Paul Jay's Ponderings

Some more pics of things along my bicycle ride that don't involve the growing of illegal but otherwise harmless weed. lol... (Probably not any worse than alcohol or tobacco, but that's politics for ya.) I thought it's funny that it's grown openly along a public right of way, yet the big deal in the local papers is about another crop hidden in the middle of boggy and mostly inaccessable wetlands. Anyhow...

First pic is the Powerhouse Museum. Once used as a promotional (or educational, if you believed everything they said) tool for Commonwealth Edison. However it is now closed down. Supposedly this is due to the proximity to the nuclear plant. The official reason it was closed is that it presented a problem to the security perimeter in a post 9/11 world. My unofficial reason (just as likely) is that it didn't do anything for the bottom line of Excelon shareholders, and wasn't all that great of a promotional tool (served too small a community.) Oh well... It was neat when it was up and running though.


The next pic is the Vestas wind turbine adjacent to the Powerhouse Museum. It was a part of a working display that logged the kilowatts produced and put on the grid. Clean energy, and probably didn't kill all that many birds along a migratory flyway. (At least not the ones with any common sense.) Now it's just sitting idly by with the rotor locked and feathered in place, thus not spinning like it once did. From appearances, it wouldn't take much to put the unit back into productive operation. If I won the lotto, I'd try buying it from them and carting it off to my estate or something. It should be plenty able to keep a house or two nicely powered while off-grid.