[Firestarter]

Wind power fraud

We’ve been fooled into believing that electricity produced by wind is better for the environment than conventional energy sources.

For nearly the last 40 years, world energy demand has grown at about 2% a year.
Since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per year, we would need to built an additional 350,000 per year, just to supply the growth in energy consumption. That’s 150% of the amount that was built in the world since the early 2000s!

That many turbines would require a land area half the size of the British Isles, including Ireland (61,000 sq mi) – to be build every single year.
In 50 years this would amount to a land area about half the size of Russia covered with wind farms (3.05 million sq mi).
Please note that this would only cover the increase in energy consumption!

In reality the vast majority of generated energy in the third world is from burning “traditional biomass”: sticks, logs, charcoal and dung burned for cooking food.
Even in rich countries with subsidised wind and solar energy, most of the “renewable energy” in fact comes from wood and hydro.

It takes a lot of energy to build wind turbines, which apart from the fiberglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. Coal is needed to make the steel and cement.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 metric tons, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. They need about half a ton of coal to make a ton of steel. Add another 25 tons of coal for the cement and you’re talking about 150 metric tons of coal per wind turbine.

If they would build 350,000 wind turbines a year (just to keep up with increasing energy demand), they would need 50 million metric tons of coal a year more than being mined now. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.

If you look at these numbers, you can only conclude that it is utterly futile to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone reduce emissions, without destroying the planet (that´s besides the huge number of birds being chopped up in the blades of the turbines): http://rodmartin.org/utter-complete-tota...ind-power/
(archived here: http://archive.is/PRoXo)


Then there´s the cost...
Offshore wind is very expensive. In 2017, the first U.S. offshore wind farm on Rhode Island cost a whopping $150,000 per household powered!

In 2018, Virginia politicians approved an offshore wind project at an estimated cost of $300 million.
Virginians will first pay 25 times the U.S. market price for the turbines and then pay 78 cents/kilowatt-hour for their intermittent electricity. That’s 26 times the 3 cents per kWh wholesale price for coal, gas, hydroelectric or nuclear electricity in the Commonwealth!

Because turbines age, onshore wind electricity output declines by 16% per decade of operation.
Natural gas plants have 30-40 year lifetimes, while wind turbines last only 15-20 years, or even less for offshore wind farms (due to the weather conditions).

Removing (decommissioning) wind turbines is also very expensive.
Virginia’s turbines will be 27 miles from the coast (which is even more expensive to remove). Removing an industrial-scale “wind farm” could cost billions, and could double the cost of wind power.
One study estimates that it will cost $565,000 per megawatt to remove Europe’s offshore turbines — or about $3.4 million for each new generation 6-MW turbine.

Because wind varies from second to second, day to day, year to year, you can´t rely on wind power when it´s needed most.
Industrial wind promoters claim turbines generate electricity about a third of the time. Energy experts put that output at 20-30% or even lower, depending on location.

From an economic, environmental and energy perspective, wind energy is unsustainable: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201...-about-to/
(archived here: http://archive.is/A5TwX)