-William Shakespeare
Today was a lot of fun. Here's a model of where we went. All the little white things are windmills!
This morning we went to the Higueruela Wind Farm which was pretty neat. They have 244 windmill's in their park, but in the region they are approaching 5,000 windmills.
They also said that they are a pretty "old" farm and that they newer windmills are much more efficient and powerful. I was under the impression that wind power isn't practical in the long run because it took more power to create, build and maintain windmills versus the amount of power that is produced, but with the numbers that they were giving us it would appear that though this may have been the case for previous designs, more modern ones could actually be more globally competitive. Considering that 10% of Spain's engergy comes from wind farms this is probably a pretty good thing!
They also had a few things about solar energy, which was kinda interesting. The thing that stuck out to me though was the use of dark panals to use the sun's heat to warm water for domestic use. All new homes that are built in Spain are required to have a 1 m^2 panel and after 5-8 years it will pay for itself, but it is supposed to last for 25 years or so. This is similar to some of the programs that are going on in Colorado and California though I am sure that there are others as well. I believe the guy giving the tour also said that the US is scheduled to have 1,800 windmills installed in the next year (we think by GE) so that should be interesting to follow up on. Miguelito:
After our exploration of the wind farm we headed for a lunch stop which actually turned out to be really really good. Then we headed to the Playmobil plant which was a lot of fun just to see what they were making.
It turns out that none of Playmobil's toys are made in China (WHOO WHOO!), but are made in Spain, Czech Rebublic, Germany and I think there was a fourth, but I can't remember it and I can't find it on their website. But Germany is the main place I believe. Long and short it was interesting to see a packaging and distribution place, they were already getting ready for Christmas! They make 7 toys (by the millions) that get distributed around the world and another site 7 more etc.
And the best part about it was that we got to bring some home! Miguelito certainly got the most though:
I was special. I got a feather for my Pirate Captian's hat.
Overall it was a very fun day! Unfortunately everyone still needs to do some more work on our paper and notebooks. Any by paper and notebooks I mean that only two people are done with their paper so there's going to be a lot of school work going on tonight since we're leaving for Barcelona tomorrow afternoon!"There is nothing good nor bad, it's the human mind which makes it appear so."
-William Shakespeare
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