Adelaide Spring [Edit]

[dukealien]

Adelaide Spring

Edit 1

We ask too much of turbines in a gale
of springtime fury, lonely crowd of teens
stood up long-limbed and naked, to prevail
against rage-storms of passion, wind that keens
to shatter or compel.  They have their use:
like adolescents, windmills’ dance provides
blind power, strong desire, electric juice
all green as summer grass; fair Earth abides.
But plugged-in turbine-kids - when pressure peaks
in statewide gusts their raving, lawless surge
flips off the careful grid of rules that seeks
to balance and constrain their pulsing urge.
How then can windmills, driven, sublimate
their hot vibes without darkening the state?

---

Many thanks, again, to @Leanne, particularly.  This edit changes two of the three simile "likes" to metaphors (really just one extended metaphor).  Plus adding a little cowbell and moving the cause closer to reality (failling off the grid due to phase and frequency mismatch... which causes a beat right before everything goes completely black).

Constrain (as in "constraint payments") fell in neatly - it keeps coming up in reading about trying to integrate subsidized/PC "renewables" into a functioning regional grid.  As I understand it, wind "operaters" receive "constraint payments" whenever the power they produce (or might produce - they get paid for energy they don't produce at all, too) is rejected by the grid operator.  Rejection as in exces to requirements, but also because its quality (phase/frequency matching or wobble) is too bad to admit to the grid; the ten SA wind farms ordered off the grid for misbehavior in the late blackout will apparently receive "constraint payments."  This is, of course, nonsense.  A power grid's purpose is to produce AC, not PC.

The idea of "constraint payments" suggests another analogy/metaphor with adolescents today (at least in the US).  That is, everybody's supposed to be able to go to college, and get a loan to do it.  This has some benefits, but in part and for many it's a "constraint payment" to keep them out of the labor force (off the grid) as much due to iffy quality as lack of work for them (excess to demand).  Suggests free verse rather than a sonnet, being overtly political  .

Just got my electricity back where I live - knocked out for over an hour by torrential rain perhaps entrained by Matthew.