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If we build them out of wood, large wind turbines could become a textbook example of the circular economy.

Illustration: Eva Miquel for Low-tech Magazine.

For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal. When – electricity producing – wind turbines appeared in the 1880s, the materials didn’t change. It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills.

New wood production technology and design makes it possible to build larger wind turbines almost entirely out of wood again – not just the blades, but also the rest of the structure. This would solve the waste issue and make the manufacturing of wind turbines largely independent of fossil fuels and mined materials. A forest planted in between the wind turbines could provide the wood for the next generation of wind turbines.

How Sustainable is a Windmill Blade?

Wind turbines are considered to be a clean and sustainable source of power. However, while they can indeed generate electricity with lower CO2-emissions than fossil fuel power plants, they also produce a lot of waste. This is easily overlooked, because roughly 90% of the mass of a large wind turbine is steel, mainly concentrated in the tower. Steel is commonly recycled and this explains why wind turbines have very short energy payback times – the recycled steel can be used to produce new wind turbine parts, which greatly lowers the energy required during the manufacturing process.

However, wind turbine blades are made from light-weight plastic composite materials, which are voluminous and impossible to recycle…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Insane Footage Shows Tornado Destroying Wind Farm In Iowa

May 23, 2024

Insane Footage Shows Tornado Destroying Wind Farm In Iowa

Shocking footage from Iowa this evening shows multiple tornadoes wreaking havoc on massive wind turbines. This is yet another reminder that wind is not a reliable power source.

Here’s the aftermath.

Two months ago, a solar farm in Texas with hundreds of acres of ground-based panels was destroyed by a hail storm.

**Hail-shattered panels at the solar farm in Fort Bend County, Texas** (FOX26 and Houston KRIV via Fox News)

Despite the evident challenges and risks, radical leftists continue pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer funds into unreliable green energy.

… and perfect timing! “Twisters,” a standalone sequel to the 1996 film “Twister,” is set to debut this summer.

Build It, And The Wind Won’t Come

May 2, 2024

Build It, And The Wind Won’t Come

Weather-dependent generation sources are…weather dependent: Last year, despite adding 6.2 GW of new capacity, U.S. wind production dropped by 2.1%.

**Damaged wind turbines at the Punta Lima wind project, Naguabo, Puerto Rico, 2018. Photo: Wikipedia.**

Three years ago, in the wake of Winter Storm Uri, the alt-energy lobby and their many allies in the media made sure not to blame wind energy for the Texas blackouts. The American Clean Power Association (2021 revenue: $32.1 million) declared frozen wind turbines “did not cause the Texas power outages” because they were “not the primary cause of the blackouts. Most of the power that went offline was powered by gas or coal.”

NPR parroted that line, claiming, “Blaming wind and solar is a political move.” The Texas Tribune said it was wrong to blame alt-energy after Winter Storm Uri because “wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.” The outlet also quoted one academic who said that natural gas was “failing in the most spectacular fashion right now.” Texas Tribune went on to explain, “Only 7% of ERCOT’s forecasted winter capacity, or 6 gigawatts, was expected to come from various wind power sources across the state.”

In other words, there was no reason to expect the 33 GW of wind capacity that Texas had to deliver because, you know, no one expected wind energy to produce much power. Expectations? Mr. October? Playoff Jamal? Who needs them?

But what happens when you build massive amounts of wind energy capacity and it doesn’t deliver — not for a day or a week, but for six months, or even an entire year? T…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Britain’s Net-Zero Disaster and the Wind Power Scam

December 27, 2023

Britain’s Net-Zero Disaster and the Wind Power Scam

“This is not about complicated issues of cryptocurrency,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos declared in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, after accusing the defendant of building FTX on a “pyramid of deceit.” Much the same can be said about the foundations of Britain’s net-zero experiment. Energy is complicated, and electricity is essential to modern society and our quality of life, but as with FTX, the underlying story is straightforward: Wind power and net zero are built on a pyramid of deceit.

