Wind Turbines - A Heart Breaking Story of Environmental Destruction

The complete, unsavory saga of a wind turbine's life cycle

the American Bird Conservancy says over 1 million birds are killed every year by wind turbines

Electricity produced by wind turbines is endangering the power grid because of the volatility of wind surges - sometimes they pump more power than we can use, so they have to be shuttered and constrained, and other times they produce no power at all. Unlike nuclear power plants that produce every hour all year long regardless of the season or the weather, the only thing about wind turbine monstrosities that’s constant is the cost that’s also monstrous.

But today I’m not even talking about the money, or the on-again off-again unpredictable power production - I’m talking about the cost in human terms and to our natural environment and ecology.

“The Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to keep it.” Genesis 2:15

The audio is for folks who’d rather listen than read - better than nothing - but the written part is full of pictures and links to sources, and a link to a great video showing the time-sequenced step by step construction of a wind turbine project in western rural NY, so I’m encouraging everyone to delve into the written version.

Because of their unreliability, wind turbine installations need the addition of multiple 20 ton container size backup battery assemblies, and even then, only enough electric power is stored to last 4 hours. It wouldn’t be worth it even if it wasn’t ruining the environment.

The story starts in far off in foreign lands.

Those backup batteries need rare earth minerals and copper and cobalt and lithium and more. These minerals have to mined somewhere. The mining operations are destructive to the environment, usually done with heavy diesel equipment, but sometimes, in poor countries, for some minerals slave labor is used, and sometimes even children are exposed to hard, dirty work in toxic materials.

Onshore wind farms require eight times the amount of critical minerals as natural gas power plants do and offshore wind farms require 13 times as much.

Newsweek did a report based on the book by Siddharth Kara.

“The artisanal site seemed to be time-warped from centuries before, populated by peasants using rudimentary tools to hack at the earth. More than 3000 women, children and men shoveled, scraped and scrounged across the artisanal mining zone under a ferocious sun and a haze of dust. With each hack at the earth, a puff of dirt floated up like a specter into the lungs of the diggers.”

photo credit - A creuseur, or digger, descends into a copper and cobalt mine without safety equipment in Kawama in 2016. Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post/Getty

“The mining of rare earth metals, used in everything from smart phones to wind turbines, has long been dominated by China. But as mining of these key elements spreads to countries like Malaysia and Brazil, scientists warn of the dangers of the toxic and radioactive waste generated by the mines and processing plants.”

“Some activities result in serious human health risks and environmental impacts; for example, the working conditions to get chromium in the mines of South Africa… In particular, distant and inaccessible small mines and smelters may be associated with serious and undocumented pollution (Zhang et al., 2012)”

…global deforestation

In the Amazon, since balsa wood is used in making wind turbine blades, and most balsa wood comes from Amazon forests, the increased demand for lightweight balsa has led to the deforestation of virgin balsa trees in the Amazon basin. 

In Scotland, nearly 14 million trees have already been cut down for wind farms.

In Germany, 120,000 acres are being cut. “The deforestation of parts of the central German ..forest has begun as the woodland, famously featured in the Grimms' fairy tales, is to be cut down to make way for wind turbines.”

Ironically, “the destruction comes at the request of the Green Party, citing the need for more “green” energy as a reason.” I guess the “Green Party” doesn’t think forests are green, and by the way, irony of ironies, forests absorb a lot of CO2.

…and the story continues in our backyard

from the Christian Science Monitor: “A new 27-tower wind farm in rural NY… comes at the cost of some 313 acres of local forest that currently act as a “carbon sink” for emissions…Tony Wagner, who owns forest land near the wind farm site, fears the project, known as Bluestone Wind, will degrade the habitats and ecosystems of thousands of acres of contiguous forest.” I emphasized “contiguous”, because carving out and logging 313 acres of forest affects all the surrounding land too.

Wind turbines are also killing over 1 million birds and hundreds of thousands of bats annually, according to the American Bird Conservancy, and causing the death of whales and fish.

A video was brought to my attention in a post by Thomas Shepstone’s Energysecurityfreedom. It had been forwarded to Roger Caiazza of Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. It was produced by Chautauqua Updates - Snowshoe Films.

It’s 27 minutes of emotionally grabbing time sequences of the construction of wind turbines in another site in western NY, starting with the action of all the heavy diesel powered equipment used in logging off beautiful forest and countryside, bulldozing the soil, building access roads, and continues through the multi-ton truckload deliveries of wind tower sections, turbine blades hundreds of feet long, housings containing the gears, turbines, generators and controls, and the huge cranes needed for hoisting these 56 ton housings 500’ up. While watching the sickening destruction of the formerly pristine countryside, listen carefully to the very informative narrative.

Here’s the video

After wind turbines are put up, the project needs cables from each tower to conduct the electricity to a substation where the DC power is inverted to AC.

The turbine generators require maintenance every 6 to 12 months and a schedule for changing the 1400 liters of lubricating oils, hydraulic fluid, and gear oil for all the gears and bearings and yaw and drive mechanisms.

Sometimes the oil leaks. When oil leaks happen, they can cause a lot of environmental damage. Oil can contaminate farmlands and forests, and becomes particularly problematic when it spreads into groundwater or worse into the sea from offshore turbines.

Sometimes they catch on fire, and they’re hard to put out because of the tower height and all the oil, so usually they are just allowed to burn themselves out, but flaming debris falling 500’ to the ground of course can start an even larger fire disaster.

After the substations are built, new high voltage transmission lines also have to be built to get the power to the existing grid, destroying miles more countryside and adding more ugliness.

One thing leads to another - since there are many calm days with little or no wind, the system needs those backup batteries mentioned earlier. In the case of lithium battery backup systems, more mining for the materials is needed, and more heavy equipment is needed to deliver and install them.

Most wind turbines wear out quickly because of the mechanical stress from the rotating blades, which weigh tens of tons. When a wind turbine project reaches the end of its life, or is discontinued for some other reason, the land may never be restored, because it’s doubtful that an energy company would be able to afford the expense - especially when there would be no profit incentive.

…and our story ends in unbelievable piles of waste

Wind turbine blades weighing 30 tons or more are made from fiberglass and special non-degradable high strength glue, so they are non-recyclable or extremely expensive to recycle. So they end up in landfills - NPR reports that over the next 20 years, the U.S. will need to dispose of more than 720,000 tons of blade material

Our environment is being destroyed by hundreds of thousands of acres of wind turbine plantations and all that’s being accomplished is to make our power grid more unreliable and dependent on the weather.

430 acres of nuclear power plants can put out as much electricity as 250,000 acres of wind turbines, and the nuclear power is reliable and constant.