Wind turbines continue to be the most controversial of so-called “renewable” energy sources worldwide. But, you say, wind energy is surely renewable.
It blows intermittently, but it’s natural, free, renewable and climate-friendly.
That’s certainly what we hear, almost constantly. However, while the wind itself may be “renewable,” the turbines, the raw materials that go into making them, and the lands they impact certainly are not.
And a new report says harnessing the wind to generate electricity actually contributes to global warming!
Arcadia Power reports that the widely used GE 1.5-megawatt (MW) turbine is a 164-ton mini-monster with 116-foot blades on a 212-foot tower that weighs another 71 tons.
The Vestas V90 2.0-MW has 148-foot blades on a 262-foot tower and a total weight of about 267 tons. The concrete and steel rebar foundations that they sit on weigh up to 800 tons, or more.
And the newer 3.0-MW and even more powerful turbines and foundations weigh a lot more than that.
Citing National Renewable Energy Laboratory data, the U.S. Geological Survey notes that wind turbines are predominantly made of steel (which comprises 71-79% of total turbine mass), fiberglass and resin composites in the blades (11-16%), iron or cast iron (5-17%), copper (1%), aluminum (0-2%), rare earth elements (1-3%) and other materials.
Plus the concrete and rebar that anchor the turbines in the earth.
It takes enormous amounts of energy (virtually all from fossil fuels) to remove the overlying rock to get to the ores and limestone, refine and process the materials into usable metals and concrete, fabricate them into all the turbine components, and ship everything to their ultimate locations.
Petroleum for the resins and composites – and all that energy – must also be extracted from the earth, by drilling and fracking, followed by refining and manufacturing, again with fossil fuel energy.
Wind turbine transportation logistics can be a deciding factor in scheduling, costing and locating a project, Wind Power Monthly admits.
The challenge of moving equipment from factories to ports to ultimate industrial wind power generation sites has become more formidable almost by the year, as the industry has shifted to larger and larger turbines.
Offshore turbine sizes (up to 10 megawatts and 650 feet in height) present even more daunting logistical, maintenance and removal challenges.
Back in 2010, transportation costs totaled an average of 10% of the upfront capital cost of a wind project.
Transporting the nacelles (housings for the energy-generating components, including the shaft, generator, and gearing, to which the rotor and blades are attached) typically required a 19-axle truck and trailer that cannot operate using renewable energy and which a decade ago cost about $1.5 million apiece.
Those costs have continued to escalate.
Highways and city streets must often be closed down during transport to wind farm sites hundreds, even thousands, of miles away – to allow nacelles, 100-foot tower sections and 150-foot blades to pass through.
Transmission lines and transformers add still more to the costs, and the need for non-renewable materials – including more steel, copper, aluminum, and concrete.
To get wind-generated energy from largely remote locations to cities that need electricity and are eager to cash in on the 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour production tax credit, the U.S. is spending $47.9 billion to construct transmission lines through 2025.
Of that, $22.1 billion will be spent on transmission projects aimed at integrating renewable energy into the existing power grid, without making it so unstable that we get repeated blackouts.
On top of all that, wind turbines only last maybe 20 years – about half the life spans of coal, gas and nuclear power plants.
Offshore turbines last maybe 12-15 years, due to constant corrosion from constant salt spray. Then they have to be decommissioned and removed.
According to Isaac Orr, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, the cost of decommissioning a single turbine can reach half a million dollars. Then the old ones have to be replaced – with more raw materials, mining and smelting.
Recycling these materials also consumes considerable energy, when they can be recycled. Turbine blades are extremely hard, if not impossible to recycle because they are complex composites that are extremely strong and hard to break apart.
A lot of times, the blades just get cut up in large segments and dumped in landfills – if they can find landfills that want them. The massive concrete bases often just get left behind.
All these activities require incredible amounts of fossil fuel energy, raw materials, mining lands and waste products (overburden, mined-out rock, and processed ores).