Net zero was sold to Parliament and the British people on claims that wind-power costs were low and falling. This was untrue: Wind-power costs are high and have been rising. In the net-zero version of “crypto will make you rich,” official analyses produced by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility rely on the falsehood that wind power is cheap, that net zero would have minimal costs, and that it could boost productivity and economic growth. None of these has any basis in reality.

The push for net zero began in 2019, when the UK’s Climate Change Committee produced a report urging the government to adopt the policy. Part of the justification was historic climate guilt. In the words of committee chair Lord Deben, Britain had been “one of the largest historical contributors to climate change.” But the key economic justification for raising Britain’s decarbonization from 80 percent to 100 percent by 2050—i.e., net zero—was “rapid cost reductions during mass deployment for key technologies,” notably in offshore wind. These illusory cost reductions, the committee claimed, “have made tighter emission reduction targets achievable at the same costs as previous looser targets.” It was green snake oil.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Canada’s offshore wind resources are huge

January 17, 2022

Canada’s offshore wind resources are huge

Nuclear energy is not the solution to achieving Canada’s emission reduction targets. Offshore wind power is safer, less costly, and carries none of the risks of nuclear technology.

Canada’s offshore wind could deliver more energy than nuclear power. The aging CANDU nuclear reactors are being refurbished at substantial cost in an effort to keep them up and running for a few more years. But this is only a stopgap measure.

The six reactors at Pickering will be shut down before 2024; the reactors at Bruce, Darlington and Lepreau will continue to generate power for perhaps a decade or so; but the era of power generation from the CANDU reactors in Canada is drawing to a close.

Canada has committed to reducing its emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) by 40 to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, and to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. The federal government has made it clear that it considers nuclear power essential for meeting these goals. In 2020, minister Seamus O’Regan, at that time the minister of natural resources in the federal government, stated in a keynote address to the Canadian Nuclear Association, “Our government understands the importance of nuclear energy in meeting our climate change goals…We are placing nuclear energy front and centre.”

But the nuclear technology the federal government is pinning its hopes on is not the CANDU design. The concept now being strongly promoted by the government is small modular reactors (SMRs). An action plan has been launched; the obligatory roadmap has been drafted and published.

At the present time, this action plan is more wishful thinking than a realistic scenario. No prototype SMR has been constructed; the final design has not even been selected from the ten technical proposals currently under consideration. The government’s claim that SMRs will help Canada meet its 2030 emission reduction targets is simply not credible.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

54 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels

February 4, 2021

54 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels

Source: Leonard, T. 2012. Broken down and rusting, is this the future of Britain’s ‘wind rush’? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html

Preface. Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable. Nor can electricity generate the high heat required in manufacturing for smelting of metals, glass, and other components. Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will use fossil fuels to crush it and permeate it with toxic petro-chemicals to extract the metal from the ore. Then the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.

Here are the topics covered below in this long post:

Windmills require petroleum every single step of their life cycle. If they can’t replicate themselves using wind turbine generated electricity, they are not sustainable
SCALE. Too many windmills needed to replace fossil fuels
SCALE. Wind turbines can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossils
Not enough rare earth metals and enormous amounts of cement, steel, and other materials required
Not enough dispatchable power to balance wind intermittency and unreliability

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UK Grid Warns Of Electricity Shortage Due To Drop In Wind

October 16, 2020

UK Grid Warns Of Electricity Shortage Due To Drop In Wind

The UK’s electricity grid operator has warned of a short supply over the next few days due to generator outages and a lull in autumn winds.

The National Grid said on Oct. 14 that it was exploring various measures to create a buffer to avoid potential outages, like the one last summer that left 1 million homes without power.

“We’re forecasting tight margins on the electricity system over the next few days owing to a number of factors including weather, import and export levels and availability of generators over periods of the day with higher demand,” the National Grid said in a statement.

“Unusually low wind output coinciding with a number of generator outages means the cushion of spare capacity we operate the system with has been reduced.”

Power outages in the UK are rare. The last blackout was over a year ago and lasted for only one hour.

In an update on Oct. 15, the National Grid said that margins are currently “adequate” and it will continue to monitor the situation through the weekend.

According to the National Grid, last month one-fifth of the power supply came from wind, “in spite of unusually calm British weather during the middle of September.”

