Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
On the right, a windmill of the kind used for hundred of years to do specific tasks — usually pump water — in specific locations. It was built mostly on site, using mostly renewable materials. On the left, the modern industrial version. Hold your applause.
Of all the bulls crashing about in the “renewable energy can save the world” china shop, none is more grotesque than industrial wind power. I have never come upon an array of behemoth wind turbines looming over a mountain ridge in West Virginia or Pennsylvania or elsewhere without feeling like I’ve been transported into the movie version of War of the Worlds, without expecting to see the flash and crackle of laser beams shooting down attack helicopters. The feeling of doom they inspire, it turns out, is appropriate.
To misquote Buckminster Fuller, “Industry kills what industry touches.” They take a good idea like organic food and turn it into industrial food. We get interested in living off the grid on solar energy and they give us enormous solar “farms” and a whole new grid. We think about hoisting a wind turbine above our house to help with the energy demand and they say, no, wait, we’ve got a better idea that makes a whole lot of money and sounds green.
So they gave us wind turbines. Now we have 57,000 of them in 41 states, a number that has more than tripled in ten years. This is great, says the industry, because it’s renewable energy, not like that terrible old fossil fuel energy that polluted the air and kills the planet. But it turns out — especially now that the earliest wind turbines have reached the end of their service life and are posing one of the world’s worst recycling headaches — that the case for industrial renewables is not so great.
Wind may be a renewable resource, but wind turbines are not. Consider what goes into your average wind turbine:
- 500 tons of concrete poured over almost 100,000 pounds of reinforcing steel rebar to form the thousand-square-foot pad, on which is set
- a three-section steel tower up to 175 feet high, on which is perched
- a nacelle containing the generator that is the size of a school bus and weighs 90 tons, from which extend
- three blades up to 173 feet in length, together weighing 40 tons, not to mention
- the trucks, cranes, excavators, bulldozers, and personnel carriers needed to transport the components to the site and erect the tower, which reminds me that
- miles of roads (that can be used by loaded cement trucks by the hundreds and oversize equipment transporters) may have to be slashed into remote mountain country where many of these arrays are located, and then a route must be cut for a transmission line (to get the power to market) that will use 20-30 tons of steel for every tower, plus half a ton of steel for every mile of wire.
Now, repeat that recipe 57,000 times and tell me again how this is an environmentally friendly enterprise.
Now add to the demands of building these monsters the requirements of decommissioning them — their estimated life span is 20 years, which in practice is turning out to be more like 15. What, for example, do you do with three 100-300-foot-long blades made of resin and fiberglass that are worn out? You cut them in pieces and truck them to a landfill. And one forecast says we’ll be doing that with 720,000 tons of blades over the next 20 years. The steel that makes up most of the turbine and tower can be reused, but only after expensive deconstruction, transportation and processing.
People in general want to reduce pollution, and the way the industries con people is to say, hey, next best thing: we’ll relocate the pollution. So you can drive an electric car, happy that no pollution is coming out of your tailpipe, and oblivious to the pollution belching from the stacks of the power plant that is producing the energy for your car hundreds of miles away. They can point to a wind turbine scything the crystal mountain air and say look, clean renewable energy, but don’t look over there at the piles of empty oil barrels and expanses of devastated land that it took to get here, or the massive boneyards we’ll be leaving behind.
Distributed energy sources, tailored to serve each site according to its needs and energy assets, supported by modestly-sized manufacturers: that is the way to go more slowly toward the ultimate crash. Industrial gigantism will get us there really fast.
“Wind Turbine” by mcdlttx is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The use of the word ‘farm’ here is interesting and instructive. Just as wind and solar companies now embrace this mom and apple pie word so did oil companies choose “tank farms”. Considering what industrial gigantism has done to farming itself you might expect them to avoid the word like a plague!
Still, wind and solar do fulfill the culturally crucial function of convincing most that ‘they’ are ‘doing something’ so we can continue BAU, at least until Elon Musk gets us off this rock in an electric self driving flying car to pursue our destiny in space.
Ì heard a stock analyst say his predictions last night on the abc radio ,,,, that elon musk the creator of Tesla has never made a profit,,, only huge losses each year for the past 10 years…. he prodicts that in another 10 years time that ,, tesla will not be around as uber will also be gone…and a few others too….
Ok, you convinced me, wind and solar at the macro level can no longer be a part of my dreams.
