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After 19 years of facing the wind, this German turbine fell to it. It’s starting to happen a lot.
Industrial Masters of the Universe have long since learned what to do when the fickle public embraces a product or concept that was previously anathema; they embrace it like an Anaconda getting ready to eat a pig. Thus they learned to love “organic” stuff, and “natural” chemicals and even “renewable” energy. As soon as they learned that customers would line up to buy $3 million turbines, that the government would subsidize up to 70% of the cost, and that the public would love them for doing it, it was game on. Now, however, accumulating costs and negatives are beginning to indicate game over.
For 20 years, the Masters of the Wind Universe have been frantically turning out War-of-the-Worlds-scale mechanical giants to decorate mountain ridges, farm fields and ocean expanses everywhere. On land, it takes a thousand tons of concrete and rebar to make the pad on which the 300-foot tower is set, to support the 60-ton generator nacelle and the three 200-foot blades weighing twelve tons each. Mountain ridges must be blasted level for the installations, major roads have to be built to them and then a major power line to transport the electricity to where it’s needed. But hey. The wind is free, all natural, even organic.
Industrial-wind flacks (in the business they’re known as windbags) trumpet the magic words: job creation, cheap electricity, no pollution. And the industry has been successful; 500 factories across the U.S. have made, and large crews have installed, 48,000 turbines in 39 states. For the last ten years, the industry has grown by more than 25% a year. The contribution of wind power to the electricity consumed by Americans has skyrocketed to, um, 1.9%.
Hard to believe but there’s a downside or two. The main problem is that the output of a wind turbine is highly variable. The wind does not necessarily blow when you need electricity. In any case, the power generated must be transported on the electric grid, which requires constant generation that can be instantaneously adjusted to match demand. Grid operators can throttle back excess wind generation, but if the wind drops and they don’t have backup instantly available, the grid could crash. So while they’re using wind energy they must have another coal or gas or nuclear plant running that can be instantly accessed if the wind drops. Talk about sustainability.
In the real world, only about one-third of the power generated by a turbine is actually used. Without the heavy government subsidies many wind “farms” would simply not be feasible. The Netherlands, an early adopter of wind power, is seriously considering dismantling hundreds of turbines because they’re losing so much money.
Now comes what could be the coup de grâce: the life expectancy of a wind turbine is 20 years, and the first wave of those built in the new age of wind are now approaching that age. After that age, bearings wear out, blades fall off, towers topple. Germany, a world leader in switching to renewable sources of energy, had to tear down more than 500 elderly turbines just last year. The country is graced by 25,000 of the monsters, more than a thousand of which could face decommissioning, at huge expense, every year.
The subsidies underpinning the industry also, it turns out, have a 20-year shelf life. In many cases the 20-year term was made explicit in the legislation. In others, it is implicit in the rising financial desperation of governments everywhere. Without government subsidies, there will be no wind industry.
The industrial crisis of our age does not have an industrial answer. Nothing industrial is sustainable. Industry could help prolong and cushion to coming transition by encouraging rooftop solar, family-scaled wind turbines and micro-hydro. Just as we consumers could help by going off the grid and producing our own energy.
If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
Thanks for the much needed view from reality, Mr. Lews. People like Robert Scribbler who are banking the very “saving of humanity,” in large part, to wind energy, don’t want to hear about the production, transportation, installation and maintenance of these behemoths, let alone their replacements (already)! None of them are manufactured in a factory that only operates on renewable (wind or solar) energy and all the rest of it still relies on dirty old fossil fuels. So it looks like we’re running into the brick wall of our predicament SOONER THAN EXPECTED!
Every day brings us closer to the inevitable collapse. It’s already happening in Venezuela (and elsewhere), but when it becomes world-wide and there’s no place to “escape” to, that’s when humanity will shine brightest (as we all go up in flames).
The entire green energy movement was always founded on, supported by, and made possible because of fossil fuels. Most “environmentalists” treated green energy as nothing more or less than a huge investment scam, which meant money in their pockets. They neither knew or cared about anything else.
Since the days of Maurice Strong, environmentalists have soul-ed out, silencing those in their ranks who believed it was about more than disingenuous profiteering. Thus, the nauseating repetition of the word sustainable, not coincidentally a fave strongism.
No one was able to stem the fraud, the lies, the bullshit that was aimed at taking everyone for another trip to the cleaners.
This is America today, a land ruled by crooks who act and play at filling an image, a set of shallow expectations via soundbites and slogans pretending to a moral authority they can’t even comprehend.
