, and were on their way to (Colorado? Montana? can't remember).

I had never seen anything so large on the highway before. They were amazing.

Better late than never - I work on a wind farm near Sweetwater and the "birds aren't an issue" claim is flat out wrong. So the turbines won't kill birds by the thousand on an annual basis, but birds AND bats are taking a serious hit. No flyway, no problem? Let's swap jobs for a week or so, then we'll talk.