Author: 6000

Back from the Bush

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What an experience. From start to finish. New friends, much laughter, a little too much alcohol (perhaps), literally thousands of kilometres, heat, dust, a gazillion elephants, that leopard, some incredible sightings*, some amazing memories. It was very special.

I’ve got about 2,500 images to sift through. Many won’t make the cut, but that’s just fine. Some will be good. Hopefully, one or two will even be proper keepers.

But they will have to wait. Today has been a real snap back to reality: a cold, wet Cape winter’s day, and flooring work in the bar meaning that we have furniture everywhere and we have to run the gauntlet of across the patio in the filthy weather in order to get between the kitchen and the rest of the house.

Catching up with everything else has been a priority ahead of a job next week, so the photos – desperate as I am to see what’s there – are taking a back seat for the moment.

But don’t worry, you won’t have to wait too long.

Soon.

* “Two lions! And they’re shagging!”

I’m a big fan…

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The world’s largest wind turbine has recently been commissioned and it’s HUGE.

The trouble with huge things standing in free space is that it’s very difficult to give them any context to indicate just how huge they are. You need something to relate it to, like these ordinary buildings and the Eiffel Tower:

And so we have to rely on numbers.

China Three Gorges Corporation announced that the 16-megawatt MySE 16-260 turbine had been successfully installed at the company’s offshore wind farm near Fujian Province on July 19. The behemoth is 152 meters (500 feet) tall, and each single blade is 123 meters (403 feet) and weighs 54 tons. This means that the sweep of the blades as they rotate covers an area of 50,000 square meters (nearly 540,000 square feet).

But that still doesn’t really mean much unless you add in some more numbers for context.

So let’s look at a couple of local wind farms and see.

Darling Wind Farm has 4 turbines, darling, each producing a maximum of 1.25MW. That’s only about 8% of the new Chinese beast. And they each have a rotor diameter of 62m. That’s a quarter of this new record holder.

Klipheuwel will be familiar to anyone who does the N2 run from time to time. That’s the 9-turbine wind farm near Caledon. Bigger and more modern than Darling, darling, they look huge, and have a nameplate capacity of 3MW each. That’s 18.75% of the Big Boy above. But actually, they are tiny in size, with a rotor diameter of 113m, versus 246m for the MySE16-260.

Analysts are suggesting that given the speed at which renewable energy technology is progressing, we should expect the next step up to be a 20MW turbine, to be announced before the end of the year.
I can’t wait to see the stats for that one.

On wine

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Here’s some interesting advice, especially for someone like me who likes to save good wine for special occasions:

Don’t save the good wine for a good day. Good wine is wasted on a good day.
On a good day, all wine is good wine. Bad wine is good wine.
Drink the good wine on a bad day. That’s what it’s for.

I’m not 100% sure I agree, but it is a variation on the theme of a quote that I have heard before:

Don’t save special wine for a special occasion.
Make an occasion special by drinking special wine.

At the end of the day, this does all just sound like the shills for Big Wine have been paid to get you to drink lots of the best wine as soon as possible.

But I’m not really sure if I have a problem with that.

Lily QP

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I’m hopefully somewhere up in the hot, dry North, so here’s a moister, more verdant image from a beagle walk last weekend:

For all that the weather is on the turn, Cape Town is still pretty soggy underfoot. The beagle went knee deep into the mud, but that was ok, because we didn’t take my car down to the Green Belt for our wander.