a lot of $$ riding on clean energy now.
The Green New Deal Windmills . . . :
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.
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 the 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 large equipment needed to build these wind farms run on petroleum - as well as the equipment required for installation, service, maintenance, and eventual removal.
How cost-effective are these eyesores when we often see many of them sitting idle or out of service? Most of the commercial-scale turbines installed today are 2 MW in size and cost roughly $3-$4 million installed.
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 NYC you'd need 57,000 acres; and who knows the astronomical amount of land you would need to power the entire US?!
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).
But let's destroy the planet's most natural process of reducing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen to make way for turbines!
And what about disposal?
The lifespan of a modern, top quality, highly efficient wind turbine is 20 years.
What happens to those gigantic fiber composite blades?
They cannot economically be reused, refurbished, reduced, repurposed, or recycled so....it's off to special landfills they go.
They're already running out of these special landfill spaces for the blades that have already exceeded their usefulness. 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 years after that, and 20 years after that, and so on.
500,000 birds are killed each year from wind turbine blade collisions; most of which are endangered hawks, falcons, owls, geese, ducks, and eagles.
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.
Here's another little problem with windmills, etc.
The generator and switching equipment operate at high power and voltage. Everything in the windmill nacelle is compact due to limited space, so there's danger of arcs and electrical fires. This is prevented by putting all the electrical equipment in a pressure vessel filled with sulfur hexafluoride, a synthetic gas that has dielectric properties that suppress arcs and fires.
Problem is, windmills leak this gas, something around a pound each per year. SF6 has an atmospheric lifetime of 3,200 years and is
22,800 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
And what about solar panels which typically have a longer useful life, but they have a waste management issue as well. Solar panels are complicated to recycle as they’re made of many materials, some hazardous, and assembled with adhesives and sealants that make breaking them apart challenging. So the glass and metal photovoltaic modules will start adding up to millions, and then tens of millions of metric tons of material in the near future.
AND with the mandate of electric vehicles there will be millions of batteries with an estimated useful life of 1500 to 2000 charge cycles or about 100,000 miles. Recycling these batteries can be a hazardous business as their cells can release problematic toxins, including heavy metals.
In the Green New Deal scheme of things there is no feasible disposal plan for all of this 'Green New' waste. The 'real deal' is that we're being dealt a bad hand.
