In my professional circulation I get to meet an talk with a lot of founders of companies. I have run across the CEOs of several “alternative energy” companies. Not a single on that is involved in wind power has a single mention it its business plan, nor in their capital plan, for setting aside reserves to decommission wind turbine equipment.
Wind power cannot compete economically on a level playing field with more conventional power sources. The field can only be tilted by government which does so in various ways. But in the end, the result is that wind power is economically unsustainable. Much like the well known Romulan Cloaking technology, the mirage can only be sustained by the continual expenditure of great amounts of energy. Government will eventually get exhausted to sustain the economic mirage.
When the economic mirage falters, wind power companies will shut down and will abandon their turbines. In only a few years, idle turbines will become first and eyesore than a danger to safety as they start to fall apart in high winds.
Then environmentalists will demand a new government program, to restore the vistas to their previous pristine clarity. And thus environmentalists will have come full circle, from where they blamed owners of open pit coal mines of greed for walking away from those eyesores without proper funding of remediation.
But should wind power companies plan for the eventual remediation, that economic truth would crush their already crush-worthy business plans.
As an addendum, let me also quickly observe that nuclear power enjoys a subsidy from the federal government that cannot be priced: government has redefined their risk so that should a plant have a radiological disaster that contaminates a wide area, government has assumed that risk.
No insurance company could price that risk, let alone reserve for it. So, nuclear power carries its own price distortion that is significant even as it is totally different in nature than the risks of any other source of utility-grade power.