Yeah environmentalists don't realise how heavy these things are or even their actual size. Not to mention how ineffective they are as there is only a small band of wind speeds they can actually operate in.
Green hippies don't know anything about real world happenings. They grew up in fantasy land and never left. Same idiots think wile e coyote brings babies across the border lmao. How did we ever allow retards to get this much power?
Conservatives know the truth and are confident that they know the truth. They do not seek people to constantly validate the way they u view the world and are more lax with the people they surround themselves with.
Yeah when you put a giant spinning fan blade in the sky birds tent to get the short straw on that. And because it damages the birds and they mostly put the wind farms near crop areas the bug population goes nuts so we then spray the crops to kill the bugs which results in less food for the birds which results in less birds so more bugs... which we then spray for.... you get the cycle
Along the right track, if it were about simply getting rid of oil and gas they'd go with nuclear, but if they went with nuclear they'd undercut their "climate refugees" vector.
Products and services are irrelevant when there's an elite class and slave class, the real minimum wage for all persons is actually 1200 Kcal a day. What's happening as an incidental consequence of neo-liberalism does not at all cover it.
This is derivative thinking, creating the system itself is a far better game than taking advantage of the system don't you agree? If it is objectively more profitable to create and alter the system then it's axiomatic that people will do so and have done so. The US is a corporation and you don't control your money supply, this isn't "taught" in schools so not sure what you're talking about there.
Yeah I went out to Utah once and I saw ton of them out rotting in the sun, they weren’t profitable so they just abandon them since they’re too expensive to take down.
In Italy it's they have the same thing (for a different reason). The mafia exploits all the government subsidies to build them using shell companies which keep the money and never finish the projects.
So coal mining companies are required by law to do extensive reclamation work on their abandoned mines (there are now about 15,000 wild elk in eastern Kentucky living on those reclaimed mines). But the wind power industry can just abandon huge windmill farms to litter the landscape for decades to come? Unreal.
In addition to the legal elk seasons in Kentucky, there are now legal elk hunting seasons in Tennessee and Pennsylvania (PA's had some legal elk hunting off & on for over a century).
Besides KY (largest elk population east of the Rocky Mountain states), PA and TN, there are also wild herds in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan (over a century), Wisconsin, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Florida (one small free herd 50+ years in NE FL), South Dakota, North Dakota (I don't think SD ever lost all of their elk - not sure about ND).
Turns out they're in 31 states now with that set to increase as there are currently 2-3 more states studying restoration efforts. There's been a lot of restoration of elk the last 25 years, and also some restored elk populations have crossed state lines and established breeding populations (KY to VA & WV); an individual KY elk in OH; 1 or 2 individual NC elk documented so far in SC).
600 cubic meters is 785 cubic yards. A typical concrete truck carries 10 cubic yards with the usable concrete being a little less than that. This pour would take a minimum of 80 trucks. Think of all that diesel pollution. The horror....the horror...
Had many conversations about "free energy turbines" they usually get mad when you spit facts. Man hours, truck transportation, idle time, heavy machinery operation. Drilling for underground cable to incorporate it to the grid. Manufacturing the cable, delivery of cable, installation of cable. Then all of the same goes for the actual wind turbine itself. Maybe even more.
Then the blades have a limited lifespan and go straight to the landfill. What about that?
These feel-good "environmental" folks fail to see the whole picture. They only see skewed financial break even information. Not the whole environmental break even, or total cost break even, including continual maintenance and service.
They're a damn eyesore on our beautiful landscape, mess with the food chain and ecosystem, and make a ton of noise...
I just flew over the Columbia River gorge the other day (I hadn't seen it from the air for decades as I usually take an aisle seat). I was shocked at the vast numbers of turbines I saw and remembered that there wasn't a single one there back in the mid 90s when I used to drive through there a few times a year.
785 cubic yards X 400lbs of CO2 per yard concrete = 314,000lbs of CO2 released = 143 metric tons CO2. We haven't even got to all the emissions from producing and shipping the iron rebar.
I calculated that an equivalent CO2 for a power plant burning natural gas is 3 metric tons. Can that be right?
A wind turbine produces about 500 kW per year. I read somewhere that the lifetime of a wind turbine is about 30 years. I don't remember where. For a total lifetime energy production of 15 MW.
This would be for 1 year, so assuming 30 year lifespan that would be a total estimate of 131,400MWh.
If you take that number and multiply by the amount of co2 per kwh of natural gas, it would be 26.28M kg of co2. (If I did my math right)
The co2 released by the concrete alone wouldn't come close to the co2 emissions from natural gas for a comparable lifetime power output, but as there's a lot more co2 released in other aspects of wind turbine production (rebar, material transport, mining, manufacturing, assembly, maintenance, cables, etc) it's hard to say how efficient they really are. This would be something cool to look into.
all that for a 2-3 MW capacity. That is what it is capable of, not what it produces, which is measured in MWh. That varies wildly with the conditions of course. They do not produce 2-3 MWh 24/7 all year, unlike the rated capacities of non-peaker CC and nuke plants.
