The watermelon cultists of the Church of Gaia delude themselves that the wind turbines and solar panels they fetishise are going to save the planet from the evil sky-dragon, climate change. This is rubbish, of course. Wind and solar, despite decades of taxpayer-funded indulgence, still account for a bare 1% of global energy consumption. The idea that they will imminently replace fossil fuels is a delusion.
But just how environmentally friendly are they, really?
Not only do solar panels and wind turbines create massive amounts of pollution and environmental degradation during their manufacture, they don’t work for very long (about half the life-span, or less, of a traditional power source) – and when they do, they leave a shocking mess behind.
Researchers estimate the U.S. will have more than 720,000 tons of blade material to dispose of over the next 20 years, a figure that doesn’t include newer, taller higher-capacity versions.
The 20-year-old turbines are babies, compared to the 200-metre tall behemoths being built today. The disposal problem is only going to get worse.
There aren’t many options to recycle or trash turbine blades, and what options do exist are expensive, partly because the U.S. wind industry is so young. It’s a waste problem that runs counter to what the industry is held up to be […]
Ninety percent of a turbine’s parts can be recycled or sold, according to Van Vleet, but the blades, made of a tough but pliable mix of resin and fiberglass — similar to what spaceship parts are made from — are a different story.
“The blades are kind of a dud because they have no value,” he said.
That might be 90% of the parts, but it’s not necessarily 90% of the mass. The blades make up the bulk of a wind turbine.
Decommissioned blades are also notoriously difficult and expensive to transport. They can be anywhere from 100 to 300 feet long and need to be cut up onsite before getting trucked away on specialized equipment — which costs money — to the landfill.
So, that’s tons of fibreglass being cut up and buried. Then there’s the concrete – which generates huge amounts of carbon emissions in the first place.
[Turbine owners] will only remediate the site to a depth of four feet, leaving most of the massive concrete foundations, which go as deep as 15 feet, used to anchor the wind turbines , in the ground indefinitely.
Furthermore, according to the website Renewable Technology, Nobles Wind facility has an extensive underground collector cable system, laid at a depth of four feet, connecting the turbines to a central substation…the Palmer’s Wind Farm project explicitly states that cables deeper than 4 feet would not be removed.
npr.org/2019/09/10/759376113/unfurling-the-waste-problem-caused-by-wind-energy
It’s not enough that green scammers hoover up trillions of taxpayer dollars to build these inefficient, destructive eco-crucifixes. They’re going to stiff the taxpayer to get rid of the wretched things, too.
It looks like Minnesota will have a very expensive mess to clean up when the wind turbines currently operating in the state reach the end of their 20 year useful lifetimes […]it will cost approximately $445,000 (in 2009 dollars) per turbine to decommission the wind facility […]bringing the total cost of decommissioning the Nobles project to $71 million. Xcel also states that these cost estimates are conservative.
americanexperiment.org/2019/10/it-costs-532000-to-decommission-a-single-wind-turbine/
As is so often the case with “renewable” energy scams, wind turbines are useless boondoggles which suck up bucketloads of taxpayer dollars, wreak environmental havoc, slaughter millions of birds and bats, and leave behind a legacy of massive end-of-life costs and enduring environmental pollution.
They’re the perfect symbol for the green movement.
