Bently installs windmills to power electric fence

Staff Reports

Minden industrialist Don Bently is using windmills to power an electric fence around his new effluent reservoir off of Buckeye Creek Road.

The new reservoir at 540 Ranch off of Buckeye Creek Road uses water pumped from the Minden-Gardnerville Sanitation District.

Bently has a contract with them that allows use of the effluent to water his agricultural crops. The reservoir is lined with heavy rubber panels and is the first "leak free" reservoir in Douglas County.

For safety and security purposes, Bently has installed two windmills that will generate electricity to power the chain-link fence that surrounds the reservoir. These two units can keep a fence electrified 24 hours a day and deliver brief shocks with small pulses of low current at around 8,000 to 12,000 volts potential.

The record for the first three weeks of operation show no wind at all even though there is a tendency for the wind to blow over the outlet portion of the reservoir. Most of the time it blows towards the dam, but one day the wind was coming across from the west.

Bently will eventually include a third windmill that was recovered from the ranch at Mud Lake. It has wooden blades to convert the wind to run the pump. It will be put up experimentally alongside the others at the reservoir.

Bently is an advocate for conserving our natural resources and realizes that the windmills are a good alternative to using fossil fuels because wind can work night and day even with heavy cloud cover but the sun cannot which makes wind power a better source of energy than solar power. The windmills convert the kinetic energy in wind into mechanical power that runs a generator to produce electricity.

Their blades are aerodynamically designed to capture the maximum energy from the wind producing a viable, clean, non-polluting, and renewable energy source because their tail allows them to make maximum use of the wind.