Troubled teenagers demanding an all wind and sun powered future are setting themselves up for an almighty toxic shock, with hundreds of millions of wind turbine blades destined for landfill.

As Steve St. Angelo reports from the USA, wind turbine blades are non-recyclable due to the fact that they are a complex composite of highly toxic plastics, comprising fiberglass, epoxy, polyvinyl chloride foam, polyethylene terephthalate foam, balsa wood, and polyurethane coatings.

Already, thousands of 45-70m blades are being ground up and mixed with concrete used in the bases of other turbines erected later or simply dumped in landfill. Which should worry locals: the plastics in the blades are highly toxic, and contain Bisphenol A, which is so dangerous to health that the European Union and Canada have banned it.

When an ‘industry’ presents itself as being purer than driven snow, it’s understandable that the proletariat might be just a little disgruntled once they tumble to the fact that they’ve been duped. No one likes being taken for a fool.

The Renewable Green Energy Myth: 50,000 Tons Of Non-Recyclable Wind Turbine Blades Dumped In The Landfill
SRSRocco Report
Steve St. Angelo
9 January 2020

Funny, no one seemed to consider what to do with the massive amount of wind turbine blades once they reached the end of their lifespan. Thus, the irony of the present-day Green Energy Movement is the dumping of thousands of tons of “non-recyclable” supposedly renewable wind turbine blades in the country’s landfills.

Who would have thought? What’s even worse, is that the amount of wind turbine blades slated for waste disposal is forecasted to quadruple over the next fifteen years as a great deal more blades reach their 15-20 year lifespan. Furthermore, the size and length of the newly installed wind turbine blades are now twice as large as they were 20-30 years ago.

Honestly, I hadn’t considered the tremendous amount of waste generated by the so-called “Renewable” wind power industry until a long-term reader sent me the link to the following article, Landfill begins burying non-recyclable Wind Turbine Blades:

Hundreds of giant windmill blades are being shipped to a landfill in Wyoming to be buried because they simply can’t be recycled. Local media reports several wind farms in the state are sending over 900 un-reusable blades to the Casper Regional Landfill to be buried. While nearly 90 percent of old or decommissioned wind turbines, like the motor housing, can be refurbished or at least crushed, fiberglass windmill blades present a problem due to their size and strength.

“Our crushing equipment is not big enough to crush them,” a landfill representative told NPR.

Prior to burying the cumbersome, sometimes nearly 300-foot long blades, the landfill has to cut them up into smaller pieces onsite and stack them in order to save space during transportation.

Wyoming isn’t the only landfill accepting worn-out wind turbine blades. They are also being dumped in IOWA and SOUTH DAKOTA.  Although, there’s probably a lot more landfills across the country, especially in Texas, that are accepting old wind turbine blades. Texas has the largest amount of wind-generated energy in the United States at 27,036 MegaWatts, followed by Iowa (8,965 MW), Oklahoma (8,072 MW), Kansas (6,128 MW), and California (5,842 MW). (source: Wikipedia)

So, with Texas powering more wind energy than the next three states combined, they will be discarding an enormous amount of wind turbine blades in the state’s landfills over the next 10-20 years.

Now, why is the Wind Power Industry discarding its blades in landfills? Unfortunately, due to the way the blades are manufactured, it isn’t economical or practical to recycle them even though some small-scale recycling has been done. Here is an image from the Low-Tech Magazine website explaining why the large wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable:

The wind turbine blades are a toxic amalgam of unique composites, fiberglass, epoxy, polyvinyl chloride foam, polyethylene terephthalate foam, balsa wood, and polyurethane coatings. So, basically, there is just too much plastic-composite-epoxy crapola that isn’t worth recycling. Again, even though there are a few small recycling centers for wind turbine blades, it isn’t economical to do on a large scale.

As I mentioned, the wind power units built today are getting much taller and larger. Check out the 83.5 meter (274 feet) long wind turbine blade being transported for a 7 MegaWatt system:

This picture was taken in 2016. So, in about 15-20 years, this blade will need to be replaced. Just think of the cost to remove three massive blades this size, cut them up, transport them to the landfill and cover them with tons of soil. Now, multiply that by tens of thousands of blades. According to the data from Hochschule Bremerhaven & Ahlstrom-Munksjo, the wind industry will generate 50,000 tons of blade waste in 2020, but that will quadruple to 225,000 tons by 2034. I have read that some estimates show an even higher amount of blade waste over the next 10-20 years.

I don’t believe the public realizes what a horrible waste of resources that wind energy is when you start to look at the entire operation from beginning to end. Wind energy is definitely not RENEWABLE. And, even worse… the wind turbines are not lasting as long as the 20-25 years forecasted by the industry. A study that came out in 2012 by Gordon Hughes, researching the relatively mature Dutch and U.K. Wind Industry, suggested that only a few of the wind farms would be operating for more than 12-15 years.

Wind & Solar A Disaster On The Electric Grid
The one thing not mentioned by the “Renewable Energy Aficionados” is that the more solar and wind that is added to the grid, the more volatile and problematic it becomes. You see, the U.S. Electric Grid has been powered by BASELOAD energy from Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear… for the most part. This type of energy generation is very stable, which is precisely why it’s called BASELOAD ENERGY.

