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Roadster Owner Drive to Wild Horse Wind & Solar Farm

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A year ago, Cathy had this idea that we should drive our Roadster to Puget Sound Energy's Wild Horse Renewable Energy Center to see the wind and solar farm. At the owner drive last month, we met a PSE employee who helped us make that happen.

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The PSE folks were very supportive of the idea, helped us put it together and even installed EV charging so we could make the round trip without spending two hours killing time at an RV park.

We had a great time with a bunch of our Seattle-area owner friends, and it was a thrill to charge our cars from renewable energy being produced on location.

I slapped together a gallery of some of the photos Cathy and I took today.
 
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Here are more pictures of the wind farm with 8 Tesla Roadsters visiting.
Round trip for me was 227 miles today. They had five NEMA 14-50 recharging outlets installed for us. So we each got about 2 hours of recharge time during our visit.

Forestmoon Gallery

You can barely notice above the black top on the Red Roadster. That is a stone wall with a transformer on the other side. One of the five NEMA 14-50 outlets was on the other side of that wall. These two Roadsters were here on a 63 foot extension cable chargine from a Roadster Foundry MC. We had 18 feet of cable on the RFMC, then three more 15 foot extension cords linked together. The other four recharging spots were on the main building and were easier to reach.

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Wow. Must have been quite an experience watching the cars charge up on freshly produced green power coming from a wind turbine just a few feet away! Each of those big turbines puts out a megawatt or more, easily enough to charge a whole parking lot full of Teslas! :biggrin:
 
Wow. Must have been quite an experience watching the cars charge up on freshly produced green power coming from a wind turbine just a few feet away! Each of those big turbines puts out a megawatt or more, easily enough to charge a whole parking lot full of Teslas! :biggrin:

They put out 1.8MW when the wind's blowing. Turns out that they consume 5-6 kW when it's not. Which it wasn't during our visit. So, the wind farm was consuming the better part of a megawatt just idling waiting for wind. The PSE guy said that they installed some solar panels, and mostly what their good for is to keep the windmills from drawing off of the grid when it's calm.

So, we charged using clean SOLAR energy at the wind farm. :smile:
 
I wonder where 41.8 MW were going during your visit: DSC_3286.jpg

That particular picture was from when Scott and Tom drove there a week earlier to scout the trip for everyone. At that time the wind was blowing and generating power. During our trip last Sunday the wind was calm and the overall wind farm was not generating anything significant while we were there.

When I was looking at that real time screen last Sunday only 5 wind turbines out of 122 were actually on the grid contributing anything at all.
During that earlier picture it was 114 out of 122. With a wind speed of 6.9 mph they were generating 41.8 MW.
 
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Because every turbine has sensors on it measuring wind speed, direction, etc. and the associated communication equipment. Also the turbines need to be positioned into the prevailing wind direction so there are motors. Transformer losses though are a major component.