Windtower

Near Leamington, Ontario, Canada. April 2012.

I think it was a GE model, but there is a mix of Siemans, Vestas and GE in that neighbourhood and I never got into the nacelle details enough to be able to tell them apart. The Enercon ones are on the north side of the 401 and easily distingushed by their green paint scheme. 

The steel mill I was working for at the time makes the steel plates which are raw material for the tower structure itself, and I was technical field representative nearly all those customers.  We'd supplied into all the designs mentioned at fabricators across North America.  Most people would not realize how much design work and considerations go into building a single tower; the structure is designed to last untouched for 20 years without any maintenance other than possibly repainting, and the plate surface quality requirement was nearly as stringent as that in the automotive industry. 

I know, I know, that doesn't mean anything to more than a handful of people who would ever read this, but an easier way to say it is: two of my old coworkers who were plate mill metallurgists developed wonderfully white hair at surprisingly early ages... and lets just say that the white in my beard started to become a lot more prominent...

I found the entire wind energy industry very interesting, but politics in Ontario, coupled with some strangely implemented / poorly handled installations, have put a serious damper on new wind farm development here.  The NIMBY reactions are so strong that I remember reading somewhere "green" that the province's decision to put big cash into nuclear is better than new wind farm investment - a counter-intuitive sign of how radioactive wind farms have become. (pun intended!)

See also: "Take your pick" bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Ta…

Digital
Edits: Contrast, saturation