Giant Turbines in Palm Springs Spin Mother Nature into Electricity

The Palm Springs Windmill Tour brochure states “travel through a forest of towering, silently spinning windmills.” You’ll “feel the energy as giant blades WHOOSH overhead.” What’s more, the internationally acclaimed-per the brochure-guided tour transports tourists into the place where power is born!

You can better understand how wind is harvested into energy by visiting a wind farm. There you will see mammoth turbines spinning Mother Nature into electricity. These turbines are hooked into local grid wires that are essential to the delivery of wind energy.

And the local grid is the major point stressed in the 90-minute tour of the wind farms in Palm Springs. “It’s just plain good business sense,” the tour operator says, describing availability of wind energy. “All Californians on the grid are served.”
And what is the grid?

As the transporter glides over desert shrubs and small rocks in-between chain links in the middle of nowhere off Interstate 10, in North Palm Springs, the grid appears to be housed within various sub stations. These substations are surrounded with fencing and barb wire and act as connectors for the wind turbines.

“The white box-bottomed generators at the base of each tower are synchronized to the grid,” the tour director continues. “Each tower has a regulator.”

These white boxes are located near the entrances to the turbines. It is necessary to enter the tubular stands of the turbines when there is a problem with a windmill, or when a turbine needs attention.

Maintenance crews called windsmiths enter the base of the turbine and then prepare for the 200-foot trek up to adjust the blades. The blades are fashioned after aircraft rather than after classic Dutch windmills. And the newer versions, called Vespas, spin faster due to hollow fiberglass, manufactured mostly by boat or surfboard companies.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy most wind farms are in California due to peak winds approximate to electric power lines (the grid) in well populated areas with simultaneous peak electricity demands. The four thousand windmills in Palm Springs, which amount to 600 million watts, are divided into four separate entities. Shell Oil and General Electric own most of the windmills.

Two generations of windmills comprise the farms in Palm Springs: downwind and dumb (non-computerized) and upwind and smart (computerized). This source of “green” energy is 100 percent pollution free but environmentalists are keeping track of birds that fly into the blades.

The tour operator says the number of birds killed yearly by windmills is insignificant when you take into account that more than 50 million birds are wiped out by automobiles and feline predators.

Aside from the United States, Germany, Spain, Denmark and India are also harvesting wind by the use of wind turbine generators (windmills). The windmills that serve Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley region are located on the San Gorgonio Mountain Pass in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Just like the brochure says, the whoosh overhead is the sound of the power and birth of energy from nature.