Posted on 10/24/2010 10:12:38 AM PDT by epithermal
European wind developers are fleeing the EU's expiring wind subsidies, shuttering factories, laying off workers, and leaving billions of Euros of sovereign debt and a continent-wide financial crisis in their wake. But their game is not over. Already they are tapping a new vein of lucre from the taxpayers and ratepayers of the United States.
-snip-
In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
How ironic that certain people don’t mind all the dead owls in exchange for wind energy, but we can’t cut down a tree where they might live.
Watch "Carbon Credits," and your wallet. This one doesn't even pretend to provide "free" anything.
It is an unashamed protection extortion racket "to prevent really really bad things from happening, if you don't pay us."
The correct word is "hypocritical."
Excellent points.
If the market doesn’t want it, isn’t willing to pay for it at a profit for the produces/suppliers, it is NOT SUSTAINABLE.
Amazing how these leftists scream about what is not sustainable but then completely turn a blind eye when that which they support is proven to be unsustainable.
Hell is too cold and too brief for these bastards.
Or, "might have lived" if they hadn't been chopped and clubbed by the windmill blades. :-)
If they can figure out the storage issue then it becomes a lot more viable in certain circumstances. The subsidy is a joke though
I have often driven by a virtual forest of windmills in southwestern Minnesota and have on more than one occasion seen every one from horizon to horizon standing idle. There is simply no way wind power could ever be a reliable or efficient means of generating electricity.
We have a forest of these windmills in eastern New Mexico. It is my understanding that the ranch land is leased to the government at $58,000. per windmill, per year. How is that sustainable, or profitable?
Minor issue: Why raise cattle? Why feed the nation? Why not destroy one of the most conservative segments of society and put them on the government tit?
Yes, I stand corrected.
NJ spent tens of millions to put up solar panels on tens of acres to generate enough power annually to power only 35 homes, when the same amount of money can be spent building a small natural gas plant that will provide power for 130,000 homes. I always tell my green friends, how long do you think the US can compete economically with solar against a country who uses natural gas???? When jobs are gone, the tax revenues to finance gov liberal programs are also gone. Some of my liberal green friends are starting to make the connection between healthy economy and its implication on tax revenues needed to fund liberal gov programs. I may not have turned them into complete small gov conservatives, but at least this is in the right direction to make them understand taxes do not drop out of the sky.
Maybe developments in battery technology will allow the wind energy to get off the government tit? They are slowly beginning to advance battery tech, such as this article:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-10/ru-ss101310.php
I remember reading in Science magazine about a molten salt battery that is much more efficient, but can’t find a link to it anymore. I think development work was going on in Europe.
In some places other energy storage schemes may make more
sense than batteries, like storing compressed air underground, flywheels, etc.
Just wait till this stupid boondoggle is over. 20 years from now those rusting motionless monstrocities will be a nice legacy to Obama.
“Sustainability” is religous doctrine for the lefties, but the situation is much worse than what you guys have rightly pointed out.
Just about everything the Left pushes most strongly is unsustainable, but not only do they not see that, they refuse to believe it.
To mention a few:
Social security - 10 to 20 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilites: unsustainable.
Medicare - 50 - 70 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities: unsustainable.
Public employee union pensions: tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: unsustainalbe.’’
Govenrment motors: tens of billions of dollars of debt, with declining sales and exploitative union contracts: unsustainable.
The federal budget - trillion dollar deficits, with 100’s of billions in interest payments each year, as far as the eye can see: unsustainable.
These pr*cks will rag on me to use a cloth bag in the grocery store, but when it comes to consequential public policy, it’s all unsustainable.
Yeah, those dead turbines certainly are much more beautiful than oil wells. sarc. they look almost identical.
There are spans of days when the turbines aorund here do not turn, so batteries had better have a helluva lot of charge capacity. That is why the city in which I live has natural gas plants and the Greenies in Austin get the pleasure of the wind turbines (never mind that about 1/4 of the generated power is lost in transmission from here to Austin).
At least pumpjacks are not 300+ feet tall. :-)
ping
Good for confronting your lib friends, maybe sanity is catching. Here is a statement regarding wind energy that is also troubling:
““In the longer run, the intermittency of wind and the fact that wind generation satisfies base-load demand more than intermediate or peaking loads should discourage investment in base-load coal and nuclear capacity,” he said.”
So, in this scenario all the wasted money on wind is delaying investment in coal and nuclear which is spooky if it comes true.
And they don’t generate those low-frequency booms that the turbine blades create. I’ve read reports of this booming sound being heard 3-5 miles away.
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