What a nice way to spend time on a pretty afternoon! (Of course I'm green-eyed... because it's been overcast and dreary gray the last couple of days here, with some thunder boomers and rain thrown in.) Those are great photos.

I'm having a difficult time deciding which photo I like most; I've saved a few and today I am using this one as my new background wallpaper.

Imagine where we could be now, if we hadn't wasted so much time and money on an illegal and toxic war for oil and concentrated on clean alternate energies instead. I'm glad to see that more effort is being spent on improving our energy resources and our environment.

Thank you for the photo show.

Good evening, Moody Blue, and thank you for the compliments on the photographs.

For your use, click here for a 1600x1200 pixel version of the photo you are now using as desktop wallpaper. The larger format should be more than big enough to encompass any monitor you might be using.

Even at that scale, the original is twice as large, so if you or anyone else would like a different size, let me know. At 1600x1200, though, the colors and the starkness of the scene begin to have that "Oh, wow!" aspect.

The Dark Wraith should probably get a new hard drive considering the sizes of the photographs he's taking, these days.

A really beautiful photo, and yes to Moody Blue -- imagine where we could be if we invested our resources wisely.

Thank you for sharing those interesting photos. While I've heard about wind farms, I don't think I've seen any pictures before...at least, not so many. I guess that area must get a lot of wind, to make it a feasible farm, huh? Were the windmills turning?

Good evening, oldwhitelady.

Yes, most of the windmills were turning. I had to use a fast shutter speed to catch the blades so they would look like they were standing still.

Also, even the shots where you see lots of those windmills do not capture even a small fraction of the scope of the entire wind farm. I wouldn't even try to count them, especially because many were so far away from the road they could barely be seen.

The prairie wind is sufficient to spin the blades quite a bit of the time, but that would not be the case in many parts of the country, so these kinds of wind farms aren't suitable everywhere.

On the other hand, I suppose if I'm giving lectures at a college in the vicinity of a wind farm, there would be more than enough hot air on any day that I teach.

The Dark Wraith should point that out to regional planners thinking about where to locate wind farms.

Good Evening, DW,

I'm partial to the Windmills in the Afternoon Sun and Lonely Prarie Barn images. Nice eye candy! The latter especially has a sort of haunting Andrew Wyeth-like quality to it.

I know there's talk of a wind farm a few miles off the Lake Erie coastline near where I live, and I've seen a few in the Poconos of eastern PA, situated where a narrow rift in the mountains apparently creates a wind tunnel effect.

They do have a certain monolithic grandeur about them that your photos capture well.

Everyone knows it's Windy! Any 60s pop music fans out there? Really dating myself.

Article from PhysOrg.com:
"Research suggests winds dying down"
(Begins):

The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.

"It's a very large effect," said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. In some places in the Midwest, the trend shows a 10 percent drop or more over a decade. That adds up when the average wind speed in the region is about 10 to 12 miles per hour.

There's been a jump in the number of low or no wind days in the Midwest, said the study's lead author, Sara Pryor, an atmospheric scientist at Indiana University.

Wind measurements plotted out on U.S. maps by Pryor show wind speeds falling mostly along and east of the Mississippi River. Some areas that are banking on wind power, such as west Texas and parts of the Northern Plains, do not show winds slowing nearly as much. Yet, states such as Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, northern Maine and western Montana show some of the biggest drop in wind speeds.