Bud, you have not even touched on Rare Earth Minerals yet that are required for the turbine to function at its stated efficiency...dwarfs the concrete cost in devastation.
Not to mention the giant diesel guzzling machines used to strip the gravel in the concrete out of precious Mother Earth leaving giant raw scars on her beautiful surface. And look at all that steel. How many trainloads and trucks of iron ore have been ripped out of our mountains, trucked to a filthy smoke belching factory before being processed and then trucked out again?
Enough to change the magnetic poles of the Earth. Seriously, some of what is attributed to global warming is the overmining of the iron range changing the rotation of the Earth.
It’s not just that... The production of Portland cement is one the biggest sources of CO2 pollution. From Wikipedia:
“The cement industry is one of the two largest producers of carbon dioxide (CO2), creating up to 8% of worldwide man-made emissions of this gas, of which 50% is from the chemical process and 40% from burning fuel.”
Exactly. Even the most modern turbines, which constantly run under the best theoretical conditions and are optimally maintained, will never generate as much energy during their service life as was necessary to produce them.
When I worked with NATO I enjoyed pointing out that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who use the metric system and those who have successfully put men on the moon. :)
The arms do not survive very long. They are made of fiberglass and have to be cut into 3 sections and buried in land fills. There is no recycling for fiberglass and once it degrades it is as harmful for lungs as asbestos. I have seen for myself the bird graveyards.
Concrete requires high heat to produce. It takes 2,775 MJ to manufacture one cubic meter of concrete, equivalent to the energy ~1/3 barrel of oil. Therefore, you need 200 barrels of oil (equivalence) just to manufacture the base of the turbine. That's just the base, and that's not factoring in the joules (ie, oil) you need to spend to build it. That also does not factor the CO2 that's emitted in the process of burning that oil for concrete production. How many joules do you need to spend to build these things, and how many joules do you get out of the turbine with its ~20 year lifespan?
Solar panels return joules spent within two years of operation. Do you even break even with these turbines?
Fun fact: Concrete is 8% of man-made CO2 emissions. Yet, leftists insist on building the one energy source that takes more concrete per capita than any other source of energy.
I work with someone who was duped into the windmill scam. He was told 20 yr payback period, which is high to begin with. He was promised it’d cost him something like 60k, ended up actually costing him 100k because nobody mentioned the base. Then the repairs. Then the maintenance. Turned it into never being able to pay itself off. Just a massive pile of garbage more needy than a newborn baby that can never be removed because that’d be a monumental expense too.
That math is ~, but the impact is worse than the meme shows.
Turbine base, e.g. (piled raft)=
~32 piles @ 18"x18"x33'
+
Cap @ 25' x 4'
= ~70 cu m per turbine
@ 150lbs/cu ft or 4,050lbs/cu yd or 2,400 kg/cu m
That's a "piled raft;" it's at the very low end, concrete-volume-wise. A Pile Group or Raft would be 2x to 5x as much concrete.
Which means, the smallest conceivable concrete turbine base is ~168,000 kg or 370,376 lbs.
CO2 from production of one lb of concrete? .9lbs of CO2 per lb.
I.e., at the LOW end, the turbine base causes the release of ~333,338lbs of CO2 FROM THE CONCRETE ALONE, before you get to mining and transportation of the materials, manufacture and transportation of the component parts, assembly and transportation of the assembled parts, site preparation and machinery required for installation, feeding, housing, transportation, and clothing of the installation workers, resource extraction, refinement and transportation, manufacture, assembly, and transportation and installation of the transmission lines necessary to convey electricity generated at the turbines, etc, etc, etc.
Nuclear also has its flaws. The US government is surpressing the amount of radiation actually being leaked by the aging US power plants.
We said in the US that we are too transparent to have a Chernobyl, but that was before we had the modern FBI.
I think it's something we need to work on, because it's incredibly helpful if done right, but it's not without consequence. Especially when you have woke police and corrupt politicians degrading the standards of even the most important infrastructure.
Nuclear's biggest downsides is the waste and threat of meltdown. Both these issues go away when we start using thorium reactors instead of uranium. Yes thorium technology isn't perfect and has a way to go. But it's a viable clean option and has more benefits vs other so called clean options.
With how we know society is run, you really want to avoid having a part of the "public" infrastructure built in such a way that it becomes dangerous with underutilization.
Humans are really really good at fucking things up. Success through failure is how humans work. Best design infrastructure to fail in non-devastating ways.
This is how modern nuclear plants are built, but they still have serious maintence issues that can be papered over to make for dangerous circumstances.
