Palmdale

I first heard of Palmdale in the Frank Zappa song “Village of the Sun” many years ago, turns out he grew up in the neighboring town of Lancaster. It is a high desert town, and although the surrounding San Gabriel Mountains and outlying desert are beautiful, the town itself is a series of strip malls and housing developments. They do have one thing going for them though, it is very windy, and the day I went there it was very, very windy.  Zappa’s lyrics say it all.

…good God I hope the Wind don't blow. It take the paint off your car And wreck your windshield too, I don't know how the people stand it, But I guess they do.

I went up there to photograph wind turbines, not the massive wind farms they have near Palm Springs, but smaller residential and business wind turbines that are a perfect energy source in this breezy desert town. You get to Palmdale on route 14, the Antelope Valley Freeway, and the first thing you see from the bluff overlooking the town is a huge 318 foot wind turbine on the edge of Lake Palmdale. There is just the one, a giant sentinel standing guard over the town, and you can easily see it is the tallest structure for miles around. It was built in 2004 to help power the district's Lake Palmdale water-treatment plant and can produce up to 950kw of electricity.

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The Walmart/Sam’s Club just recently installed a mini wind farm on their parking lot. Seventeen micro wind turbines were humming along pretty furiously the day I was there, standing at respectful distances from each other and producing 76,000 kilowatt-hours of energy annually for the store. You may not like Walmart for some of their business practices, but they are making an effort to make their stores more sustainable.  I included a video I took of it, it’s not very exciting, but it gives you an idea of just how windy it was.

I came across a few small residential wind turbines as I toured the town, but could not help but think how much more could be done to take advantage of the winds that whip pretty consistently across this high desert town. As I drove around I was listening to radio reports about the oil spill in the gulf, it was hard not to be discouraged by the lack of will to make a serious effort to get this country and the rest of the planet off our addiction to fossil fuels. It seems environmental disasters and the price of gas are the only things that get us to even start talking about alternatives. What a cliché, but it is the truth.

The travel photographer in me wanted to see if I could find any vestige of history in this town, but the only things I could find were an old schoolhouse and a motley graveyard called the Palmdale Pioneer Cemetery. No coonskin caps or stagecoach remnants I’m afraid, it wasn’t very inspiring. But passing through the town is the great California Aqueduct, bringing water from the north to Los Angeles and Southern California as it begins to wind down its journey in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains. More on the aqueduct later.