It hurts to admit it, too. Not so much with macro solar, I never really gave a rat’s ass about those grotesque dark panels set in vast desert arrays, but those big gleaming turbines in formation, on the mountains, in the valleys, or’ the oceans, white with foam! … I find them beautiful.
But they’re out. Both of them. I will move on as I must, c’est la vie. Just please, Tom, don’t dig up any dirt on high speed rail. I couldn’t handle that. In the Holy Trinity of my renewable dreams, Wind is Jesus, always here even when He’s not,* Solar is the enigmatic – and possibly even dispensable – Holy Ghost, but HSR, is God himself.
* Obviously, in the world of the Divine, the battery storage problem has been solved.
Aww, so quickly given up. :p
Well, I hope you don’t give up completely on renewable energy and such things.
I liked the picture Tom, the old windmill v the modern. In Australia these old fashioned robust devices were basically installed bit by bit on virtually every farm in Australia from the mid 1800s to pump water (no electricity then). The most popular were called Comets, they were simple steel structures with steel gal blades stood from 4 to 9 metres high. They could be repaired with any old bit of tin and a few tools. They were so common as to be almost an icon and if no longer used they simply rusted away where they stood, they must have built them in the hundreds of thousands over this time and still make them today, no power required just a bit of wind. There is an old bloke up the road from me who still gets out and about repairing them for the farms in the area that still use them, and if they worked and still do most are still used – no twenty year life there!.
We thought about a windmill for us for power but the problem is not enough regular wind. I would think it would still be a modest problem to fit a generator to the back of them for power if you wanted to but hey that means an individual tailored approach, not some gigantic base-grid power BAU system which is what the biggies are. Makes you weep – the answer is under our noses.
Good article, Tom. The hard truth about renewables is slowly being absorbed; that neither do they supply the answers to the energy conundrum. Short of a drastic reduction in population, there is no solution. That is why so many are smoking hopium; a refusal to see the possibility that humans are not only not very exceptional, but that we are completely optional.
[BBC finds the worst is Sulfur Hexaflouride]
*Climate change: Electrical industry’s ‘dirty secret’ boosts warming*
– – –
Sulphur hexafluoride, or SF6, is widely used in the electrical industry to prevent short circuits and accidents.
But leaks of the little-known gas in the UK and the rest of the EU in 2017 were the equivalent of putting an extra 1.3 million cars on the road…
– – –
Each turbine would normally have contained around 5kg of SF6, which, if it leaked into the atmosphere, would add the equivalent of around 117 tonnes of carbon dioxide…Across the entire UK network of power lines and substations, there are around one million kilograms of SF6 installed…
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49567197
Tom,
Agree with you totally. Don’t forget, those blades are also very effective at killing migrating birds, which are already in decline. Save the world from climate change? More like pushing stressed species closer to extinction.
The amount of energy needed to produce a cubic yard of concrete approaches .37 barrels of oil. The weight of a cubic yard of concrete is 4050 lbs. +-. A nice round conservative estimate is 90 barrels of oil to produce the concrete in the pad.
A search of “energy-consumption-production-of-concrete” with Geoplast in the string will deliver some interesting information about the uses of energy in the construction industry.
Best to All
Many opinions from those that probably have never been on a wind farm, let alone construct one. Yes, those components go into a wind turbine, but not 57,000 times. Some of those are common to the complex (transmission) and can be used for 10’s or 100’s of turbines in one facility. Concrete is produced locally in “batch plants”, the ingredients are trucked in. But then so is your bread.
The reason they exist in macro scale is because people don’t want to pay the true cost of electricity. The rate goes up and people freak out because the general sentiment is cheap electrical power is a right as opposed to an anomaly of an industrialized eta.
Want to pay 20-cents per kWh, fine then, we won’t need such large developments. Rates go down with scale. The other reason large facilities are required is because of the load profile. Everyone ramps up their load, or rejects it near the same time requiring administration of larger blocks of electrical sources. Fix that and most of the problems go away.
The value in wind energy isn’t in the construction, the value is in the zero margin fuel source. There haven’t been any wars over wind resources recently that I can recall.
Finally, wind sites are strictly “reclaimed”. The disruption from construction is restored leaving just the footprint of the turbine, access road, and substation. We watch these very closely. Remember, when you point a finger three fingers are pointing back at you. And we have no illusions about greenwashing, but its better than the status quo alternative at the moment.