What About Those 14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines?
The US has had wind farms since 1981, but what the left and the green movement don't want to talk about regarding windmills is (as usual) the truth.
The truth is: windmills, like solar panels, break down. And like solar panels, windmills produce less energy before they break down than the energy it took to make them. That's the part liberals forget: making windmills and solar panels takes energy, energy from coal, oil, and diesel, energy that extracts and refines raw materials, energy that transports those materials to where they will be re-shaped into finished goods, energy to manufacture those goods. More energy than those finished windmills and solar panels will ever produce.
The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it's too cold or the wind speed is too high.
The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about the abandoned wind farms. Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy's California "big three" locations--Altamont Pass, Tehachapin, and San Gorgonio--considered among the world's best wind sites.
The truth is: wind energy is just a tax scam. Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst focusing on energy and environmental issues for the Heritage Foundation, is not surprised.
"Therein lies a lesson for those who seek to make fortunes out of tax payer subsidies, and for those who want to live in a dream world of "clean energy", the whole renewables industry of solar, wind and biomass is just an artificial bubble incapable of surviving without subsides from governments and tax payers. The Green evangelists who push so hard for these wind farms, as usual have not thought the whole idea through."
The problem with wind farms when they are abandoned is getting the turbines removed, as usual there are no Green environmentalists to be seen. The City of Palm Springs was forced to enact an ordinance requiring their removal from San Gorgonio. But California's Kern County, encompassing the Tehachapi area, has no such law.
Could you imagine the outraged Green chorus if those turbines were abandoned oil drilling rigs.