A company tried to put in a wind farm in my country town once, wanting to rent space across numerous properties.
I realized that the driving business model was a series of ownerships:
- Sales pitch, acquiring the property rights (”we’d like to rent a mere X square feet of your property to put up this tower”)
- Flip that to the construction company (builds the tower)
- Flip that to the operator company (manages power generation/distribution)
...then things get interesting...
- Considering the enormous cost of repairs, broken turbines may or may not get fixed. (Go look up “spectacular wind turbine failures”)
- As turbines reach end-of-life, what happens gets murky, most likely...
- Flip that to scrapping operation, costly process of dismantling & removing the very large & tall turbine remains.
Upshot is it’s a series of “flipping”, with each stage’s owner not caring about next/previous stages, only that they can somehow get a profit out of their flip. That could very well end with a business buying the end-of-life equipment, scrapping & selling what they easily can, then declaring a loss on the rest & bankrupting out of further liabilities.
What this looks like:
- A confusing sales pitch to the locals (what I encountered) who don’t understand what the marketing crew cleverly portray
- Locals consenting to renting out property (big profit for leasing a very small space)
- Eyesores constructed (from a distance they may look interesting, but up close the fast-moving shadows and “infrasound” are very irritating) and lasting 10-20 years
- Major mechanical failures ending usefulness, at best turbine stop spinning, at worst turbine suffers fire & partial collapse
- Game of musical chairs stops, whoever is left standing is stuck with hulking debris which is costly to remove
- Giant eyesores remain indefinitely while nobody wants to pay for removal.
The aforementioned town passed an anti-windmill ordinance and they weren’t built. I’d have had a spectacular view of them all if built.
“I’d have had a spectacular view of them all if built.”
The neat think about the wind farms is the night view. They are all set up to have their flashing red lights all go off/on at the same time. Even the huge farms do this. When you see this on the horizon from a small aircraft at night for the first time; What the heck was that?
Other than that, a huge waste of taxpayers dollars.....
Great summary, and it sounds like you dodged a bullet with the help of a smart city council.