What this really says is that green energy in America was never intended to be “sustainable”, viable, or even worthwhile. Like Maurice Strongs’ version of environmentalism, green energy was a cynical distortion of any substance, another fleecing, another monument to waste and greed and stupidity.
Yes, it is all failing. In truth, that’s all it ever could do.
Wind power has been a blessing to humans when it has been used in situ to drive tools or move watercraft, then it requires a complexity of understanding by those harnessing it with modestly complex devices they might have built, and usually maintain themselves.
It seems to be failing as it is used to power random devices far away,then it requires a complexity of equipment and infrastructure designed, built, operated and maintained by separate specialists.
We seem able to support complexity of understanding but complexity of infrastructure requires too much energy.
This latest post seems to be primarily an aesthetic complaint, which in the case of windpower has a long literary pedigree that goes back to Manuel de Cervantes. There is a core of a valid argument here questioning the sustainability of utility-scale wind generators, but your aesthetic sensibilities get in the way of your point. Also, the fact that windpower is subsidized is meaningless in an environment where the U.S. government subsidizes all forms of energy “production” one way or another. Wind is one of the newest members of that particular club, taking a seat alongside oil, natural gas, coal (check out the rock-bottom lease prices for coal miners in the Powder River Basin), nuclear, ethanol and, most recently, solar. I can make the argument that the tax credits for wind are more transparent than for other energy, because they are output-based and expire after after 10 years. And the tax credit itself you dislike is going away for good in 2019, a result of the tax bill passed last December.
I think you have an important point to make regarding this nation’s seat-of-the-pants approach to energy policymaking, and that there are no silver bullets out there to replace the current crop of default energy sources. Each energy source has its advantages and disadvantages, and that includes utility-scale wind. Its good to know what they are, but it’s never a black and white matter.
Notwithstanding my disagreements with this latest dispatch, I enjoy your insights and writing skill, and look forward to each new post from you.
Thank you for making an important point! The only green event with industrial-scale electricity production is shutting down a power plant. As you point out, the construction of wind turbines really hasn’t facilitated that.
Another point that I often see overlooked is what uses the energy at the other end of the wires that run to the power plants. How many electrically operated manufactured goods are there with metal components not smelted by coal, or which in any way could be truthfully described as green? Not many!
Our future, if we’re to have one, will be a return to our solar energy budget — the burning of wood and perhaps dung, with perhaps some small scale mechanical operations utilizing wind or hydro power. Hopefully trees still have the ability to grow in the exciting new world we’re creating for ourselves.
Trees are already dying all over the world from absorbing pollution. Read Gail Zawacki. We are in hospice, friends.
It does not take a climate scientist or even a particularly bright bulb on the street to see that Capitalism, unrestrained by the requirements of Planetary life support systems, is guaranteed mutually assured destruction. When dollars are sacrosanct to Planetary life support systems, what other outcome can be expected? Socially enabled capitalism is clearly a failed paradigm. Help end tax funded pollution of the commons for starters. Our tax dollars are funding a Planetary ecocide future for the children of ALL species. A future EXXON scientists confirmed to the CEOs of EXXON as early as 1978. Shortly after that they and other fossil industries started investing big money, tax subsidized as well, into the denier-sphere pipeline. The GOPollutocrats, which also include most Ds, of today would not exist as such without that cash infusion.
Efficiency first. The cheapest, greenest power is the watts not used.
Good post! It’s not just the decommissioning of the turbines – the blades have to be replaced at regular intervals. Because they are made of fiberglass composite materials, they are difficult to recycle; Denmark has accumulated a massive amount of scrapped turbine blades:
https://co2insanity.com/2011/06/12/broken-wind-turbine-blades-create-mountainous-waste-problem/
But hey, they’re working on making the blades recyclable, good for them:
http://nawindpower.com/researchers-aim-to-make-wind-turbines-recyclable
But it’s more energy and resource expenditure, further decreasing the already modest net energy gain to be had from industrial-scale wind…
The article makes valid points about the very limited ability of wind turbines to intermittently produce some electricity. That is only one of the predicaments that society will have to try and cope with as the availability of fossil fuels declines.The demise of global trade as shipping declines will be as hard to deal with as the decline in business and tourist use of airlines because of the cost escalation.
Great article and fine writing. For more background on the subject of “renewable” energy and the big picture, see my article Questionable Renewable Energy Dreams at http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/926/66/
– Jan Lundberg, independent oil industry analyst
J.L.,
I was unaware of this piece. It is cogent and mild mannered.
