A friend driving down the Salinas Valley on Hwy 101 asked about the single large wind turbines there. It was a good question. They are nearly unique in California and stand out because they are not clustered together in a massive wind farm.
I’d thought I’d written about them before and posted an article to my web site. However, I had not.
What I had done was research them for a half-day seminar I did for PG&E 21 April 2018 at CalPoly in San Luis Obispo, California. Slides on the Salinas Valley wind turbines and a single turbine in Palmdale were buried in part of that presentation titled Distributed Wind Has its Place.
I’ve written extensively on the distributed use of wind turbines for decades so I am not going over that topic here. You can find more information about it on this web site and in my book Wind Energy for the Rest of Us (2016) beginning on page 7.
What I have done is extracted the slides from that presentation that refer to the wind turbines in Salinas Valley and Palmdale. There are 12 slides referring to these wind turbines.
There are also at least two single GE wind turbines at prisons in the Salinas Valley and a single wind turbine at a prison west of Lancaster, California.
