Expansion

[loomixguy]

Was making my rounds yesterday to the east. I am partnered up with a guy who lives across the highway from Reinke Manufacturing's plant where they produce center pivots and trailers. As I was loading up my truck I looked off to the south and saw the skeleton for a building of immense proportions. There has been activity all summer long at the facility, they filled in a huge draw, did a bunch of leveling, etc. I kinda figgered it was so they had a place to park the trailers when they were rolled out of the plant, but now they are erecting this monstrosity of a building, plus, it appears to be the tallest building at the plant as well. God knows what they will be using it for, but from the amount of new center pivots that have been leaving that place since last fall, bidness has been good. Severe storms that turn pivots into haywire probably doesn't hurt bidness, either.

I also saw that my partner finally got his wind-powered tubine up and running. It's up about 50-60 feet in the air, but the head is smaller than I thought it might be. When I was there last they were digging the footings for the base, so it didn't take long to get it going. It was spinning to beat the band yesterday. He told me that it should produce all the electricity they need at his house and shop buildings there, with the overage being purchased (at a greatly reduced rate) by the utility company. Kinda curious as to how they will get along with this thing. Time will tell, I guess.

Day before yesterday I went to see another customer who lives quite a ways to the northwest. Deja vu for pivots, I guess. He is a direct heir to the T&L pivot fortune. This guy farms several thousand acres, just around his home place, and the amount of brand new green paint that was parked all over the yard just dumbfounded me. Farming is paying off now, too.

One thing about all 3 entities discussed here...they all have vision.

 

[tumbleweed_texn]

You dont happen to know the brand name of the turbine they are using do you? We checked on wind generators and also solar panels. The outfit we talked to is probably the biggest supplier for the home market in Wyoming. They told us that we would need a wind turbine along with solar panel and a fairly large bank of batteries to be completely self-sufficient. We were both under the impression that we could do like your neighbor and have extra power to sell back to the utility company. After listening to their sales pitch we were somewhat rethinking our plans. Having one type of power system to learn was daunting enough, but they were trying to lead us to believe that we needed the gambit of alternative energy. To top it off, they said if we wanted to increase the battery capacity, we would have to double the amount of batteries every time we wanted to upgrade. Altogether, it was going to cost somewhere between 50 and 60 thousand to get set up. Im not convinced that would be a savings over the years.