The latest announcement may fan concerns about over-reliance on wind power, which critics say is unreliable compared to gas or nuclear power.

Growth in Renewable Energy

Renewable energy has been a rapidly growing source of electricity in the UK. According to government data, 47 percent of UK electricity generation came from renewables in the first quarter of 2020, compared to 36 percent from the same time in the previous year.

A maintenance boat works next to the turbines of the new Burbo Bank offshore wind farm in the mouth of the River Mersey on May 12, 2008, in Liverpool, England. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rolling blackouts in California show how reliance on solar and wind power can backfire

August 22, 2020

Rolling blackouts in California show how reliance on solar and wind power can backfire

(Natural News) California issued its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years last week as the state’s grid operator tried to keep the power system from complete collapse in the midst of a heat wave, and some are pointing out that the situation demonstrates the failures of green energy.

The rolling blackouts affected upwards of 2 million Californians. Many of the outages took place in the afternoon, when power demand peaked as people starting turning up their air conditioning at the same time that solar power supplies started slowing down as the sun set.

The state’s three biggest utilities – Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, and San Diego Gas & Electric – cut off power to homes and businesses for roughly an hour at a time until the close of an emergency declaration, and this was followed by a second outage.

On top of that, erratic output from the state’s wind farms failed to make up the gap. Around a third of the state’s electricity comes from renewable sources thanks to state law mandates, and these alternatives proved incapable of keeping up during peak power usage. In the past, utilities and grid operators in the state bought extra electricity from other states when it fell short, but the vast size of the heat wave meant that other states were also reaching their limits and had none to spare.

Governor Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation into the outages seen in the state over the weekend, vowing to uncover the cause. However, Republican Assemblyman Jim Patterson of Fresno, who serves as the Committee on Utilities and Energy’s Vice Chair, said that the problem can be traced to California’s reduced dependence on natural gas.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘A Breath of Fresh Air’: Offshore Wind Power Could Produce More Electricity Than World Uses

October 28, 2019

‘A Breath of Fresh Air’: Offshore Wind Power Could Produce More Electricity Than World Uses

“Let’s get going!”

Shanghai Donghai Bridge's 100mw offshore wind power project is China's first national offshore wind power demonstration project in the early morning light of morning in Shanghai, Oct. 4, 2019. — Shanghai Donghai Bridge’s 100mw offshore wind power project is China’s first national offshore wind power demonstration project in the early morning light of morning in Shanghai, Oct. 4, 2019. (Photo: Costfoto/Barcroft Media/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)

A new report from the International Energy Agency released Friday claims that wind power could be a $1 trillion business by 2040 and that the power provided by the green technology has the potential to outstrip global energy needs.

“Talk about a breath of fresh air,” tweeted writer Steven E. de Souza.

The IEA report looks at the business of wind power and opines that as investment increases and the technology becomes cheaper, the sector could explode.

The IEA finds that global offshore wind capacity may increase 15-fold and attract around $1 trillion of cumulative investment by 2040. This is driven by falling costs, supportive government policies and some remarkable technological progress, such as larger turbines and floating foundations. That’s just the start—the IEA report finds that offshore wind technology has the potential to grow far more strongly with stepped-up support from policy makers.

“Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation, but its potential is vast,” said IEA executive director Fatih Birol.

It would take a major infrastructural commitment to develop wind power to the point that the renewable energy resource could take over the majority of global energy needs, but it’s not impossible. As The Guardian pointed out Friday, “if windfarms were built across all useable sites which are no further than 60km (37 miles) off the coast, and where coastal waters are no deeper than 60 metres, they could generate 36,000 terawatt hours of renewable electricity a year.”

“This would easily meeting the current global demand for electricity of 23,000 terawatt hours,” added The Guardian.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Getting Real About Green Energy: An honest analysis of what it CAN’T promise

October 12, 2019

Getting Real About Green Energy: An honest analysis of what it CAN’T promise

I want to be optimistic about the future. I really do.

But there’s virtually no chance of the world transitioning gently to an alternative energy-powered future.

These Are The ‘Good Old Days’

I’m often asked where I stand on wind, solar and other alternative energy sources.

