Have you ever heard of wind prospecting?

Just as prospectors ran to California for gold in the early 1800s, power producers seek the windiest places on Earth to place windmills for power generation. To produce adequate power to pay for a windmill, each power generation site must have an average wind speed greater than 10-12 miles per hour.

Remember that the relationship between wind speed and the force that wind produces on a given surface is not a linear function in mathematics. As a result, a site with average wind speeds of 15mph will produce over three times the amount of energy as a site with 10mph average winds over the course of a year. Variations in tree cover and elevation greatly impact wind prospecting.

A local windmill for power generation can be found east of Webster on Rt. 104.