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Old June 11th, 2012 #1
Dawn Cannon
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Default Wind turbines

Putting this one in "scams" because let's face it, G.E. need keeping an eye on, and windfarms are a huge scam.

I thought we had a thread on wind turbines, but can't find it.

GE plans $900 million investment in Turkey


http://uk.news.yahoo.com/ge-plans-90...0--sector.html

Quote:
General Electric Co. will invest $900 million in Turkey's infrastructure development and innovation projects over the next three years, John Rice, Vice Chairman and President of GE global growth and operations said on Monday in Istanbul.

GE will produce its wind turbines in Turkey during these three years, Turkish Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan told reporters at the same conference.
 
Old June 11th, 2012 #2
Bruce Rideout
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'Investment'
Translation; Heres a rape drug in your drink.

Sorry for my callousness, Dawn.
More like: Here comes a SmartMeter to every Turkish household and Chicken Coop. No Opting Out.

Not to worry, Syria and Iran may be erecting their Flags over ZioTurkey soon.
 
Old June 21st, 2012 #3
Hugo Böse
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Those things are visual pollution of the landscape. Government by decree forced these things upon hapless electricity consumers for the benefit of large landowners and the green mafia.
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Old March 13th, 2013 #4
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Default turbines

Turbines are great if homeowners had them. But they take those huge turbines and then they have to be maintained and then the electricity has to be run for miles. If you have a wind turbine at home it just makes sense. If the wind blows you just run your stuff and can charge batteries, but these huge wind farms are total bs. They are eyesores and cost moe than they produce.
 
Old February 16th, 2014 #5
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The towering symbols of a fading religion, over 14,000 wind turbines, abandoned, rusting, slowly decaying. When it is time to clean up after a failed idea, no green environmentalists are to be found.
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Old May 26th, 2014 #6
Dawn Cannon
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Default EU Elections Signal The Fall of Climate Fraud...

EU Elections Signal The Fall of Climate Fraud...
...as predicted here a month ago.
I have stayed up examining the exit polls for the European Union Parliament where 28 countries compete to gain seats.

Preliminary results suggest that The French National Front and UK Independence Party (unknown in the EU parliament) have gained many seats, while the three big liberal, leftists and Green parties all lost seats.

This outcome gives great powers to those who want to abolish the EU as a union and in particular it places the future of the EU green energy drive in disarray, as most these new parties have clear anti-green energy policies.

Take UKIP (United Kingdom Independent Party) energy policy for example;
It argues that the theory of man-made climate change is unproven and implausible, and that even if the theory were valid, the costs of the Climate Change Act and other measures designed to reduce climate change will greatly exceed any foreseeable benefits

UKIP believes that the UK's current energy policy, dictated by Brussels, with its heavy reliance on wind, is seriously undermining the UK economy and driving jobs, industry and investment off-shore. It is forcing millions of households and pensioners into fuel poverty. And over-dependence on renewables threatens security of supply, and raises the probability of electricity shortages by the end of the decade
http://www.ukipmeps.org/news_608_UKI...gy-policy.html

The EU has been the epi center for climate fraud where trillions of dollars worth of the taxpayers money has been pilfered in the pursuit of the so called "green alternatives and renewables".

This community sees these shocking election results as a good start to the dismantling of climate nonsense in the EU and wishes all the best for the new wining political contenders.

https://plus.google.com/+CyrusManz/posts/RjM4vEvWvjc

This "forbidden topic" actually made the national news pages. Any man made climate change denial is usually deemed conspiracy theory.
 
Old February 6th, 2020 #7
Dawn Cannon
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Default Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills

A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.

The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones nestled against one another.

“That’s the end of it for this winter,” said waste technician Michael Bratvold, watching a bulldozer bury them forever in sand. “We’ll get the rest when the weather breaks this spring.”

Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.

Built to withstand hurricane-force winds, the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet under.

“The wind turbine blade will be there, ultimately, forever,” said Bob Cappadona, chief operating officer for the North American unit of Paris-based Veolia Environnement SA, which is searching for better ways to deal with the massive waste. “Most landfills are considered a dry tomb.”

“The last thing we want to do is create even more environmental challenges.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...p-in-landfills
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Old February 6th, 2020 #8
Hugo Böse
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dawn Cannon View Post
A wind turbine’s blades
The concrete foundations are another massive problem, they can weigh as much as 50 to a 100 tons or more and consume quite a bit of land and thus are quite expensive to remove. In Germany for example subsidies for wind turbines expire 20 years after they were built, wind turbines in Germany are uneconomical without subsidies, so after subsidies end their operators shut them down, and often declare bankruptcy.
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Old February 6th, 2020 #9
Dawn Cannon
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugo Böse View Post
The concrete foundations are another massive problem, they can weigh as much as 50 to a 100 tons or more and consume quite a bit of land and thus are quite expensive to remove. In Germany for example subsidies for wind turbines expire 20 years after they were built, wind turbines in Germany are uneconomical without subsidies, so after subsidies end their operators shut them down, and often declare bankruptcy.
Pure insanity.

I drove through Germany at night once and it was a black and red vision of hell with all those damn things lighted up. Couldn't see the sky at all. His beloved Deutschland defecated upon by foul hand.
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The Bloodbath is Coming
7.6 billion savages multiplying and running wild over the earth, devouring everything in sight, trampling over every other lifeform without mercy or compassion.
 
Old February 6th, 2020 #10
Dawn Cannon
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Default Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy

Matt Ridley
13 May 2017
9:00 AM


The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.

Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.

As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.

It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.

Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.

