Don Quijote's Paradise

Yesterday afternoon I went out to the Kotzebue wind farm.  Last summer we all watched some heavy machinery and equipment come in on the barge, get unloaded down the beach, climb slowly up the hill, and sit there all winter.  Now that spring is here, an ice road was constructed from the staging area to the location for 2 new windmills, and the crane has been in operation to assemble them.

In this not-so-good picture (we couldn't get very close), you can see the base of one of the new windmills next to the crane.  The new ones are about twice as tall as the 17 others that have been here for a while.  Yesterday was a nice, calm day, so we thought they might be mounting the generator.  They had tried earlier, but the crane was just 8 feet too short.  I heard that they got the generator up today but still have the blades to mount.  You can't see it, but at the top of that base are two openings.  People climbed 300 feet up inside the base and were stationed at those openings to bolt the generator on.  You couldn't pay me any amount of money to do that job!

Here's an article on our cooperative's site from last year explaining these two new windmills.  http://www.kea.coop/articles/the-wind-farm-that-continues-to-grow/