Just imagine how much coal they had to burn to make the coke for that steel rebar and how much natural gas they had to use to bake the lime to make all that concrete. Then factor in all the diesel fuel they burnt digging and crushing the aggregate and then hauling everything to the construction site. So many barrels of oil in every green project.
Fitting monuments to the destruction of animal life and creation's beauty.
Follow T. Boone Picken's advice and invest in the natural gas industry and gas turbines. Each windfarm requires these to back them up when the wind doesn't blow.
At the end of their useful life, no one will spend the money to remove these monstrosities, furthering pollution and a visual blight upon the land.
It’s not inherently bad. It’s just funny when they are being hypocritical by pouring large amounts for useless structures like windmills. The amount of energy required to produce cement emits a lot of CO2. Concrete producers use pozzolans (fly ash, slag, silica fume) to reduce the carbon footprint of cement production and to make better, more durable concrete. They have even begun injecting CO2 into concrete during the mixing process to help trap the gas and form small limestone particles.
All they do is mix up a few ingredients....like making cake batter....I still don't understand how concrete can be bad....maybe if you didn't wash it off your hands while you were pouring it......but really.....
To be fair, it's the concrete powder that takes enormous amounts of energy to produce. I'm no expert but I believe it's a certain type of sand which has to be heated and dried at very high temperatures.
Mixing it with water only takes a fraction of that energy. :)
Environmentalists are carefully touching the topic, knowing that if people know that concrete isn't very environmentally friendly, they might choose to live in wooden single family homes instead of commie blocks. Some of them even goes so far that they wanna build commie blocks and even parking garages in wood instead of concrete. Now that's insane.
Are carbon fiber composites used for the blades? I thought they were or at least are desired to be if the cost of CF comes down. CF manufacture is very very CO2e inefficient, the equivalent of 50 kg(CO2) / kg(CF). Once you make that into a composite, perhaps double. For reference just about all main synthetic polymers are 1-4 kg(CO2)/kg. Wind farms have been known to alter local micro-climates too. Rebar is likely not CO2 cheap, I cannot speak for concrete.
Concrete has very high energy content as the key ingredients are transformed in a huge kiln, which is in addition to mining, transport, and processing costs.
15 years ago there started a great push to move away from GlassFiberRP towards CarbonFRP by making CF cheaper. I thought they might have achieved that to some level, but I guess even with CF being the lowest cost almost ever it is still not low enough. It would only become low enough if another CF precursor is found to make good general purpose CF.
The reasoning is reduced density of CF compared to GF, and the much greater specific strengths and moduli of general purpose CF compared to general purpose GF.
Mines, Minerals, and "Green" Energy: A Reality Check
Mark P. Mills
July 9, 2020
"Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy."
FYI for land owners. If you're letting people lease your land for these things, make sure it's explicitly stated in the contract when they will be removed and who will be covering the cost of disposal. People have been fucked hard in the past.
For the turbines in the ocean, do they require a similar concrete base? Do they pump the water out to pour it, or do they just drop it onto the ocean floor, and let it land on top of whatever sea life is down there?
Great question, for what I know they use concrete all the way up to a few meters over the surface, and in any case there's gotta be a massive concrete foot to prevent the structure from tipping over.
These structures can be up to 150m tall, plus 50-100m for the wing. The old WTC twin towers was 400m tall. Burj Khalifa, tallest building in the world is 828m tall. All that for a maximum of 8MW, if it's windy.
A modern nuclear reactor gives an output between 1GW - 2GW
What most don't know - solar and wind power requires special battery banks to store the energy, and certain elemental components of said batteries are only found in 2 small countries in the world....so we would be at their absolute mercy. They are already starting w the Green New Deal bullshit, cancelling that pipeline and new fracking permits
Wind is the dumbest source of energy, those things are often dead on arrival they don’t work. The energy “crisis” has been solved for decades but they still want us to quarrel of crude.
If we’d just deregulate the building materials industry we could be using any number of alternatives that just haven’t been rated by municipal building codes. Construction should be so much better but we’re operating at a huge disadvantage because of regulation.
Just think, something that tall is gonna have a concrete pier/footing that is as deep as it is tall.
And another thing average people don't understand, is commercial or heavy use concrete has to cure for weeks. What this means is the concrete has to be kept at a certain temperature for a few weeks in order to get the required strength. Often times, especially in the summer, after the concrete is hard enough, crews will put a water sprinkler system on the concrete and cover wet burlap blankets on top to help keep the concrete cool. I've worked on bridges where we tapped right into a fire hydrant, and ran water continuously for 14 days, in order to keep the bridge deck cool. That was one bridge. About a quarter mile long, and 100' long, pretty average bridge.
Yeah environmentalists don't realise how heavy these things are or even their actual size. Not to mention how ineffective they are as there is only a small band of wind speeds they can actually operate in.
