Wind Power in Minnesota

The greenies love to talk about how great wind power is and then proclaim that every state should start building wind turbines. Because the states of Minnesota is composed largely of suckers there have been several locations where wind turbines have been built. As the state likes to show off accomplishments to make an argument for their existence they put up a website that provides a live feed of the output of various wind turbines.

The problem is this website gives live feeds and most of the time the turbines site at producing 0kW. As I write this the only two places where the turbines are producing remotely usable power output are Olivia (~90kW) and Winthrop (~70kW). Most other areas are reading 0kW or less than 10kW. For the cost of constructing these behemoths it’s not work it. I’d say we could build a couple of nuclear reactors but that’s not kosher anymore due to the third nuclear incident in the 60+ years we’ve been using nuclear power.

Here’s the problem, wind power only works if there is wind. Minnesota isn’t known for extremely high winds so we’re not the best place to build these things. Maybe on a coastline it would make sense and there is generally higher winds but in Minnesota these things are mostly an expensive mistake.