‘Turbine Cowboys’ Review: Melodramatic, But Kinda Cool

When the Weather Channel began promoting “Turbine Cowboys” two months ago, our own Angeli Duffin wrote: “As ratings are critical to any show’s success, we expect ample attention will be given to the dramatic side of the job, but we hope some wind energy education will be mixed in as well.”

Alas, I’m here to report the our hopes were not fulfilled, at least not in any significant way. The drama in “Turbine Cowboys,” meanwhile, is mostly of the all-too-familiar Weather Channel junk food variety: Some good footage salted heavily with a repetitive narrative arc, larded with predictable plot turns and then piled high with amped background music and foreboding narration.

image via Weather Channel

This is not to say that “Turbine Cowboys,” beginning a Tuesday night run this week, does not provide some insight into the wind power industry. It’s most profound accomplishment is in bringing home the monstrous scope of the machines, tens of thousands of which now dot the United States, generating close to 3 percent of the electricity we use.

Episode 1 mixes the experiences of two disparate crews, one in Idaho, the other in the Bahamas. The duo who ascend and inspect a turbine at the Fossil Gulch plant in Idaho offer the more compelling vignette largely because they offer themselves with such genuineness.

There’s a scene where, still down on the ground, one of the guys, all geared up to go, thrusts his arms back several times to loosen up, like a football player getting ready to receive a kickoff, or a boxer about to answer the bell to start a bout. Describing the feeling of leaving the interior of the nacelle and then stepping out into the open, a few hundred feet up in the air, attached only by ropes, Brent says: “It’s the moment that you go right over the edge, that’s when I pucker a little bit.” There’s only a little bravado mixed with this admission of visceral fear, and Brent’s mate, Alex, offers a less colorful but every-bit-as-evocative take on that first step away from safety: “It’s always the same feeling, like I’ve never done it,” he says. “I have that anxiety.”

With their thoughtfulness and attention to safety, these guys strike you as serious professionals doing a crazy-ass job—but what exactly where they doing dangling out there on those turbine blades? This is the frustration of “Turbine Cowboys”: We’re told that with a big ice storm due, and the blades considered valuable pieces of equipment, the guys need to “inspect every blade on every turbine on the ranch.” But inspect them for what? What sort of issues are they looking for? What kind of damage might they find? And what if they do find damage? (And when did a wind farm become a wind “ranch”?)

[source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Earthtechling/~3/TCt4zQvWPyk/]