Ok, I've heard enough...
I shouldn't have left such an open topic last for so long...
Here's some turbine 101 regardless on what any tech sheet, hand out, literature or website may have to say as they are all geared on selling and promoting wind turbines. (Not mills, by the way.. Turbines produce, mills drill or pump)
First of all, there are no 410 foot turbines yet in North America, the largest are off the coast in Denmark and New Zealand wich are all off shore turbines, 360ish feet. The reason for there taller towers is obviously that with storms and strong tidle changes they need some room for the giant swath diameter of the blades.
Our turbines here in the Eastern, Wa (Kennewick) are just like the ones in Ellensburge, in fact they were errected by R.E.S contracted by Seimens. The towers are just like ours, 286' with 156' blades. Give or take 10 feet on those figures depending once again on what web site, handout ect you look at. 2.3 MW at full speed.
There are four things that make constant noise in a wind turbine no matter what the meter per second wind speed is, the rickmeyer gear oil pump, the CC Jensen off line gear oil pump, the hydraulic combistall motor and the wine of the Winergy gear box. From the ground you would have to know what you are listening for to realy hear them unless you open the tower door, then you can hear it just fine as the tower acts as a 286' megaphone. The most noise you are hearing is the wind passing over the stallists and dinotails located on the leading and trailing edges of the blades. There job is to reduce harmonic noise and keep the noise frequency low so the noise won't travel down the blades and into the main bearing and literaly take out the huge bearing. Most times you can only hear a light swishing of the stallists as they cut through the windy air, but upon wind gusts the wind turbulance over the stallists get lowder and lowder for only moments until the computer tells the blade to pitch a little more out of the wind to find the "happy" spot to keep the turbine from over speeding.
OK, you see, you all hit some topics and good points... Just not fully educated about them.
That being said, wind turbines are the biggest pieces of SH!T I have ever worked on. They are very unreliable and blow major components every Frickn' year. It takes literial thousands and thousands of them to do what one nuc plant can achieve every hour. And to say wind turbines don't create waste is a joke too. Mostly what they waste are lives... But the waste stories are for another thread...
Later!
