Wind Farms - The Story

 

Right now the average wind farm is about 150 turbines. 

Each wind turbine needs 80 gallons of oil as lubricant and we're not talking about vegetable oil, this is a PAO synthetic oil based on crude...  12,000 gallons of it. That oil needs to  be replaced once a year.

In America, it is estimated that a little over 3,800 turbines would be needed to power a city the size of New York... That's 304,000 gallons of refined oil  for just one city.  Now you have to calculate  every city across each nation, large and small, to find the grand total of yearly oil consumption from "clean" energy.  Where do you think all that oil is going to come from, the oil fairies?

Not to mention the fact that the large equipment needed to build these wind farms run on petroleum. As well as the equipment required for installation,  service, maintenance, and eventual  removal.

And just exactly how eco-friendly is wind energy anyway?  Each turbine requires a footprint of 1.5 acres, so a wind farm of 150 turbines needs  225 acres; In order to power a city the  size of NYC you'd need 57,000 acres; and who knows the astronomical amount of land you would need to power the World's great cities All of which would have to be clear-cut land because trees create a barrier & turbulence that  interferes with the 20mph sustained wind  velocity necessary for the turbine to work properly (also keep in mind that not all states are suitable for such sustained winds) Boy, cutting down all those trees is gonna anger a lot of green-loving tree-huggers.

Let's talk about disposal now.   The lifespan of a modern, top quality, highly efficient wind turbine is 20 years.

After that, then what? What happens to those gigantic fiber composite blades?   They cannot economically be reused, refurbished, reduced, repurposed,  or recycled so guess what..? It's  off to special landfills they go.

And guess what else..? They're already running out of these special landfill spaces for the blades that have already exceeded their usefulness.  Seriously! Those blades are anywhere from  120 ft. to over 200 ft. long and there are 3 per turbine. And that's with only 7% of the nation currently being supplied with wind energy. Just imagine if we had the other 93% of the nation on the wind grid... 20 years  from now you'd have all those unusable  blades with no place to put them.. Then 20 A years after that, and 20 years after that, and so on.

Golly gee, how green is that?

Oops, I almost forgot about the 500,000 birds that are killed each year from wind turbine blade collisions in America alone; most of which are endangered hawks,  falcons, owls, geese, ducks and eagles but in Australia includes wedge-tailed eagles and not to mention the orange-bellied parrot.   Apparently smaller birds are more agile and able to dart and dodge out of the way of the spinning blades, whereas the larger soaring birds aren't so lucky.

I'm sure the wildlife conservationist folks are just ecstatic about that.

I'm so glad the wind energy people are looking out for the world.  Thank You Sarah Hanson-Young. And this doesn’t take into account the  need for each turbine to operate at 75% efficiency for  a minimum of 60 years just to off-set the co2 emissions created in its manufacture; but hang on, each turbine only has a life expectancy of 20 years . . . oops!!!