Posted on 10/24/2010 10:12:38 AM PDT by epithermal
European wind developers are fleeing the EU's expiring wind subsidies, shuttering factories, laying off workers, and leaving billions of Euros of sovereign debt and a continent-wide financial crisis in their wake. But their game is not over. Already they are tapping a new vein of lucre from the taxpayers and ratepayers of the United States.
-snip-
In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
How ironic that certain people don’t mind all the dead owls in exchange for wind energy, but we can’t cut down a tree where they might live.
Watch "Carbon Credits," and your wallet. This one doesn't even pretend to provide "free" anything.
It is an unashamed protection extortion racket "to prevent really really bad things from happening, if you don't pay us."
The correct word is "hypocritical."
Excellent points.
If the market doesn’t want it, isn’t willing to pay for it at a profit for the produces/suppliers, it is NOT SUSTAINABLE.
Amazing how these leftists scream about what is not sustainable but then completely turn a blind eye when that which they support is proven to be unsustainable.
Hell is too cold and too brief for these bastards.
Or, "might have lived" if they hadn't been chopped and clubbed by the windmill blades. :-)
If they can figure out the storage issue then it becomes a lot more viable in certain circumstances. The subsidy is a joke though
I have often driven by a virtual forest of windmills in southwestern Minnesota and have on more than one occasion seen every one from horizon to horizon standing idle. There is simply no way wind power could ever be a reliable or efficient means of generating electricity.
We have a forest of these windmills in eastern New Mexico. It is my understanding that the ranch land is leased to the government at $58,000. per windmill, per year. How is that sustainable, or profitable?
Minor issue: Why raise cattle? Why feed the nation? Why not destroy one of the most conservative segments of society and put them on the government tit?
Yes, I stand corrected.
NJ spent tens of millions to put up solar panels on tens of acres to generate enough power annually to power only 35 homes, when the same amount of money can be spent building a small natural gas plant that will provide power for 130,000 homes. I always tell my green friends, how long do you think the US can compete economically with solar against a country who uses natural gas???? When jobs are gone, the tax revenues to finance gov liberal programs are also gone. Some of my liberal green friends are starting to make the connection between healthy economy and its implication on tax revenues needed to fund liberal gov programs. I may not have turned them into complete small gov conservatives, but at least this is in the right direction to make them understand taxes do not drop out of the sky.
Maybe developments in battery technology will allow the wind energy to get off the government tit? They are slowly beginning to advance battery tech, such as this article:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-10/ru-ss101310.php
I remember reading in Science magazine about a molten salt battery that is much more efficient, but can’t find a link to it anymore. I think development work was going on in Europe.
In some places other energy storage schemes may make more
sense than batteries, like storing compressed air underground, flywheels, etc.
Just wait till this stupid boondoggle is over. 20 years from now those rusting motionless monstrocities will be a nice legacy to Obama.
“Sustainability” is religous doctrine for the lefties, but the situation is much worse than what you guys have rightly pointed out.
Just about everything the Left pushes most strongly is unsustainable, but not only do they not see that, they refuse to believe it.
To mention a few:
Social security - 10 to 20 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilites: unsustainable.
Medicare - 50 - 70 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities: unsustainable.
Public employee union pensions: tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: unsustainalbe.’’
Govenrment motors: tens of billions of dollars of debt, with declining sales and exploitative union contracts: unsustainable.
The federal budget - trillion dollar deficits, with 100’s of billions in interest payments each year, as far as the eye can see: unsustainable.
These pr*cks will rag on me to use a cloth bag in the grocery store, but when it comes to consequential public policy, it’s all unsustainable.
Yeah, those dead turbines certainly are much more beautiful than oil wells. sarc. they look almost identical.
There are spans of days when the turbines aorund here do not turn, so batteries had better have a helluva lot of charge capacity. That is why the city in which I live has natural gas plants and the Greenies in Austin get the pleasure of the wind turbines (never mind that about 1/4 of the generated power is lost in transmission from here to Austin).
