windfarm

Greg Fallis

These are not windmills; they're wind turbines. On this particular windfarm there must have been at least 70 turbines (it's hard to count at dawn and when you're driving at 75 mph) spread out over a wide area. The photo doesn't give a real sense of the scale of these machines--they're around 230 feet tall. About the size of a 15 story building, in other words. Each of the three blades is about 100 feet long. They're massive. And eerie. Because they're so huge the blades appear to be turning slowly--but when you hear them cutting through the air you're not surprised at the claim that the tips of the blades can be moving at 300 feet per second. Per second.

As the poet Prine says, we are living in the future.

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