My answer is: I love them. But they’re incapable of enabling our society to smoothly slip over to powering itself by other means.

They’re not going to “save us”.

Some people are convinced otherwise. If we can just fight off the evil oil companies, get our act together, and install a national alternative energy system infrastructure, we’ll be just fine. Meaning that we”ll be able to continue to live as we do today, but powered fully by clean renewable energy.

That’s just not going to happen. At least, not without a lot of painful disruption and sacrifice.

The top three reasons why are:

Math
Human behavior
Time, scale, & cost

I walk through the detail below. I’m doing so to debunk the magical thinking behind the current “Green Revolution” because I fear it offers a false promise.

Look, I’m a huge fan of renewable energy. And I’m 1,000% in favor of weaning the world off of its toxic addiction to fossil fuels.

But we have to be eyes wide open about our future prospects. Deluding ourselves with “feel good” but unrealistic expectations about green energy will result in the same sort of poor decisions, malinvestment, and crushed dreams as fossil-based system has.

As we constantly repeat here at Peak Prosperity: Energy is everything.

Without as much available, the future is going to be exceptionally difficult compared to the present. Which is why I call the time we’re living in now The Good Old Days.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China’s Renewable Boom Hits The Wall

September 30, 2019

China’s Renewable Boom Hits The Wall

When earlier this year China announced subsidies for 22.79 GW of new solar power capacity, those following the country’s renewable energy story must have started to worry. The capacity subsidized is half the amount approved in 2017, at 53 GW. And chances are that solar and wind additions will continue to fall.

Subsidies are one reason. In January, Beijing said it will only approve solar power projects if they are cost-competitive with coal. Judging by the size of subsidies announced in July, more than 22 GW in projects can boast cost-competitiveness with coal.

Yet there is another reason: curtailment. China-based journalist Michael Standaert wrote in a recent story for Yale Environment 360 that China’s solar and wind farms continue to produce electricity that is wasted because there is not enough transmission capacity.

Renewable energy is a top priority for China as it fights one of the worst air pollution levels in the world while subject to an uncomfortably high degree of reliance on energy imports, namely oil and gas. At the same time, it is one of the biggest—if not the single biggest—driver of global energy demand as its middle class grows fast and with it, energy demand. Now, it seems, energy demand is taking the upper hand.

China has substantially increased subsidies for shale gas exploration and methane separation from coal, Standaert writes. He also quotes a former IEA official as saying, “Though China is the largest clean energy market in the world, wind and solar only accounted for 5.2 percent and 2.5 percent of China’s national power generation in 2018.”

What’s more, Kevin Tu, now a fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, tells Standaert that “Against the backdrop of an ongoing U.S.-China trade war and a slowing Chinese economy, political priority of climate change in China is unlikely to become very high in the near future, indicating great difficulties for Beijing to further upgrade its climate ambitions.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rethinking Renewable Mandates

August 6, 2019

Rethinking Renewable Mandates

Powering the world’s economy with wind, water and solar, and perhaps a little wood sounds like a good idea until a person looks at the details. The economy can use small amounts of wind, water and solar, but adding these types of energy in large quantities is not necessarily beneficial to the system.

While a change to renewables may, in theory, help save world ecosystems, it will also tend to make the electric grid increasingly unstable. To prevent grid failure, electrical systems will need to pay substantial subsidies to fossil fuel and nuclear electricity providers that can offer backup generation when intermittent generation is not available. Modelers have tended to overlook these difficulties. As a result, the models they provide offer an unrealistically favorable view of the benefit (energy payback) of wind and solar.

If the approach of mandating wind, water, and solar were carried far enough, it might have the unfortunate effect of saving the world’s ecosystem by wiping out most of the people living within the ecosystem. It is almost certain that this was not the intended impact when legislators initially passed the mandates.

[1] History suggests that in the past, wind and water never provided a very large percentage of total energy supply.

Figure 1. Annual energy consumption per person (megajoules) in England and Wales 1561-70 to 1850-9 and in Italy 1861-70. Figure by Tony Wrigley, Cambridge University.

Figure 1 shows that before and during the Industrial Revolution, wind and water energy provided 1% to 3% of total energy consumption.