I happen to agree that renewables cannot plug into J.P. Morgan’s corporate grid, and serve to maintain a parasitic degenerate profiteering class. When properly deployed they are small scale producers that define the term “democritized energy”.
Thanks for the straw man argument that just won’t last.
Early turbines were like the Ford Model T car. They just didn’t last long. But today’s turbine are built much better than the Model T versions.
Turbines do not have to be placed in fragile ecoclimates. The vast majority of them are being built on farmland and in the ocean.
The fossil fuel propagandists trying to discredit alternatives are full of it, as usual. They are like dinosaurs, going extinct from a giant meteor called Alternative Energy.
Are you calling Lewis a propagandist? Really?! You’re either Crazy, stupid or both. There is no such thing as renewable energy. As for Tom, his integrity is unquestionable. Take off your rose colored glasses, friend. This is no place for cowards.
Misdirection,
With out subsidies there would be no coal, oil or nuclear industry.
As for mechanical failure; machines have a life cycle and require maintenance, repair and eventually replacement. Article offered no full life cycle cost comparison between the alternatives writer alludes to as superior. As for disposal of obsolete
and damaged turbines the sum total of wind power could be but a speck compared to what coal, oil and nuclear have already left and continue to leave behind to befoul the landscape.
His is a fools argument that the investor class has recognized and rejected.
While this engineering analysis should be enough to make the case – http://ieer.org/resource/reports/carbon-free-and-nuclear-free/ – that fossil fuels and nuclear have no future, this from the Governor of the Bank of England to the investors at Lloyd’s is the nail in their coffin: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/2015/844.aspx
Dale, I think you and Kevin are heavily invested into alternative energy in some.way. Good for you. Must be nice pocketing all that government funny money.
And by the way, the people who frequent this particular website know that economists and politicians are stupid a d not to be trusted. You’re not fooling anyone here.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://riunet.upv.es/bitstream/handle/10251/63342/-Bernal-Perez%253BA%25C3%25B1%25C3%25B3%253BRamon%2520Blasco-Gimenez%2520-%2520Efficiency%2520and%2520Fault-Ride-Through%2520Performance%2520of%2520a%2520Diode-….pdf%3Fsequence%3D3&ved=0ahUKEwjJkcWvwfHMAhVD04MKHSlcAoMQFgg3MAM&usg=AFQjCNECkFuG14nIM84dRADPDSRwoulg_Q&sig2=4ibkkjtXGNb39kPsg8pkaw
Never mind that link up there Doesn’t work. It was a study on wind turbine damage.
“The contribution of wind power to the electricity consumed by Americans has skyrocketed to, um, 1.9%.”
Um, no. It seems the author did not read carefully the very report from the IER that he links to. In 2015 wind contributed 1.9% of the overall energy consumption of Americans. However, wind did contribute 4.7% to electrical generation.
That said, his overall point is still valid. The deployment and maintenance of wind power and photovoltaics depends on an industrial complex designed and built to use large flows of fossil fuels. Renewables, with their lower EROIs, will be hard pressed to replace those large flows and power the rest of society in the manner we have become accustomed to.
Um, yes, the author did read the report carefully, meant what he said and said what he meant. The difference between the 4.7% generated and the 1.9% consumed is WASTED.
Just don’t put any of them in MY back yard.
This article is completely full of shit – you DO realize that, don’t you?
Wind is producing reliably and at the least expensive cost per Kwh available. Every failing this article attempts ascribe to this tech is a failed multiply-debunked Republican talking point. And here you are screaming at people who point this out?!? Fuck you.
This is not difficult to learn about – there are tons of blogs out these covering this. But they are probably part of some environmentalist conspiracy to you, no doubt.
What a very very strange mixture of proper skepticism and anti-renewable energy bullshit exists here.
This comment seriously degrades both the tone and the content of this conversation – you do realize that. don’t you?
Informed dissent and corrections are welcome here; fact-free tirades larded with obscenities are not. You are welcome to state your point of view and argue for it, but if all you have is “Republican talking point” and “environmental conspiracy,” please take it somewhere else. And if you’re going to begin by stating that wind generation is reliable, we’re going to have to talk about the meanings of words.
Your input, if you have any, is welcome. Posts like the one above are not.
I am, by the way, very proud of the fact that since the inception of this website in 2009, I have never banned anyone from contributing and have spiked only two or three nasty or irrelevant comments. This while sites across the web are eliminating their comments sections entirely because they have become so rancid. Here, by contrast, we have an ongoing conversation among well-informed people all over the world that is, for me, a daily pleasure. I intend to keepit that way.