WHAT I See When I See a Wind Turbine
Posted: December 9, 2018 Filed under: Climatism, Energiewende, Energy Poverty, Fact Check, Failed Green Schemes, Fossil Fuels, Government Grants/Funding, Green Agenda, Green Energy, Renewables, Unreliables, Wind Farms | Tags: auspol, Climate Change, Climatism, COP24, Crude Oil, Energiewende, Energy Poverty, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, Green Energy, Green Energy Failure, Industrial Wind, Renewable energy, UNFCCC, unreliables, Wind Energy, wind energy scam, Wind Farms, wind power, Wind Turbine Syndrome 3 Comments“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers
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AN extremely inconvenient insight into the monumental amount of “dirty” fossil fuel derivatives required to manufacture, install and maintain so-called “green”, “clean” and “renewable” industrial wind turbines…
(Climatism images, links and bolds added)
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To Get Wind Power You Need Oil
Each wind turbine embodies a whole lot of petrochemicals and fossil-fuel energy
WIND turbines are the most visible symbols of the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be, the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels.
Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages [pdf] 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.
If wind-generated electricity were to supply 25 percent of global demand by 2030 (forecast [pdf] to reach about 30 petawatt-hours), then even with a high average capacity factor of 35 percent, the aggregate installed wind power of about 2.5 terawatts would require roughly 450 million metric tons of steel. And that’s without counting the metal for towers, wires, and transformers for the new high-voltage transmission links that would be needed to connect it all to the grid.
A lot of energy goes into making steel. Sintered or pelletized iron ore is smelted in blast furnaces, charged with coke made from coal, and receives infusions of powdered coal and natural gas. Pig iron is decarbonized in basic oxygen furnaces. Then steel goes through continuous casting processes (which turn molten steel directly into the rough shape of the final product). Steel used in turbine construction embodies typically about 35 gigajoules per metric ton.
To make the steel required for wind turbines that might operate by 2030, you’d need fossil fuels equivalent to more than 600 million metric tons of coal.
A 5-MW turbine has three roughly 60-meter-long airfoils, each weighing about 15 metric tons. They have light balsa or foam cores and outer laminations made mostly from glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy or polyester resins. The glass is made by melting silicon dioxide and other mineral oxides in furnaces fired by natural gas. The resins begin with ethylene derived from light hydrocarbons, most commonly the products of naphtha cracking, liquefied petroleum gas, or the ethane in natural gas.
The final fiber-reinforced composite embodies on the order of 170 GJ/t. Therefore, to get 2.5 TW of installed wind power by 2030, we would need an aggregate rotor mass of about 23 million metric tons, incorporating the equivalent of about 90 million metric tons of crude oil. And when all is in place, the entire structure must be waterproofed with resins whose synthesis starts with ethylene. Another required oil product is lubricant, for the turbine gearboxes, which has to be changed periodically during the machine’s two-decade lifetime.
Undoubtedly, a well-sited and well-built wind turbine would generate as much energy as it embodies in less than a year. However, all of it will be in the form of intermittent electricity—while its production, installation, and maintenance remain critically dependent on specific fossil energies. Moreover, for most of these energies—coke for iron-ore smelting, coal and petroleum coke to fuel cement kilns, naphtha and natural gas as feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of plastics and the making of fiberglass, diesel fuel for ships, trucks, and construction machinery, lubricants for gearboxes—we have no nonfossil substitutes that would be readily available on the requisite large commercial scales.
For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.
This article appears in the March 2016 print issue as “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine.”
To Get Wind Power You Need Oil – IEEE Spectrum
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WIND ENERGY – not as “clean”, “green” or “renewable” as the bumper sticker suggests!