How much, exactly? The wind energy industry certainly isn’t telling, wind energy promoters and environmentalist groups certainly don’t want to discuss it, and even government agencies haven’t bothered to calculate the amounts.
But shouldn’t those kinds of data be presented front and center during any discussion of what is – or is not – clean, green, free, renewable, sustainable, eco-friendly energy?
We constantly see and hear reports that the cost of wind energy per kilowatt-hour delivered to homes and businesses is becoming competitive with coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric alternatives.
But if that is the case, why do we still need all the mandates, feed-in tariffs, and other subsidies? And do those reports factor in the huge costs and environmental impacts presented here?
Amid all these terribly inconvenient facts about wind energy, it shouldn’t be too surprising that a new study destroys the industry’s fundamental claim: that wind energy helps prevent global warming.
Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy David Keith and his postdoctoral researcher, Lee Miller, recently found that heavy reliance on wind energy actually increases climate warming!
If this is so, it raises serious questions about just how much the U.S. or other nations should rely on wind power.
As the authors explain, the warming is produced because wind turbines generate electricity by extracting energy out of the air, slowing down wind and otherwise altering “the exchange of heat, moisture, and momentum between the surface and the atmosphere.”
The impact of wind on warming in the studied scenario was 10 times greater than the climate effect from solar farms, which can also have a warming impact, the two scientists said.
The study, published in the journal Joule, found that if wind power supplied all U.S. electricity demands, it would warm the surface of the continental United States by 0.24 degrees C (0.43 Fahrenheit).
That is far more than any reduction in warming achieved by totally decarbonizing the nation’s electricity sector (around 0.1 C or 0.2 F)) during the 21st century – assuming climate models are correct about the amount of warming that carbon dioxide emissions are allegedly causing.
“If your perspective is the next ten years, wind power actually has – in some respects – more climate impact than coal or gas,” says Keith, a huge wind power supporter. But, he added, “If your perspective is the next thousand years, then wind power is enormously cleaner than coal or gas.”
Of course, his analysis assumes significant warming that has yet to occur, despite the increasing use of fossil fuels by China, India, Indonesia, and other countries.
It also assumes the world will still be using increasing amounts of coal and natural gas 100 to 1,000 years from now – a highly dubious proposition.
And it ignores every point made in this article, which clearly explains why wind energy is not really cleaner than coal or gas.
Maybe, my friends, the answer is not blowing in the wind.
Duggan Flanakin is Director of Policy Research at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
To Private Citizen (Reply link is missing): The reports/articles you linked use “levelized cost” for comparing electricity sources. That term always requires context that tells what it includes. In this case it supposedly covers everything from plant construction to decommissioning. It’s not clear how much of the pre-construction materials cost and post-decommission disposal cost are included. Surely average kwh cost per year (or other time period) is a better, more informative comparator–one that weighs full life cycle costs as referenced in this article.
Now, let’s talk about what are the power plants run by diesel and coal are made of.
The researcher quoted in this article, Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy David Keith literally stated the following in his article with Lee Miller: “Wind beats coal by any environmental measure, but that doesn’t mean that its impacts are negligible”
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/large-scale-wind-power-has-its-down-side/
In short, they start off by saying that wind is superior to coal from the environmental point of view. This dispatch we have at hand here treats the rest of its content in the same way: convenient curation of facts and half-facts, a sensational jumble of numbers without side-by-side comparisons, etc.
All this stuff is easy to check; it took me 30 seconds to Google the researcher names and to conclude that this dispatch is bullshit!
So you dismiss the article because you found something negative about the author? And you decide that the numerical data it contains should be termed a “sensational jumble of numbers”? I think that’s known as wilful blindness.
Crocodile tears. Oops, I mean avian tears!
You know, this play of the dead-birds’ card by anti-AGW folks is a joke. And a sad bit of double talk. A few tall buildings kill more birds per year than all the wind generators in this country. House cats kill billions of songbirds each year in North America alone. I hardly think you really care about these birds anyway or you would be protesting their ceaseless massacre by the many other means that kill more birds than wind turbines. And have done so for hundreds of years.
