The whole concept was obviously absurd from the beginning.
Does shoveling up the dead birds count as a green job?
Wind farming ... just another government black money hole boondoggle!!
Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number
Harsh, descriptive language assures that nobody under 30 will even be able to take the racist quiz without needing therapy first.
A whole lot of ugly for nothing.
Thanks, greenies.
Millions of birds have been killed by wind turbines.
Weird how the left who have their animal right groups do not care about the birds which keep getting killed, including the great American Bald Eagle.
“How can you put a price on feeling good. Every time you see those monuments to government action I’m reminded that I personally, am saving the planet. They make me feel good and that’s what’s really important. SO they don’t provide much energy. So they kill protected birds and bats. So their low freq harmonics drive people crazy. I feel good, Vestas gets massive subsidies, Siemens makes a fortune, politicians get huge kick backs, and that’s what’s really important.” -Liberal
They can be useful for bringing electricity to areas that are too remote and too sparsely populated to justify the construction of a power plant and electrical grid, but they’re also unreliable because they don’t work on windy days and have to be throttled back on really windy days and they do require maintenance.
So... part-time supplemental power to a few people in niche markets.
I have an apt title for this report,
“Wind From The Other End.”
Posted on a similar thread:
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 watched some show last week about things that burst into flames in the sky. The host wondered what they were and he and his camera crew photographed them. They were birds who flew into the concentrated solar light of a solar power plant. The video showed the birds burned and in one case writhing on the ground for a half minute or so before expiring.
This is a terribly cruel way for an animal to die.
bkmk
Check out the documentary “Windfall”.
Here is an excerpt from a review by NPR:
“To optimize the investment, wind-power developers tend to build a lot more turbines than they initially propose. In Tug Hill, farther north in upstate New York, a proposed 50 high-tech windmills became 195. As skeptics began to investigate, they learned that wind power is too unreliable to replace dirtier forms of generation, and that the wind business is based less on electricity than on tax credits: Big investment companies keep flipping the companies so as to restart the depreciation process.”
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/02/146099048/when-a-windfall-isnt-quite-what-it-seems
Cut the government subsidies on wind and solar, and they’ll eventually go away.
Laz, are you interested in this issue? I’m pinging you just in case.
So many billions flushed away over stuff most of us said would never work. What a shocker.
