I work on wind turbines and cant find much misleading in this artical.
#1- Its expensive, thats very true.The initial start up and and construction of a wind sites pretty steep, eventually if nothing goes wrong you will turn a profit.Notice I said "if nothing goes wrong", thats an important phrase right there because something almost always goes wrong. Take a slight design flaw in ablade thats traveling close to 200 mph at the tip and flexing in the wind.Thats a lotta force, if theres a flaw its not in one blade, its in all of them.Many of the parts for these are built overseas and Ive seen first hand the lack of quality control and lack of unifomity in them, if your an investor and a few of the same parts fail youre going to expect them to find the cause and replace all the parts in the park if the warranty is still good. Every screw ups potentially a multi million dollar problem.
#2- It cant power modern civilization.True at this point. Theres simply not enough space available.These things are huge, they cant be close together, and thats just the turbines, thats not even including the power lines that need to be ran, the access roads to get to them, etc....All this has to be done on someone elses property and all these property owners are paid well for the use of thier land.This adds substantially to the cost of each turbine and is done on a contract basis.I have never seen one of these contracts but I imagine they expire eventually, what then?Propertys are sold, people die, banks forclose, contracts expire, etc... Frankly Im curious to see down the road whats gonna happen when people want these off there land or want to renegotiate for much more money on an existing site.Untill someone figures out how to harness much more energy on a much smaller scale theres no feasable way to get enough of them out there to cover our needs.
#3- not green enough- something I was actually suprised about and something thats not talked about at all is the waste on these things.Theres a reason many of the parts are built overseas for them to be cost effective.The amount of waste and byproducts of some of the parts is mind blowing.To build them legally and avoid Health, safety, and enviromental laws in the US would be a very expensive process.Thing is these are the same parts prone to failure and breakage so once theyre here the same process must be repeated with the same if not more waste and byproducts if they fail.If they fail however repairs can be done without near the scrutiny by the government and the general public that a full blow production facility would attract.Ironically enough probably 90% of what gets thrown away could be recycled but its cheaper to throw it out.
#4 Enviromentalists are anti energy- This is also true. But most of the people involved in these things arent out to save the world, they are out to turn a profit.The investors, the labor force, the landowners, etc... all have one thing in common, they want to be paid.Many of the biggest proponents of these things are also very heavily invested in them, they have to push for them because they have everything tied up in them.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the true enviromentalists who push for change but arent quite delusional enough with thier beliefs to invest anything into them.They talk a good game but arent willing to stake thier own paychecks on it, and most have no idea what its actually like in the industry theyre promoting.
Theres not many in the middle.Theres not a lot of people around who truely care enough to push the agenda and invest thier own time and money into it to make a difference.Its either all or nothing for most of these guys and not much middle ground in between.
Personally I think they have a place and I think they will improve them to the point where theyre less cost restrictive and take up less space to harness the same amount of energy.This isnt going to happen with the government dumping endless supplies of money into them.Theres to much wasted money, to much greed, and to little oversite on the spending of the funds for anyone to seriously attempt to improve them.Theres just no incentive when your playing with someone elses money and they squander millions of dollars every year.I dont think they will ever replace other energy forms completely, I dont think they should even try, I think they could lessen our dependency on other forms to some degree but thats about it.Cut out the funding, get some private money and private business playing with thier own money and I gaurantee half the crap you see now would be greatly improved and redesigned to maximize profit and minimize everything else thats wrong in this industry.
Last edited by petasux; 06-05-2011 at 05:10 AM.
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Four Dirty Secrets About Clean Energy