For an energy source to work well, it needs to be able to produce an adequate “return” for the effort that is put into gathering it and putting it to use. Wind and water seemed to produce an adequate return for a few specialized tasks that could be done intermittently and that didn’t require heat energy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

45 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels

May 23, 2019

45 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels

Source: Leonard, T. 2012. Broken down and rusting, is this the future of Britain’s ‘wind rush’? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html

Preface. Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable. Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will use fossil fuels to crush it and permeate it with toxic petro-chemicals to extract the metal from the ore. Then the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.

Here are the topics covered below in this long post:

Windmills require petroleum every single step of their life cycle. If they can’t replicate themselves using wind turbine generated electricity, they are not sustainable
SCALE. Too many windmills needed to replace fossil fuels
SCALE. Wind turbines can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossils
Not enough rare earth metals and enormous amounts of cement, steel, and other materials required
Not enough dispatchable power to balance wind intermittency and unreliability
Wind blows seasonally, so for much of there year there wouldn’t be enough wind

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Utility scale energy storage has a long way to go to make renewables possible

May 16, 2019

Utility scale energy storage has a long way to go to make renewables possible

What follows comes from my book “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation” , which is also where you’ll find the references backing up what I’ve written below.

I often get letters from people about energy breakthroughs in biofuels, solar, electric trucks, and so on. This post is about the “record breaking amount of battery storage add in 2018” (go here to read the article).

To enhance your own evaluation of the constant barrage of happy news in the media, here’s why I didn’t get excited or cheered up and go back to thinking the future was bound to be bright and shiny.

First, let’s go over the four possible ways to store electrical energy. We don’t need to store much now, because we still have natural gas, which kicks in to balance solar and wind power (but not coal and nuclear, which are damaged by trying to do this), and for much of the year provides 66% of electricity generation (along with coal), because wind and solar are so seasonal.

So if the grid is to be 100% renewable someday, which it has to be since the 66% of power coming from fossil fuels now to generate electricity is finite, then utility scale energy storage is essential Let’s look at what it would take each of the four methods to store just one day of U.S. electricity generation, 11.12 Terawatt Hours (TwH).

The only commercial way to store electricity is pumped hydro storage (PHS), which can store 2% of America’s electricity generation today. But we’ve run out of places to put new dams. Only two have been built since 1995. There are only 43 PHS dams now, and we’d need 7800 more to store one day of U.S. electricity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mainstream to jetstream

April 22, 2019

Mainstream to jetstream

A couple of decades ago, renewable energy was almost an outlier: the new kid on the block. But now, solar and wind are not just mainstream: in both developed and emerging economies, they are the preferred option when it comes to power generation.

A powerful synergy of enabling factors and demand-side attributes is propelling solar and wind to compete against, and win, in competition with even the most cost-effective and flexible hydrocarbon-fuelled sources of power. Renewable energy is now the preferred choice when it comes to reliable, affordable, and environmentally responsible energy.

A new report on global renewable energy trends from Deloitte Insights charts the astonishingly rapid disruption of traditional energy systems and markets that renewables are causing as the cost of photovoltaic and windfarm power plants continues to fall.

Clearing the way

Longstanding barriers to the greater deployment of renewables have faded thanks to three strong attributes: rapidly approaching grid parity, cost-effective and reliable grid integration, and technological innovation. Solar and wind can now beat conventional sources on price while increasingly matching their performance. Moreover, the integration of renewables is actually solving grid problems rather than exacerbating them. Wind and solar are now competitive across global markets even without subsidies.

Onshore wind has become the world’s lowest-cost energy sources for power generation, with an unsubsidized levelized cost of US$ 30 -60/MWh, which falls below the range of the cheapest fossil fuel , natural gas—which weighs in at around US$ 42 – 78/MWh. Except for combined-cycle gas plants, the levelized costs of all conventional sources and nonintermittent renewables have either remained flat (biomass and coal) or increased (geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear) over the past eight years, while the cost of onshore wind and utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) plants have dropped by 67 and 86 percent respectively as the cost of components has plummeted and efficiency has increased—trends that are expected to continue.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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