WindTurbines

 Source: https://farmersforum.com/50-reasons-to-oppose-wind-turbines/

Jane Wilson and John Lee Pettimore
Special to Farmers Forum

Wind Concerns Ontario likes this opinion by Canadian Armed Forces veteran and former mining technician John Lee Pettimore, posted on “X” (formerly Twitter), on how wind power can’t replace fossil fuels. Pettimore lists 46 reasons why wind turbines cannot replace fossil fuels. We’ve added a few more:

1. 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.

2. Too many windmills are needed to replace fossil fuels.

3. Wind turbines can’t be built fast enough to replace fossil fuels.

4. There are not enough materials such as rare earth metals or fossil fueled heat to create the cement, steel, epoxy, and other parts needed.

5. There is not enough dispatchable power, such as natural gas or hydropower, to balance wind intermittence and unreliability.

6. Wind blows seasonally, so for much of the year there isn’t much wind.

7. When too much wind is blowing for the (electrical) grid, it has to be curtailed. If the wind is over 55 mph the wind turbine has to shut down or risk being damaged.

8. The best wind areas will never be developed – they’re too far from cities and the grid.

9. The grid can’t handle wind power without natural gas backup.

10. The role of the grid is to keep the supply of power steady and predictable. Wind does the opposite, at some point of penetration it may become impossible to keep the grid from crashing.

11. Windmills wouldn’t be built without huge subsidies and tax breaks.

12. There is tremendous environmental damage from mining material for windmills.

13. Wind is only strong enough to justify windmills in a few regions.

14. The electric grid needs to be much larger than it is now.

15. Wind blows the strongest when customer demand is the weakest.

16. There is no utility scale energy storage in sight.

17. Wind power surges harm industrial customers.

18. Energy returned on energy invested is negative.

19. Wind turbines break down too often.

20. Wind doesn’t reduce CO2.

21. Wind turbines increase the cost of farming.

22. Offshore windmills battered by waves, wind, ice, corrosion, are a hazard to ships and ecosystems.

23. Wind turbines are far more expensive than they appear to be.

24. Wind turbines are already going out of business and fewer are being built in Europe.

25. Windmills are so huge they’ve reached the limits of land transportation by truck or rail.

26. Windmills might last 12 to 15 years or at best 20 years.

27. Offshore wind turbines could affect fisheries.

28. Wind has a low capacity factor.

29. The quality of wind resources is location specific, with the best locations often found far from the load centre where the transmission grid already exists.

30. Dead bugs and salt reduce wind power generation by 20 % to 30 %.

31. Germany has been spending more for much longer than other nations, and Energiewiende has proven to be a failure.

32. Wind turbines are more expensive to decommission than construct and are so often not recycled.

33. Decommissioning wind turbines costs as much as $500,000 per turbine.

34. Wind turbines threaten biodiversity in hundreds of protected, key biodiversity, and wilderness areas.

35. Wind turbines and solar PV depend on the energy storage of coal and natural gas plants to provide power when the wind dies.

36. Operations and maintenance (O&M) costs are too high. Increasingly there are high insurance costs from hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, defective equipment, untrained personnel and more.

37. Turbines can’t be improved much. They are nearing the maximum possible capacity for harvesting of wind. Turbines are so heavy they damage roads during delivery.

38. There is not enough metallurgical coal to make the steel for wind turbines.

39. When oil prices rise, the cost of building wind turbines rises.

40. Electricity can’t make cement, steel, glass, bricks, or ceramics.

41. Wind turbines are ecologically destructive.

42. They add pressure to supply chains as wind turbines need 10 times the materials of conventional energy technologies.

43. Wind turbines are buckling and toppling, splatting wind blades across fields and oceans. See Nantucket.

44. We can’t make wind turbines more efficient because we don’t understand turbulence.

45. Have we reached peak wind? Wind generation declined in 2023 for the first time since the 1990s.

46. Wind turbines can only utilize, at most, 59 % of the kinetic energy from wind. This is called the Betz Limit, based on research by German physicist Albert Betz in 1919. As Warren Buffett said, “On wind energy, 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.” While the wind production tax credit may be great for the rich, it’s harmful for taxpayers and energy consumers. The more wind turbines the higher the cost of electricity, and who suffers the most? The poor.

Wind Concerns Ontario adds the next four points:

47: Wind power is a low density power source. In other words, too much land is required for wind turbines (access roads, infrastructure such as cables, transmission lines).

48: Wind power is NOT low-cost. Other forms of power generation cost less, such as nuclear.

49: Wind turbines have significant environmental impact on wildlife and humans, and are a source of noise pollution which has an effect on health.

Finally, number 50: Wind is not reliable. Further to Mr. Pettimore’s assertion that wind is “seasonal,” the fact is, in Ontario, the wind resource is not only limited it is characterized by periods of high winds which are completely out of phase with demand. (Documented by Marc Brouillette in his paper, Ontario’s high-cost millstone) In the extreme cold and hot days, wind is absent, as it has been for many days this summer.

Jane Wilson is president of Wind Concerns Ontario. She can be reached at contact@windconcernsontario.ca.

Jane Wilson is president of Wind Concerns Ontario. She can be reached at contact@windconcernsontario.ca.

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