The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/...global-energy/
 
Old December 14th, 2021 #12
Dawn Cannon
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Default How the wind power boom is driving deforestation in the Amazon

What does the deforestation of balsa wood in Ecuador’s Amazon region have to do with wind power generation in Europe? There is a perverse link between the two: a drive for renewable energy has boosted global demand for a prized species of wood that grows in the world’s largest rainforest. As Europe and China increase the construction of blades for wind turbines, balsa trees are being felled to accelerate an energy transition driven by the need to decarbonize the global economy.

In the indigenous territories of the Ecuadorian Amazon, people began to notice an uptick in international demand for balsa wood from 2018 onwards. Balsa is very flexible but tough at the same time, and offers a light yet durable option for long-term wind power production. The typical blades of a wind turbine are currently around 80 meters long, and the new generation of blades can extend up to 100 meters. That means about 150 cubic meters of wood are required to build a single unit, according to calculations by the United States National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Ecuador is the world’s main exporter of balsa wood, holding 75% of the global market. Major players include Plantabal S.A. in Guayaquil, which has around 10,000 hectares dedicated to the cultivation of balsa wood destined for export. With the boom in demand starting in 2018, this company and many others struggled to cope with the quantity of international orders.

This increase has led directly to the deforestation of the Amazon. Irregular and illegal logging has proliferated by those who have reacted to the scarcity of wood grown for timber by chopping down the virgin balsa that grows on the islands and riverbanks of the Amazon. The impact on the indigenous people who live in the area has been as devastating as mining, oil and rubber were in their day.

In the province of Pastaza on the border with Peru, the accelerated construction of a highway through Shuar people’s territory to link the western city of Puyo with a pier on the Pastaza River generated controversy in 2019. At the gateway to the Amazon, the Shuar and Achuar peoples perceived the road as infrastructure for extraction and deforestation, not as a contribution to the development of their communities. But the project went ahead regardless without their consent, and the road was completed in November 2019.

Thousands of kilometers away, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was telling an audience in Brussels about the European Union’s ambitious European Green Deal, which aims to foster a transition to a carbon neutral economy to tackle climate change. Von der Leyen presented the plan with these words: “The European Green Deal is Europe’s new growth strategy. It will cut emissions while also creating jobs and improving our quality of life. For that we need investment. Investment in research, innovation, green technologies. To pull this off, we will deliver a Sustainable Europe Investment Plan which will support one trillion euros of investment over the next decade.”

Wind power fever has driven a fever for balsa wood, with devastating consequences for Ecuador’s indigenous communities. In September of this year in Achuar territory, the total deforestation of balsa trees was clearly visible on the Pastaza River, and the loggers had moved on to neighboring Peru. Although prices were already beginning to drop, the loggers continued to travel up the Pastaza with large canoes to unload the logs in Copataza, where they were put onto trucks and driven away along the new highway.

In June, Achuar indigenous leaders began to speak out. “Don’t make any investment, even if you cut down balsa you will not be able to remove it, and it will not be sold,” they posted on Facebook, adding that they would not allow the balsa wood to leave their territory for the city. “This is an urgent call for us to understand the serious problems this brings to neighboring countries such as Peru. The loggers are causing division between brothers.” By then, it was already too late.

Sharamentsa is a community that has bet on energy innovation itself, with a solar-powered canoe project. It had resisted opening its islands to loggers, but a local leader bowed to pressure and sold off the community’s balsa trees, causing an uproar and a clear division among families.

The felling of balsa trees also has consequences for the islands’ ecosystem and for the river. The loggers trail alcohol, drugs and prostitution in their wake, and contaminate extraction sites with plastic, cans, machinery, gasoline and oil. They abandon used chainsaw chains, eat the turtles and chase away parrots, toucans and other birds that feed on the flowers of the balsa trees. Illegal deforestation has profound impacts on the balance of flora and fauna, pushing the ecosystem to the breaking point.

Wind turbine blades are mainly made from polymethacrylamide (PMI) foam, balsa wood and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) foam. A typical design will use balsa for the load-bearing part near the center of the blade, and PVC foam as it approaches the tip of the blades. However, there is increasingly a need to build longer and lighter blades, as well as to ensure a reliable supply chain. PET, a low-density foam generated from plastic bottles, is a substitute. Danish company LM WindPower has used PET since 2017. “Today we use PET foam in blades of more than 80 meters,” said Paul Dansereau, a materials engineer at the company, adding that 60% of this material is recycled.
 
Old December 14th, 2021 #13
Dawn Cannon
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The social and environmental impact of wind farms does not end with the deforestation of the Amazon basin, but extends to the territories in countries like Spain where they eventually operate. These are sparsely populated communities with constant winds, and where local opposition is scattered by low population density and isolation.

Matarraña, an area in the Spanish province of Teruel, is home to several wind farm projects that are slated for construction in the short term. Spain has pledged to increase wind energy production, which currently accounts for 21.9% of the electricity consumed in the country. The local population feels powerless in the face of the arrival of million-euro projects that affect plants, wildlife, the landscape and even social harmony. “We have a debate between the need for renewable energies, where wind farms have a very clear role, and the need to preserve the territory, the landscape. This does not fit together very well,” said Eduard Susanna, an olive oil producer.

Esperanza Miravete, a geography and history teacher in Valjunquera, a town of 338 inhabitants in Matarraña, criticizes the “very strong aggression” of wind power companies on the territory. “There is no one protecting the landscape, and there is no natural park or anything that could stop an industrial project here,” she said.

Wind turbines are a key component of the energy transition within the framework of the European Green Deal, but the production of balsa wood for blades and the rise of large wind farms in rural areas present problems for diverse ecosystems and host communities.

The energy transition poses a green paradox, and wind power companies must be able to provide a clear answer to this question. When Europeans turn on the heating this winter, they have a right to know just how clean their energy really is.

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-...he-amazon.html
 
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