“You have your sister working for you,” she said. “So this is a family business?”
“Three out of six,” he told her, motioning for her to lead the way out of the office. “My brother handles the sales end of things. I oversee manufacturing. Nevada is our resident engineer. I tell her she’s not all that, just because she’s in on the technical end of things, but she doesn’t believe me.”
“There are six of you?” she asked, thinking it would have been great to have a brother or sister. And a whole lot less lonely when she’d been growing up.
“Sometimes it felt like twenty, but it was good. We’re a close family.”
“Everyone still in Fool’s Gold?”
“One of my brothers moved away, but the girls are here.” He pointed to one of the big warehouses. “That’s where we store the components. They’re not here long. We have a whole lot more demand than we can fill. Wind turbines are popular.”
“That’s what I hear,” Charity told him. “As I said in my call, I’m the new city planner. I’m coming around and meeting all the business owners in the area.” She was also interested in his relationship with Josh, but doubted she would figure out a way to bring that up.
“What do you know about wind turbines?”
She thought for a second. “They’re really tall?”
He grinned. “Good start. Come on. I’ll take you to the sales office and give you a quick course in what we do here.”
The sales office was another building. Inside there was a model of a wind farm, with working wind turbines, pictures of different kinds of wind turbines, cutaways of the machinery and several blank TV screens.
“I won’t show you the entire DVD collection. Not until you have a few million you’d like to invest.”
“Not this week. I’m thinking of buying a house.”
“Maybe when the budget’s not so tight?”
She laughed. “You’ll be first on my list.”
He pointed to the models of turbines. “This is what we build. They come in various sizes, the largest of which produces six megawatts of power. Assume it’s going at full speed twenty-four-seven, we’re talking about enough electricity generated to power fifteen hundred households a year.”
“You’re kidding? From one of those? We all should have one in our yard.”
“Don’t get too excited, that’s under extremely optimal conditions. Reality is a little less easy to calculate. The wind doesn’t always blow, and the turbines are fairly loud.”
He hit a switch and one of the TV screens came on. The picture scanned across a seemingly isolated patch of desert scrub. The background noise increased until it was uncomfortably loud.
“That’s close to what they’re like at fifty feet.”
Charity wanted to cover her ears. “Okay, maybe not in the front yard.”
He hit another button and the picture shifted to a large display of wind turbines.
“There are other considerations,” he said. “Some areas are windier than others. We use something called Wind Power Density to determine the best placement for the turbines. There are also problems with delivery. The towers are usually between two and three hundred feet tall. The blades are between sixty-five and a hundred and thirty feet long.”
She tried to picture that, but couldn’t. Ethan must have been used to those unfamiliar with his industry. He immediately hit a button and the TV screen changed to a drawing of a blade next to a six foot man.
“The blade wins,” she murmured.
“It’s going about a hundred and sixty miles an hour. It always wins. So we want a relatively isolated location that we can deliver to and provide service to. Not too close to the community but not too far away. Lots of wind, but not so much wildlife.”
“Right,” she said. “Birds get clipped by the blades and die.”
“We actually have a bigger problem with bats.”
She blinked. “Bats, as in bats? Don’t they have sonar that allows them to see anything that’s moving in the sky?”
“Yes, but the spinning blades create a change in pressure.” He paused. “You don’t want to know. Let’s just say turbines can have a negative impact on bat migration. To change that, we recommend owners shut down the turbines during slow wind nights.”
“A computer does that, right?”
“It can. The biggest concerns are during late summer and early fall, when bats migrate.”
She had the weird feeling there was something crawling in her hair. “Um, bats migrate?”
He nodded.
“I could have gone my whole life without knowing that.”
“They don’t want to hang with you any more than you want to hang with them.”
“Uh-huh. That sounds nice, but I don’t actually believe that. I think bats get a good laugh out of making girls scream.”
“Maybe. I hadn’t thought about it, but you could be right.”