The day after we went Up West to locate the Chapin and Adel graves and see the Peters homestead, Labor Day Sunday, Sue and Jim, my sister and brother-in-law, took me to see Luckert family sites near Center and also the startling new alien invasion of cornfields north of Bloomfield. At that time the Elkhorn Ridge Wind Project was just getting underway, the beginning of a $140 million project to produce 80 megawatts of power by gigantic windmills that make the little Sandhill shorties dwarfs indeed. When I was little and we went Up West north of Newport, I relished the child-sized eight-to-ten-foot windmills (maybe a bit higher but not much), which didn't have to be tall like the ones I grew up with, not in the windy, low rolling Sandhills in the state's center. Imagine my surprise at this two miles north of Bloomfield.
Several of the 265-foot towers east of the Cemetery Road lacked rotors back then, like the one nearest the telephone pole at right. The best shot I got suggesting their size is this one, with two tiny pickups at the base. Actually, they're big pickups but--Anyway, Jim said most of the towers have elevators as well as computerized equipment for maintenance. Each rotor/blade is 100 feet.
They seemed to me to be the alien creatures from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds marching across the alfalfa and corn fields with their Star Wars' Imperial stormtrooper white plastic.
By the day after Thanksgiving, the system was up and running, providing $10,000-$12,000 per tower for a ten-year lease, as I recall, to a farmer whose fields were invaded. The huge windmills had not yet crossed the highway when I saw them in September, so I was in for further astonishment when I headed north up Cemetery Road, after taking all the grave photos in the last entry. The view below was what I saw when I got over the first hill north of the Bloomfield cemetery. Incidentally, that first mile intersection down by the white building in the foreground is where I turn to go a mile and a half west to the second Koftan farm site, the one I grew up with.
These giants miniaturize farms. I'm not surprised they are meant to provide enough power for 25,000 homes from the biggest wind farm in Nebraska. A smaller one is nearby in the Crofton area. I have read that they are very noisy, but this day they were turning very slowly.
I had driven through the impressive Tehachapi Pass wind farm, one of California's three largest, which has more in tighter clusters, but the Bloomfield project has a powerful effect on anyone who's grown up in the area. The view at the left below is with the tower sign; the view at the right is to give some indication of size by my little pickup I was leaning on.
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