When wind and solar came onto the picture, the Renewable Energy Aficionados thought this “CLEAN GREEN ENERGY” was going to get rid of the dirty fossil fuel power plants. Unfortunately, the more wind and solar that are added, the more BASELOAD energy has to be removed. Why is that unfortunate? Because when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, then the Electric Utility Industry is forced to TURN ON the Natural Gas Power Plants to make up the difference.

And let me tell you, this is becoming much more of a big problem when the wind energy that was generating 40% of the electricity in the area totally falls off the very next day when the wind stops blowing. I have read several articles showing examples of the extreme shut-in of wind and solar electric generation in a very short period of time.

There is so much information out there about this “Intermittency” problem, let me provide a perfect example taking place in Germany. Germany installed one hell of a lot of wind and solar, and it is now becoming a nightmare because they are suffering from black-outs, while at the same time their citizens are paying some of the highest electricity rates in Europe.

Germany’s Renewable Energy Disaster – Part 1: Wind & Solar Deemed ‘Technological Failures’

Germany’s wind and solar experiment have failed: the so-called ‘Energiewende’ (energy transition) has turned into an insanely costly debacle.

German power prices have rocketed; blackouts and load shedding are the norm; and idyllic rural communities are now industrial wastelands (see picture).

Hundreds of billions of euros have been squandered on subsidies to wind and solar, all in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide gas emissions. However, that objective has failed too: CO2 emissions continue to rise.

But you wouldn’t know it from what appears in the mainstream media. Its reticence to report on what’s actually going on in Germany probably stems from the adage about success having many fathers, and failure being an orphan. Having promoted Germany as the example of how we could all ‘transition’ to an all RE future, it’s pretty hard for them to suck it up and acknowledge that they were taken for fools.

REST OF ARTICLE HERE: Germany’s Renewable Energy Disaster – Part 1: Wind & Solar Deemed ‘Technological Failures’

That article above came from the website, StopTheseThings.com, which I highly recommend checking out.  They put out a lot of excellent material on the global wind industry.

For example, I found this interesting article about a wind turbine that was purchased by Akron-Westfield’s School Board that went operational in 1999. The wind turbine was supposed to provide the School District with approximately (2) teachers’ salaries worth of revenue once the loan was paid off after ten years. According to the article from StopTheseThings.com, Turbine Trouble: School Board’s Wind Turbine ‘Investment’ Ends in Financial Disaster:

After a decade of dashed financial hopes, mechanical failures and punishingly costly repairs, the school has been left to lick its wounds and lament. The experience to date has been a total financial failure. And now comes the whopping cleanup bill to have the nightmare removed, for good.

A-W wind turbine removal may become budget item
The Akron Home Towner
Julie Ann Madden
11 October 2019

What will it cost to remove the Akron-Westfield’s inoperable wind turbine from its site?

According to A-W School Board Member Nick Mathistad, about $220,000:

$183,000 for disassembly and disposal of the wind turbine; and
$37,000 for foundation removal/disposal, dirt fill and seeding of site.
“These are budget numbers, and the scope of work would be bid out at a later date if it comes to that,” Mathistad explained in a text to The Akron Hometowner.

I recommend reading the entire article because it is worth a GOOD LAUGH. I believe the author of the article misunderstood and thought the town of Akron was in Ohio, but it was located in Iowa. [Note to Ed: oops! The geographical error has now been fixed in the STT post, sorry for any confusion.]

Once you read the article, it plays like the typical TRAIL OF TEARS as the poor school board was plagued with mechanical failures and issues that cost one hell of a lot of money and just when the wind turbine was going to be paid off after ten years, it broke down for good… LOL.

That’s correct, and the wind turbine has been sitting there idle for nearly a decade… rotting away. And now, it seems that the school board is placing the $220,000 cost to disassemble and dispose of the wind turbine in their $5.2 million bond. Again… LOL.

I have to tell you; I am simply amazed at the level of INSANITY and STUPIDITY taking place by individuals, companies, corporations, and countries that are ramping up wind and solar energy. They are a complete disaster and will only get worse as time goes by.

Lastly, the world should have used the energy that has been investing in wind-solar and put it into transitioning our society to a smaller footprint or DEGROWTH. That was the smart and logical move. However, we are taking the last bit of good fossil fuel energy and putting into Non-Recyclable “supposedly renewable” Green Technology Boondoggles that will become serious liabilities in the future as we won’t have the available energy to properly disassemble and dispose of the tens of thousands of wind turbines dotting the landscape.
SRSRocco Report

How dare you!! One for Greta to sort out when she grows up.

By Kirye
and Pierre Gosselin

A few days ago we looked at 19 stations scattered across Antarctica and found no unusual climate trends taking place there over the past 31 years.

Today we focus on 13 crucial stations located on and around the Antarctic Peninsula, which alarmists say is threatening to melt down and cause sea level rise to accelerate rapidly, and plot the data from NASA going back to 1998, i.e. 21 years.

