"The tour is an all day event with the tour taking four hours having stops at a 500 Megawatt wind farm, a Algae wheel wastewater treatment plant, a Anaerobic Digester running off cattle/swine waste and other organic products to produce 3 megawatts/hour of electricity off methane gas and a visit to the Liberty Landfill for a 6.9 Megawatt biomass power generation plant."
So our first stop was the Meadow Lake Wind Farm. I know little to none of the technical mechanical and electrical terms concerning wind turbines, but I was hoping that the speaker at the location would be able to put things into layman's terms. The speaker at the wind farm was terrible at this! He didn't really have much to say and somewhat sounded like he wasn't expecting us/didn't want us there. He knew we were coming right? We got the okay to be there right? He spoke for a couple of minutes and then started taking questions from people. The only people who had questions were the people who understood what the heck he was talking about in the first place. During the talk I had wandered away from the boyfriend aka lost my translator! So I just tried to take note of the things that I could understand... during storms they shut down, there is always enough wind at this location for the turbines and lightning strikes are common, but rarely cause damage because they are so well grounded. One of the things I found very interesting was the fact that they only supply enough energy for the current demand and if they start to supply more than the demand then they shut some of the turbines down, because they get charged for overproducing.
Here is one of the turbines being repaired...
That crane just barely reaches the tip of the blade. I had never been so close to a turbine and I had no idea how big they actually are. Our tour guide who was in charge of taking us from site to site did some talking on the bus and was much better at explaining (in terms that everyone can understand) what she knew about wind turbines. She talked about how the turbines are generally separated into three sections which she discovered when she climbed up inside of one. She also explained how the wind turbines here are placed on land owned by farmers who lease the land to the wind farm company and then farm the land around the wind turbines. It was interesting to hear a little bit about the politics involved in getting this wind farm started.
Our next stop was the Algae wheel wastewater treatment plant. This was a completely new concept to me as I had never heard about it before. This facility uses algae to treat municipal wastewater and the algae in turn can be used as a biofuel. There was no speaker at this location, so I didn't fully understand that logistics and details of this process, but our tour guide did briefly explain that this process is in it's infancy. This location is the only location that is currently doing this in the U.S.
Then we made a stop at a privately owned farm where the owner has built an Anaerobic Digester to turn his cattle/swine waste into methane gas which can be used to produce 3 megawatts/hour of electricity. Our tour guide later told us that the city of Reynolds, IN uses 3 megawatts/hour of electricity at peak usage. So just this one anaerobic digester could potentially supply Reynolds, IN with electricity. This was my favorite stop. I got the sense from this farmer that he was doing this out of concerns for an environmentally friendly way to dispose of this waste and help ease his reliance on non-renewable energy. He spoke with us about how he had been to several sites doing this same thing. He wanted to do it, but didn't know much about it and even now admitted that he didn't know some of the technical terms or inner workings of the Anaerobic Digester, but he figured out enough to learn what he needed to know (and financially invest) in getting a system up and running on his own farm.
It was refreshing to see that a private farmer was taking matters into his own hands. He then took us out to the Anaerobic Digester and said that we could walk across it and take a look, but not to fall in! I passed on walking across it, but I did snap a photo...
Our last stop was to be at the Liberty Landfill where I received this handout which was very helpful in explaining what they are doing there.
The speaker at this site mentioned that he has noticed a reduction in waste and believes this to be a side effect of recycling and reusing picking up. I was glad to hear this! Although that does put a damper on what they are trying to do at the landfill.
All in all the tour was interesting and informative. I would have liked a better prepared/more personable speaker at the wind farm, but in his defense he didn't apply for the job of tour guide, he applied for the job of wind farm engineer! Going back to my favorite stop, Anaerobic Digester, our tour guide also mentioned that the farmer there had a high school education and no background in engineering. It really made me feel like renewable energy is available to anyone/everyone who is willing and able to put in the time to learn about it and learn about how it can be applied. That made me feel good about the changes that I am trying to incorporate into my life and my goals for the future. Near the end of the tour our guide told us that you should always care more than you know, because when you care that much you will always find a way to figure out what you need to know.
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