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By Bob Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Thursday, Sep 04, 2008
Whenever I see photos of the big wind turbines that both presidential candidates say will eventually help us escape the grip of foreign oil, I flash back to Akron, Iowa.
Five years ago, that little town was my eighth stop on a quest to visit all 13 Akrons in the United States.
By the time I was finished, I had logged 9,400 miles, stayed in 16 motels, driven eight rental cars and taken 22 airplane flights. The Beacon Journal's finance department was weeping.
But we digress.
The point is: I have seen wind turbines operating in an everyday setting, and they really do work.
No, I wouldn't want a bunch of them right in my backyard. But if I had to choose, I'd rather have one of them than one cell-phone tower — or even one oil well.
And I certainly wouldn't mind a wind turbine at, say, my local public school.
That's where they put one in Iowa's Akron, a berg of 1,500 on the east bank of the Big Sioux River, just east of where South Dakota meets Nebraska.
Akron-Westfield School is a one-story brick structure that's home to about 575 kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. In 1999, the school took out $678,000 in loans to erect the turbine on some bluffs above the football field.
The big white contraption sits atop a 164-foot-tall white tubular pole, looking like the world's biggest airplane propeller — without the noise.
Three blades, each 76 feet long and weighing two tons, spin in a clockwise direction, pushed by the breeze. The blades spin a shaft inside the pole, which spins a generator, which produces electricity.
The project was launched when a creative school official and the city administrator signed an agreement saying the school would get full retail credit for all of the electricity it used from the generator, and the city would buy the excess.
Which was cool for the school. But some of the people living inside the city limits thought that, financially speaking, it wasn't cool at all.
A new mayor sided with the malcontents, and soon a legal battle was raging because the city council never ratified the agreement. Lawyers argued all the way to the state supreme court. Just before the ruling came down, a settlement was reached: The school paid half of the $160,000 the city said it owed for electricity consumed during the illegal contract. Which left virtually everyone moderately unhappy.
In any event, the wind turbine worked, and it worked well. It's still working well today. In fact, Akron's turbine has consistently produced far more juice than was projected.
Although relatively small as wind turbines go, each year it pulls 1.3 million kilowatt hours of electricity right out of thin air.
The only problem — a minor one — has been blade icing, which occasionally knocks it offline. But during ice storms, sensors shut down the turbine, then restart it automatically.
So wind-power technology is here and has been for a long while — not just as an attention-getting miniature model next to a science museum, as is the case in Cleveland, but in a practical, workaday, Middle America setting.
Both presidential candidates claim they will lead the charge to wind power. I'll believe that when I see it. We've been talking about this same technology since I was in elementary school.
Face it: We're addicted to oil. We're simply not going to give it up until we absolutely gag on the price tag.
Meanwhile, perhaps a local school system would be interested in an elaborate Science Fair project that could help pay the bills.
Bob Dyer can be reached at 330-996-3580 or bdyer@thebeaconjournal.com.
Whenever I see photos of the big wind turbines that both presidential candidates say will eventually help us escape the grip of foreign oil, I flash back to Akron, Iowa.
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