Wrestle with the earth forever
Botanists, satellites, and politicians
Dig, dry, destroy
The butterfly effect
Uncanny playspace
Turbine testing and wind on demand
Fluid dynamic domestication
So, is it beautiful?
Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring...
Moving the [atmospheric] river
Exhibition
Curatorial Conversation
Gallery
About
One of LADWP’s biggest success stories, the Owens Lake Turbine Wind Test Site (“Twits” as it’s known on the lake) was born from the aftermath of the lawsuit from the US Navy that brought LADWP to Owens in the first place. In 2005, four years after the Navy successfully sued the EPA to address the source of dust storms obscuring flight visibility at downwind China Lake Naval Air Station, it was a group of China Lake mechanics who wrote to the LADWP to propose the creative use for their decommissioned jet engines.
Though flyable training days were rising after early control work began at Owens Lake, the Navy shared an interest to accelerate the approval process for additional dust control measures. In the early days, LADWP was flying just as blindly as the Navy pilots, trying all sorts of dust control tactics. Without a precedent to study, LADWP spent huge amounts of effort and time to develop control measures and feed them into a lengthy multiagency bureaucratic approvals process.
The Turbine Wind Test Site allowed for testing at scale, on site, and on demand. Replicating wind scenarios with turbine engines in real site conditions enabled rapid iteration on wind mitigation prototypes. Trucking aging jet turbines out to a landscape of fine-particle dust filled with endangered birds and butterflies was not without challenges and incidents, but the emissions reductions achieved by LADWP would be decades behind if not for this creative and adaptive project.
A feat of engineering on the soft silt, TWTS had to be designed largely for aesthetics, as local native tribes with stakes to the land have negotiated agreements about the visual impact of any infrastructure on the lake. Sunken down and embedded within what appears to be another berm road, TWTS satisfied tribal guidelines and cultural preservation groups forbidding the facility from being visible from surrounding roads. Luckily everyone nearby drives with AC and the windows up, as they made no comment on the center’s roaring sound.
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