“500 million to possibly over 1 billion birds are killed annually in the United States due to anthropogenic sources…”
A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions; https://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr191/psw_gtr191_1029-1042_erickson.pdf
House cats kill small birds that have high reproductive rates. Windmills may also kill small birds, but they also kill large birds with slow reproductive rates.
Wind power which requires significant resources to build and provides intermittent power is more expensive than nuclear and much more expensive than fossil fuels. Wind farms need backup fossil fuel plants for when the wind isn’t blowing. It makes more sense to just use the fossil fuel plants.
David … that’s pretty weak. Almost no one in the avid (rabid) anti-AGW end-times theory camp gave a darn about birds before this silly objection fell into their laps. Where were these bird lovers when it counted?
“How the bald eagle soared again”;
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/10/02/how-the-bald-eagle-soared-again
More important is your second point. Solar and wind generation capacity is insufficient …. at this time. Just wait a while. But that doesn’t make a case against it.
People (logically and with enlightened self-interest) were unhappy with fossil fuels for decades due to atmospheric pollution issues, mineral extraction and industrial practices, long before global warming became the new Satan.
Why would anyone want to dis wind and solar in principle (granted, siting might have its specific issues)? This is the oddity of the hypocrisy: wind and solar were always a good idea environmentally and now there are good ideas economically (lowest cost per watt). Yet now that wind are solar are touted on the AGW climate change bandwagon, one should turn against these means of electricity production?
Where I come from that’s called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The statement that renewable energy is a good idea economically is one of the most inaccurate statements that I have ever heard. The European Union has proven this. They have called for carbon import taxes to protect their industry from unfair competition from nations that don’t use as much renewable energy. The only reason they could see such a need as that their use of renewables has made everything more expensive because the cost of the energy is more expensive.
Ten years ago I was reading articles written in Europe complaining about the “carbon leak.” This is the loss of industry and the associated jobs to other nations that had not increased their cost of power with renewable energy.
Remember Georgetown Texas that uses 100% renewable energy when available. The average monthly power bill for the homes went from around to $250 a month to $1200 a month.
Private Citizen, thank you for you comments. Please continue. A diversity of opinions is beneficial. In the 1970’s there was enough concern for the Bald Eagle as well as other birds to cause DDT to be banned. The polar bear is one animal that went from just another bear to one where there was a great deal of concern due to the climate change issue. Like the Bald Eagle, the bears are doing fine.
There is no such thing as wind power. What we have is wind turbines coupled with fossil fuel generators. In order to have power 24/7, the fossil fuel generators cut in when the wind cuts out. In order to do so they can’t be in cold storage. They have to be idling just like a gasoline car engine idles. The capitalization and maintenance of redundant generating capacity is one thing that makes wind power so expensive. When wind power is said to be inexpensive, does that include the cost of everything required to make it work?
You comment of “Just wait a while” is an excellent idea on wind energy. The UK is fully committed to the reducing its emission to net zero and nuclear doesn’t seem to be in their plans. That means using solar and wind. Let’s see how it works out for them before committing ourselves to a high risk solution.
“The statement that renewable energy is a good idea economically is one of the most inaccurate statements that I have ever heard.”
David … I’m willing to be educated. The only sources I have available on comparative costs of wind to other fuel represent winds as the less expensive option per watt.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf
https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/08/insider-not-all-electricity-equal-uses-and-misuses-levelized-cost-electricity-lcoe
I am aware that on a site by site basis, the output is sporadic and needs gas to maintain a baseload supply line. This seems symbiotic and positive to me. But eventually, the sheer quantity of wind turbines across a continental distances will likely (and sooner not later) be able to supply a significant fraction of baseload sufficient to retire heavy polluting fuels… all depending of course on the grid infrastructure and how we manage the flow of electrons.
I think multiple fuels is wisely strategic (wind, sun, gas, geothermal) and frees us from expensive subsidized polluting fuels (coal, oil, biofuels, and nuclear).
