The Wind Farm

About a decade ago, I sat in on meetings with county officials as they decided whether or not my locality would be the site of Virginia's first "wind farm," meaning a bunch of big windmills to produce power. They would be located on North Mountain in Eagle Rock.

I wrote several articles about them as the project wound its way through the permitting process.

After the project, known as the Rocky Forge Wind Project, was approved, construction was halted via lawsuits filed by various citizens and groups who did not want to see large windmills in the northern part of the county.

After some back and forth and lots of slowdowns, the company came back and asked for a reduction in the number of towers, but the towers would be taller.

This screen shot from the Rocky Forge website indicates what the windmills will look like.

Now the windmills are going up. Google has agreed to purchase the power. I have no idea if the power will go towards the data center that Google is building not far from me.

We drove out to look at the tower pieces. These are blades. As you can tell by the way the trucks look, the blades are quite large.

This would be part of the tower for the blades. Maybe both pieces fit together to make the very tall tower? Anyway, the things were huge.

Another shot of the blades. Below are more shots of the parts. These are massive pieces of equipment.

I have no personal opinion about this project. For me, it's just another indicator of the changes coming to this community, changes that have long been in the making. Time will tell as to whether these changes are good or bad.