Cold Enough to Freeze the Wind

... or maybe just the wind turbines. Dig this.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has the details.

Minnesota invested itself in alternative energy sources years ago, and so the revelation that the state spent $3.3 million on eleven wind turbines hardly qualifies as news. However, the fact that they don’t work in cold weather does.

In the video, each turbine will power 35 homes. Assuming an $80 monthly power bill for each one, that works out to $2800 of retail electricity per month. Here I'm assuming that they use natural gas for heating and cooking. With a price tag of $3,300,000 for 11 wind turbines, each turbine cost $300,000. Each turbine will recoup it's cost in about 9 years, assuming no maintenance fees, an assumption that is clearly fantasy as illustrated in the video above. A capital improvement project that pays for itself in 10 years probably isn't such a bad idea, but I doubt this one will. I would bet that the internal workings of the turbines won't take so well to being frozen over and over again.

This brings up an interesting point about the two big alternative energy sources we want to use - solar and wind. You probably can't use them effectively anywhere that gets heavy snow and icing. Solar panels buried under snow won't produce any power at all and designing for the weight and freezing will make them cost that much more. If you assume that all wind and solar has to be produced south of a parallel drawn on the border of, say, Oklahoma and Kansas, that means that the denisty of such projects will have to more than double to make up for the lack of such projects to the north.

That's a lot of windmills and solar panels per square mile.