Submitted by Jeff Buster on January 31, 2007 - 7:33pm.
WIND TURBINE TRAVELS:
Cleveland Foundation and Cuyahoga Port Authority - take a Road Trip to San Diego
Cleveland Foundation’s head Ronn Richard and Foundation wind advisor Mr. Stuebi want to bolster Cleveland’s poor public image by putting “about 10” wind turbines “3 miles out” in Lake Erie North of Downtown Cleveland. They are encouraging the Cuyahoga County Commissioners to seek tax payer funding for the project. This is a mistake – for the reasons I have outlined in the past on this blog.
If Cleveland and NEO are to be extricated from becoming more and more inconsequential – as has happened steadily over the past 40 years while the Foundation’s personnel, and Mr. Roman of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, and the staff of the Cuyahoga Port Authority, and other purported “leaders” have collected their salaries and benefits – we need to pay attention not to gambling casinos and convention centers or grand plans of shining white turbines on Lake Eire – but to rudimentary manufacturing support infrastructure.
Today the Port of Cleveland is obsolete. It has no modern lifting equipment for either containers nor for other heavy cargo. Meanwhile, the Port Authority spends its time and our money on eminent domain actions for its private development friends.
If NEO is going to be in the wind turbine manufacturing business – the Port of Cleveland must have adequate cranes. Instead of using $900,000.00 of taxpayer money to “study” a lake front plan with no public input, the Port Authority should study the economics behind modernizing the Port. A trip to San Diego would allow Mr. Carney (who should resign) and Mr. Richards to see the trade that adequate lifting equipment and dockage brings…scores of GE turbine nacelles and steel turbine tower sections – all made overseas - are stockpiled on the waterfront. The 300 E Gottwald mobile crane http://www.gottwald.com/gottwald/export/gottwaldsite/de/news/pdf/Construction_Materials_uk.pdf does the heavy lifting for the Port of San Diego. This 100 ton capacity crane can also be barge mounted - perhaps for setting those turbine towers in Lake Erie! (probably not enough capacity for setting the nacelles) Heavy haul trucks are pulling the machinery out onto the interstate highways daily for installation in the desert wind regimes of Southern California.
Gentlemen, I encourage you to practice Kaizen, go to San Diego – not Vegas - to see what the Cleveland Port Authority should be investing in.
Amazing photo and port
Wow, Jeff. Did you take this photo and the one of the many turbines? You should indicate the source of these great photos.
And I think you are right about the wind situation. But I have a serious question for you. Knowing all the people involved in planning wind in NEO and how things are developing around the world, how do you think "we" should spend the first $1 million, $10 million and $100 million developing wind as a power source and industry in NEO?
Disrupt IT
DIGITAL VISUAL HIGH
Hello Norm!
The evening silhouetted wind turbines which I posted and you mastheaded on Realneo I shot on the way out of downtown Palm Springs just before dusk last Thursday. There is no digital manipulation of the shot - the vast number of turbines and blades is a result of compressing the view by using a 12x optical zoom and a tripod to stabilize the shot for the low light. Though the file size on Realneo is quite small, the original is a10 mega pixel RAW file. The Coronado Bridge/San Diego Port photo is shot with a 10X optical zoom from the west deck of the San Diego Conference Center, which is about a mile from the tallest port crane and the stack of white turbine towers right under the crane. Again, the file size on Realneo is tiny, while the original was a 2 mega pixel JPEG file. Except for your shot of the Gelato Bldg which you kindly added to one of my posts, and the Business Week screen grab, all the photos up on the Buster blog are from either my 7 year old Sony or more recently from a contemporary Panasonic DMZ FZ50. I get a lot of satisfaction from working with the color (especially in winter) and the articulate forms waiting out there to photograph...
And Norm, thanks for kicking up Realneo as a great canvas on which everyone can plaster their images!