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The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind:
Wind turbines across the Great Plains states produced, for the first time, more than half the region's electricity Sunday.
The power grid that supplies a corridor stretching from Montana to the Texas Panhandle was getting 52.1 percent of its power from wind at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, Little Rock, Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool Inc. said in a statement Monday.
As more and more turbines are installed across the country, Southwest Power has become the first North American grid operator to get a majority of its supply from wind. That beats the grid's prior record of 49.2 percent and the 48 percent that a Texas grid operator reached in March, Derek Wingfield, a spokesman, said in an e-mail.
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For the First Time, Wind on the Plains Supplied More Than Half Region’s Power
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It's raisins that make Post Raisin Bran so raisiny ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @01:10AM
Imagine if you could suck the energy out of tornadoes to generate power. You kill tornadoes that do deadly damage, and you extract electrical power out of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @01:34AM
Imagine if you could suck the energy out of politicians to generate power. You gently urge politicians that do nothing but spew hot air, and you extract electrical power out of it.
was going to leave kill... but it didn't make much sense in the sentence...
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday February 15 2017, @01:55AM
Relevant [smbc-comics.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @02:21AM
You would have to extract crazy amounts of energy out of the atmosphere with crazy numbers of wind turbines though. I haven't read or heard anything about there being a wind shadow downwind from a wind farm, except very locally around a given turbine (why they position the individual turbines the way they do, for example). I also didn't see anything like the wind farms in the upper midwest when I drove through Tornado Alley last summer; but I have no idea if that's a result of policy or because wind maps discourage wind farms there. Maybe more knowledgeable Soylentils would know.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rts008 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @05:00AM
Policy.
Tornado Alley is also renowned for their support of fossil fuel industries/lobbies, (re: Oklahoma, and Senator Inohofe's snowball to dispute climate science, and other wackiness.) coupled with politician's hot air, the wind from Tornado Alley would create a surplus of US energy production, and pose an energy threat to the entire world.
That's why it will never happen, as long as money is considered 'free speech' for political purposes. Follow the money, and answers will become obviously apparent.
We(globally, it seems), as 'Humanity', seem to be going through a 'Hurray for me, and fsck you, I got mine!' phase. Hopefully short-lived, as sustainability of this tactic seems suspect, IMO.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @12:24PM
Perhaps then they will relent eventually through pure economics. Those areas are rather poor, and cannot make any more money from ranching and farming than they already do. Lease income from wind turbine sites would be a welcome second income to those people. It already is for many of their counterparts in the upper midwest. Also, the new families of the people maintaining the wind farms have brought the first fresh blood to many communities there in decades. Income from wind is not quite a second oil strike, but it does extract value from the natural environment of the place that can be traded to municipalities like Memphis in the heartland.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @01:22PM
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday February 15 2017, @07:05PM
Illinois [wikipedia.org] is in Tornado Alley (which is why I won't live in a house without a basement, I was in the tornado that hit here in March 2006) and we have wind farms. Oklahoma is obviously all for brown energy, what with the fracking, but why would any Tornado Alley state not like wind power?
Did you actually research your assertion that there are no wind farms in Tornado Alley, or did you get that "fact" the same way Trump and company get their "facts"?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @08:48PM
No I didn't research the boundaries of Tornado Alley. I am not from that region and my sense of the boundaries of Tornado Alley are inexact. Notionally Southeastern Colorado, Northeastern New Mexico, the top of Texas, and the entirety of Oklahoma, which is the eastbound route I drove through, seem like the heart of tornado country. A friend I used to work with in Chicago became a tornado chaser and that region is where he would go.
I did not see windfarms there the way I saw them on our westbound leg through the upper midwest. But thank you for more or less answering the question--the difference seems to be down to policy more than the physics of wind power and tornadoes.
It does seem foolish to me, though, for them to deprive themselves of a perfectly fine revenue stream that benefits rural communities in several ways, simply to serve dogma. Fossil fuels and wind power are not necessarily a zero sum game. If you're a landowner in that region making lease revenue off oil & gas extraction, why wouldn't you welcome lease revenue from wind turbines, too, since the one doesn't preclude the other?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Thursday February 16 2017, @03:36AM
I did NOT assert there are no wind farms in Tornado Alley.(although, the only wind turbines I have seen in Oklahoma, have been in pieces loaded on trucks, passing through. I hear there are working wind power-plants somewhere in OK, but I have never seen one. YMMV)
I was replying to the reason for the scarcity(not absence) of them in the midwest, which was specifically asked about.
The local pol's have placed severe barriers for any competition to the oil lobbies.(hint: Ask Boone Pickens how his wind farm projects worked out.)
Oh, and can the Trump-flavored vitriol. Alternative facts, indeed.
Absolutely, you should improve your reading comprehension to avoid this type of mistake in the future. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @10:02PM
Design wind turbines to kill butterflies, and the tornadoes will take care of themselves.