It must be picking up again, despite the lack of a sharp rise in energy prices, I am seeing more news about wind projects coming online. The latest one is a Rhode Island project from Deepwater Wind, to build an offshore wind farm.

I don’t think wind is the answer, but it’s a part of a way to generate power. We have lots of wind, it blows all night as well as during the day, and we should capture some of that. It’s good to see larger projects getting going around the country.

I’m not sure about offshore wind, but this will be interesting. We do make offshore drilling work, which I’m sure seemed like a silly idea at some point, so maybe this will work. There is a lot of knowledge about building structures to survive the incredible forces of the ocean, and I’m looking forward to seeing how feasible this is.

I have thought that small scale wind isn’t necessarily a good idea, though I’m testing some of that myself. I ordered a development kit of a Windbelt power generation kit and will set it up out at the Ranch with the idea of powering a small LED light, or set of lights.

My thought it to get this out near the gate where we can’t run power (too far), but could use lights for the gate or the keypad next to the gate. If there’s enough power, I might even try to light the street number. If it works OK, I might even look to modify it to have a capacitor or battery of some sort to sustain power on non-windy days.