I am not pro-wind et al because I am a climate change junkie. My assessment is that CO2 GHG science is inaccurate and conveniently used to stroke up paranoia so the dying nuclear industry can hold on to life. I just want cleaner air and better public health.
I think that if you can show me that wind, solar and gas are the more expensive fuels over the long run, I would still favor them. I would rather pay a premium for air, environment, and health (forget global warming and natural climate cycles that humans should well enough alone).
Most of the concerns we’ve had about fossil fuels since the 60s have actually been mitigated, although alarmist rhetoric always ignores or denies it. Improving efficiency in the use of all resources is in everyone’s interest, including that of producers. But awareness of the environmental costs of so-called clean energy has been suppressed by its evangelists. To claim that solar and wind were always a good idea environmentally sounds like evangelism, not honest appraisal.
Sorry man but you have to do better than that. Maybe it’s too much work to dig it up (your citations) but the post below is correct. Its real live energy establishment economic analysts who are showing wind and solar are cheaper per watt than fossil fuels and nuclear on a fully Levelized cost basis. Including BP and Lazard. Take away subsidies and measure the full costs of each fuel cycle and its supply chain. Its clear now that wind and solar are cheaper per watt. Can’t fight progress and down market forces.
To Private Citizen (Reply link is missing): The reports/articles you linked use “levelized cost” for comparing electricity sources. That term always requires context that tells what it includes. In this case it supposedly covers everything from plant construction to decommissioning. It’s not clear how much of the pre-construction materials cost and post-decommission disposal cost are included. Surely average kwh cost per year (or other time period) is a better, more informative comparator–one that weighs full life cycle costs as referenced in this article.
One can find numerous “studies” by alternative energy “think tanks” asserting that wind and solar have become competitive, but this is clearly belied by the facts. First of all, in countries like Germany that have made a huge effort to transform their energy generation capacities toward renewables electricity costs have soared into the blue yonder – so much so, that we now have the phenomenon of “energy poverty” in the richest country in Europe, which by now kills countless people who can no longer afford to properly heat their homes in winter (somehow, despite all the “warming”, winters continue to be cold a.f.). Recently Germany provided even more glaring evidence. After the government cut subsidies for wind power, new installations crumbled by 90% year-on-year. In other words, without subsidies there is no wind power, which ipso facto proves that it is not economically viable or even remotely competitive. If and when it becomes competitive, no government interference will be required – market forces will ensure that it thrives.
Excellent article. Not to mention the amount of birds and other wildlife these eye sores kill or displace. I never knew the massive cost and materials needed to build one and put it in place. Just shows you how utterly mad (smart people) people can be.
Back in 2015 the American Bird Conservancy(ABC)sued the Dept of the Interior and forced them to revoke a 30 year Eagle Take Permit they had grated to the Wind Power Companies and they were still under Obama back then
this is missing facts like side by side co2 emissions and recyclable content if the plants
Where are the ‘endless’ Environmental Impact studies and Lawsuits from the so called Conservationist groups? We can hardly build a road or bridge without years of Studies and Litigation yet the Wind Farm bird killing machines seem to get a free pass!
Free pass? Railroaded is more accurate. In Ontario, municipalities were denied their traditional zoning powers when Green energy came to the sticks.
Rural Ontario is Conservative, and we were abused by the citiots.
But other than all these facts wind energy is still “good”. Just ask Greta and all the other “greens” who know nothing about mining, manufacturing, and how to get electricity to market.
Shining ivory turbines , foundations of clay. The people who worship them don’t want to know.
Duggan, you seem to be turned inside out. What possible inconsistency of logic can beset you that you use anthropogenic climate change principles to make your case that anthropogenic climate change promoters are hypocrites and faulty in their arguments. So you want wind energy to contribute to global warming to prove your point that wind energy does not reduce global warming. We’ll show those stupid AGW lefties, duh!
That’s brilliant.