13 of 13 Antarctic Peninsula/island stations cooling

The following map shows the location of the stations:

What now follows are the mean annual temperature plots of the 13 stations, using NASA Version 4 unadjusted data:

13 of 13 Antarctic Peninsula and nearby island stations show cooling over the past 21 years. There hasn’t been any warming there so far this century. Data source: NASA GISS, Version 4 unadjusted. 

via NoTricksZone

https://ift.tt/2tEGLVP

January 24, 2020 at 11:43AM

By Paul Homewood

h/t Mike Jackson

I mentioned Sherelle Jacobs earlier. This, I believe, is the second sceptical piece in the last couple of weeks:

There is something sinister in the stiff mountain air at Davos this year. As ever, the spectacle is almost burlesque in its grotesqueness: the world’s elite has descended on the luxury ski resort in their private jets to discuss global warming over pan-seared Indonesian soy cutlets cooked by a celebrity vegan chef flown in from Canada. But underneath the seedy hypocrisy lingers an even murkier mendacity: an unthinking consensus on how to “save the planet”.

Take the speech by Greta Thunberg, who rattled off Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figures pertaining to requisite cuts in carbon emissions. “I’ve been repeating these numbers over and over again,” she droned as gormless CEOs and UN apparatchiks blinked at the hoodie-clad managtivist standing before them, grinding on about missed deadlines and squandered targets.

Greta’s bland, corporate-friendly strategy is intriguing; it reinforces her ruse – that the science is mind-numbingly clear, the necessary actions are unquestionable, and that her task is simply to “continue to repeat” it until we are bored.

Naturally, Donald Trump was having none of it. He let rip at this paper-shufflers’ PR stunt, dismissing the “predictions of the apocalypse” and “prophets of doom”. In his own ham-fisted way, the president was groping at – if not quite grasping – the disconcerting truth. Global warming is happening, but the climate science itself is messy, mystifying and ambivalent; the certainty with which eco-warriors present their case is thus disgracefully dishonest.

The causal links made between global warming and the Australian bushfires is one example. Greta has tweeted her despair at the world’s failure “to make the connection between the climate crisis and extreme weather events and nature disasters like the #AustralianFires”. But the inconvenient truth is that scientists have not definitively linked the bushfires to climate change alone. It may be a factor among many. The Australian Academy of Science itself concedes: “Population growth, climate change, temperature extremes, droughts, storms, wind and floods are intersecting in ways that are difficult to untangle.”

The misleading bushfires rhetoric barely scratches the surface of the problems with this consensus. “We know perfectly well” that humans are behind the heating of the planet, Sir David Attenborough proclaimed in a recent BBC interview: this is now a “crisis moment”. But Sir David’s onomatopoeically crumbly prose can’t distract from the shaky foundations of his apocalyptic assertions.

You don’t need to dispute that man is contributing to global warming to question whether it is healthy to talk about the issue with such unwavering certainty, or to ask whether the situation is so urgent as to require the impoverishment of billions to fix it. Scientists have not indisputably proved that other factors are not also contributing. Studies of the heat going into the oceans by dissenters like the Israeli physicist Nir Shaviv, for example, suggest the Sun has a large effect on climate change. Eco-catastrophists have not credibly invalidated his findings, published in the prestigious Journal of Geophysical Research.

Such uncertainties matter when people are being asked to make vast sacrifices in the name of reaching net zero carbon. All our efforts may not make a difference anyway. But contrary views are not permitted. Some researchers are chilled by the shift from scientific endeavour based on theory and evidence to reliance on IPCC-endorsed predictive modelling. Here the cult of managerialism and the mania of eco-catastrophism have dangerously intersected – as university bureaucrats push for research projects which pull in mouth-watering computer-based investment.

Like Galileo and Descartes on the eve of the Enlightenment, scholars have found subtle ways to dodge the suspicions of inquisitorial reactionaries. They discreetly publish papers without press releases, or with incongruous “eco-consensus” inserts, even though these often jar with their findings.

When did Western civilisation enter this new Dark Age? The creepy scenes of Greta’s machinic protestations at Davos offer a clue. Managerialism, an ideology that has filled the vacuum created by the collapse of communism and post-Seventies disillusionment with market capitalism, infects every corner of society. The twist is that it relies for its survival on the flagrant denial of the chaotic complexity upon which it feeds. It deems that all problems (like all corporations) share more similarities than differences, and can thus be solved through generic, optimised processes.

Thus activists like Greta reduce climate change to a clearly diagnosed illness that can be treated by meeting precise deadlines, while the rest of us pay the bill. And thus our elites – who share the same arrogant belief that we have all the expertise to address the Earth’s intricacies – cravenly refuse to acknowledge anything that throws into doubt established “facts”. Sadly, until the era of managerialism falls in on itself, we are probably stuck.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/23/davos-doom-mongers-herald-new-dark-age-climate-science/

I particularly like this bit, which has rarely been touched upon in the media before:

Here the cult of managerialism and the mania of eco-catastrophism have dangerously intersected – as university bureaucrats push for research projects which pull in mouth-watering computer-based investment.

Two Different Americas