At least pumpjacks are not 300+ feet tall. :-)
ping
Good for confronting your lib friends, maybe sanity is catching. Here is a statement regarding wind energy that is also troubling:
““In the longer run, the intermittency of wind and the fact that wind generation satisfies base-load demand more than intermediate or peaking loads should discourage investment in base-load coal and nuclear capacity,” he said.”
So, in this scenario all the wasted money on wind is delaying investment in coal and nuclear which is spooky if it comes true.
And they don’t generate those low-frequency booms that the turbine blades create. I’ve read reports of this booming sound being heard 3-5 miles away.
Come visit some of the windfarms around here. You get a combination of a low-frequency whirring combined with a “whoosh” from the blades. Also, there have been farms and ranches that have had the joy of fires from the transmission lines when they have been snapped in wind storms.
I am no fan of wind energy, but if, and only if, it is economically feasible would I consider it. As for batteries, I agree they may not be the answer. But, maybe compressed air storage would work. It appears Texas is playing with it because of all the old salt dome mines there:
http://www.seco.cpa.state.tx.us/re_wind-reserve.htm
Speaking of Austin, I read an interesting discussion in the book “Gusher of Lies” that said the nuke plant nearby was even cheaper than natural gas when we had that gas price spike a few years back. I would bank on nuclear before wind.
Our local Natural Gas powerplants are quiter.
Our local Natural Gas powerplants are quieter.
That is the problem, it is not feasible for commercial grade power needs in a free market system. If you live in a rural area and wish to generate your own power, then it can play a role. Our cities and industries need constant, reliable baseload capacity. Also, most wind farms are far, far away from the final customer, so you lose a lot of generated power from source to customer. Let us not even get into security issues related to windfarms.
I, too, would place my bets on nuclear power before commercial wind and solar.
bump
Actually the correct word is is misinformation or mythology.
Altamont Pass windmills kill about 5000 birds per year.
550 million birds are killed each year by buildings
130 million birds are killed each year by powerlines
80 million birds are killed each year by cars
67 million birds are killed each year by pesticides
nobody knows how many are killed by feral cats.
How do you know all of this?
However, the utilities folks in the Smart Grid development effort (the one directed by NIST under the auspices of the White House per the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007) are looking at electric vehicle batteries to bridge the relatively short gap between a sudden reduction of wind/solar and when they can get other generation spun up and online.
It is not a storage problem so much as it is a transportation problem. After they build them they need to connect them to the regular electric grid. Most of the time that is expensive. Ask T. Boone Pickens who owns the largest wind farm in the country. I wouldn’t be surprised if his don’t go silent if he can’t get someone else to lay the lines for him.
Easy, look it up on the internet.
Do a search using the key words birds killed by windmills cars buildings power transmission lines pesticides cats
“ERCOT reported that wind power production plummeted Tuesday evening from about 1,700 megawatts to about 300 megawatts.”
About the same as a nuclear power plant tripping off-line.
The collection portion moves among and around the CREZs collecting the power generated by the windfarms that will be located within the numerous CREZs. Pickins' wind farm was or is to be located in the Roberts County CREZ.
The cross state portion are two lines, one to DFW, and the other to San Antonio Austin.
The distribution portion would be those lines that split off the main trunk lines that distribute the power to various areas around DFW and SAA.
Currently the project is in site approval with the PUC and the projected completion date is in 2013.
Thanks for the excellent information. That caused me to do a little research on my own. It seems that things are moving along pretty well and, as you said, have been in the works for several years. It seems the only possible speed bumps ahead are any actions by environmental groups to impede the progress.
The only thing that might appease them is to put the windmills themselves underground. :-)
Wind power juts like ethonal production is probably workable on a small scale right at the location, such as out on a large corn farm etc where you dont have to transport the silage and the power can be used right there. But these sort of technologies just dont scale up up and the greeneies dont seem to be able to get their minds around that.
There is simply no way wind or solar could ever supply reliably or not, all of our energy needs.
How about giving some reference sites to check out?
Go ahead
I've said for years the shredded poultry downstream should be gathered as food for the victims of the Baraqqi depression.
Go ahead
Go ahead and what?
I thought you had something you wanted to add, a link or something?
Looking for your links?
Well...( no pun intended..) they can be little noisy bassturds though...
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