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SEE also :
- ‘GREEN’ Energy Future | Climatism
- IF CO2’s Your Poison, Renewable Energy Is No Antidote | Climatism
- UN Carbon Regime Would Devastate Humanity And The Environment | Climatism
- TRULY GREEN? How Germany’s #Energiewende Is Destroying Nature | Climatism
- GREEN Energy Is The Perfect Scam | Climatism
- DO NOT PASS GO! Seven Years Jail Time For Using Cheap Electricity In Australia | Climatism
- WESTERN Nations, Driven By A Global Agenda Of Climate Alarmism, Are Destroying Their Industries With Carbon Taxes And Promotion Of Expensive, Intermittent Green Energy | Climatism
- COP24 : Climate Alarmism Is Threatening To Destroy Australia | Climatism
UNRELIABLES related :
- CHINA To Phase Out ‘Renewable’ Subsidies, Continue To Build Coal Plants | Climatism
- ENERGIEWENDE FAIL: German CO2 Emissions Higher Now Than In 2009 | Climatism
- GREEN ENERGY FAIL : Record Australian Thermal Coal Exports | Climatism
- ADDING More Solar And Wind Power ‘Doubles’ CO2 Emissions | Climatism
- GODFATHER Of Global Warming Alarmism James Hansen Admits Renewable Energy Is A “Nice Idea” Though Useless | Climatism
- Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ | Climatism
- GREEN ENERGY FAIL : €Trillions Spent On #Unreliables In Europe Yet Emissions Keep Rising! | Climatism
- China Counts the Staggering Cost of its Wind Power Experiment | Climatism
- Renewables Retreat: China Slaps Ban on New Wind Power Projects | Climatism
- Germany’s €Trillion Euro Disaster: Wind Power ‘Transition’ Destroys its Industrial Heartland | Climatism
ECO HELL related :
- ‘GREEN’ Killing Fields: Wind Turbines Responsible For Massive & Unnecessary Bird Slaughter | Climatism
- ‘GREEN’ Energy Future | Climatism
- TRULY GREEN? How Germany’s #Energiewende Is Destroying Nature | Climatism
ENERGY Poverty related :
- ‘GREEN’ Energy Poverty : Thousands Dying Because They Can’t Afford Heating Bills | Climatism
- GREEN ENERGY POVERTY: Volunteer Knitters In High Demand As Soaring Power Prices Leave People Cold | Climatism
- IT’S OFFICIAL : South Australia Has The World’s Highest Power Prices! | Climatism
- POLITICIANS Mad With Global Warming Theory Are Destroying The Economy And Hurting The Poor | Climatism
- PARIS Accord Based on Fraud | Climatism
UN-Settled “Science” :
- CLIMATE CHANGE : The Unsettled Science Of “Settled” Science | Climatism
- CLIMATE Change For Dummies | Climatism
- INCONVENIENT : Arctic Sea Ice Extent Enters The Mean Zone! | Climatism
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STATE Of The Climate (August 2018) :
IPCC Report 2018 SR15 :
TEMPERATURE Related :
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- THE Great Global Warming “Pause” | Climatism
- PEER-REVIEWED SCIENCE : The Medieval Warm Period Was Indeed Global And Warmer Than Today | Climatism
ORIGINS Of The Global Warming Scam :
- FATHER Of The 2°C Climate Target Admits Number Is Fabricated : ‘Two degrees is not a magical limit; it’s clearly a political goal’ | Climatism
- THE Orwellian Era Of @NASA Climate Pseudoscience | Climatism
- WESTERN Nations, Driven By A Global Agenda Of Climate Alarmism, Are Destroying Their Industries With Carbon Taxes And Promotion Of Expensive, Intermittent Green Energy | Climatism
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- CLIMATE CHANGE – The Most Massive Scientific Fraud In Human History | Climatism
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- The Creator, Fabricator And Proponent Of Global Warming – Maurice Strong | Climatism
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- THE Climate Change Farce Explained By Two Expert “Scientists” | Climatism
- UN IPCC : Climate “Has Almost Nothing To Do With Environmental Policy.” | Climatism
- UN IPCC : “Long-Term Prediction of Future Climate States Is Not Possible.” | Climatism
- UN IPCC Rewrote Temperature History To Suit Their Political Agenda | Climatism
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- OUR Planet Has Enjoyed 10 Warm Periods During The Past 10,000 Years | Climatism
- THE ARCTIC : Ground Zero For Anthropogenic Hubris And Climate Change Hysteria | Climatism
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Reblogged this on Climate- Science and commented:
I see dumb energy. Too exprnsive -too dirty. Just another big scam.
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[…] Výroba větrných turbín a solárních panelů by bez fosilních paliv také nebyla možná. Větrná turbína potřebuje spoustu oceli, k tomu beton, uhlíková vlákna a skelné polymery a také mnoho dalších zušlechtěných kovů – měd, hliník, vzácné kovy, zinek a molybden. Solární panely a baterie potřebují vysoce ryzí přísady – křemík, olovo, lithium, nikl, kadmium, zinek, stříbro, mangan a grafit – to vše je těžké vyrobit v pecích, které spalují dřevěné uhlí na vaší zahradě. Přeprava, montáž a údržba větrných a solárních farem a jejich silnic a přenosových vedení vyžaduje velmi mnoho naftou poháněných strojů. […]
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