Today marked another milestone day for Spring Farm CARES. Those of you driving by probably wondered what was going on with all the cranes. Sadly, two of our three windmills had a catastrophic failure this past month. Even more sad is that it was due to negligence in how they were assembled when they were installed. Turbines that we thought we’d have for 20-30 years were suddenly made useless after 11 years. Although the parts to fix the problem were not that expensive, the turbines could only be repaired by taking them down, and then putting them back up again, and that was a huge expense.
We made the decision to take the turbines and towers down and call it a day on our wind project. Our goal is to add to our solar arrays to make up the difference for what we lose in generation from the wind. Thankfully, the infrastructure for the windmills can be used for solar generation.
The purpose of our wind and solar project has always been to be able to provide for our animal sanctuary if there were a prolonged outage of the grid. And, as important, to lessen our footprint environmentally. Twelve years ago, as this project was put together, wind power was the way to go for us and held an advantage that solar did not offer. Today, with advancing technology, that is no longer true. So, you can say, that we needed to shift to where the winds take us next. While the windmills end an era of their own today, the sun will come up tomorrow on the next generation and we will move ahead.
A special thanks to Rig-All for coming so quickly with their cranes and expertise to help us get these down before winter set in.