Green hippies don't know anything about real world happenings. They grew up in fantasy land and never left. Same idiots think wile e coyote brings babies across the border lmao. How did we ever allow retards to get this much power?
but but its like mother earths breath man. Its like gods air yo. How can they just like, farm God's air and moms breath like that man?! Fascist! Lmao
We didn't. They stole an election and no one even let us present our evidence of it.
I'm talking big picture, spanning decades and multiple positions of power. The people running our universities are literally retarded.
I think it comes down to something as simple as
Conservatives know the truth and are confident that they know the truth. They do not seek people to constantly validate the way they u view the world and are more lax with the people they surround themselves with.
Leftys/commies are the exact opposite
I've been lead to believe that they also do considerably harmful to all living creatures, but most obviously birds and humans.
Yeah when you put a giant spinning fan blade in the sky birds tent to get the short straw on that. And because it damages the birds and they mostly put the wind farms near crop areas the bug population goes nuts so we then spray the crops to kill the bugs which results in less food for the birds which results in less birds so more bugs... which we then spray for.... you get the cycle
Don't forget the hundreds of acres of destroyed habitats they need to dig up for the foundations and cables.
All to power a city block.
Not just birds, insects as well. Billions daily.
They shut a wind farm down in California because of the impact to migratory birds. It turns out that windy areas also are used by birds to migrate.
Along the right track, if it were about simply getting rid of oil and gas they'd go with nuclear, but if they went with nuclear they'd undercut their "climate refugees" vector.
Products and services are irrelevant when there's an elite class and slave class, the real minimum wage for all persons is actually 1200 Kcal a day. What's happening as an incidental consequence of neo-liberalism does not at all cover it.
This is derivative thinking, creating the system itself is a far better game than taking advantage of the system don't you agree? If it is objectively more profitable to create and alter the system then it's axiomatic that people will do so and have done so. The US is a corporation and you don't control your money supply, this isn't "taught" in schools so not sure what you're talking about there.
Kind of like how they're all "save the random newt!" but ignore the sheer slaughter these turbines and solar panels are wreaking on avians and bats.
Yeah, Warren Buffett needs to eat too. His company owns a ton of those windmills in the Midwest.
Yeah I went out to Utah once and I saw ton of them out rotting in the sun, they weren’t profitable so they just abandon them since they’re too expensive to take down.
In Italy it's they have the same thing (for a different reason). The mafia exploits all the government subsidies to build them using shell companies which keep the money and never finish the projects.
So coal mining companies are required by law to do extensive reclamation work on their abandoned mines (there are now about 15,000 wild elk in eastern Kentucky living on those reclaimed mines). But the wind power industry can just abandon huge windmill farms to litter the landscape for decades to come? Unreal.
elk don't live in eastern kentucky. perhaps you mean deer.
Oh really? Well that will come as an enormous surprise to the hundreds of hunters who each harvest an elk every year in eastern Kentucky.
In addition to the legal elk seasons in Kentucky, there are now legal elk hunting seasons in Tennessee and Pennsylvania (PA's had some legal elk hunting off & on for over a century).
Besides KY (largest elk population east of the Rocky Mountain states), PA and TN, there are also wild herds in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan (over a century), Wisconsin, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Florida (one small free herd 50+ years in NE FL), South Dakota, North Dakota (I don't think SD ever lost all of their elk - not sure about ND).
Turns out they're in 31 states now with that set to increase as there are currently 2-3 more states studying restoration efforts. There's been a lot of restoration of elk the last 25 years, and also some restored elk populations have crossed state lines and established breeding populations (KY to VA & WV); an individual KY elk in OH; 1 or 2 individual NC elk documented so far in SC).
Wait until you find out how they're recycled when they break or are decommissioned
600 cubic meters is 785 cubic yards. A typical concrete truck carries 10 cubic yards with the usable concrete being a little less than that. This pour would take a minimum of 80 trucks. Think of all that diesel pollution. The horror....the horror...
Had many conversations about "free energy turbines" they usually get mad when you spit facts. Man hours, truck transportation, idle time, heavy machinery operation. Drilling for underground cable to incorporate it to the grid. Manufacturing the cable, delivery of cable, installation of cable. Then all of the same goes for the actual wind turbine itself. Maybe even more.
Then the blades have a limited lifespan and go straight to the landfill. What about that?
These feel-good "environmental" folks fail to see the whole picture. They only see skewed financial break even information. Not the whole environmental break even, or total cost break even, including continual maintenance and service.
They're a damn eyesore on our beautiful landscape, mess with the food chain and ecosystem, and make a ton of noise...
I just flew over the Columbia River gorge the other day (I hadn't seen it from the air for decades as I usually take an aisle seat). I was shocked at the vast numbers of turbines I saw and remembered that there wasn't a single one there back in the mid 90s when I used to drive through there a few times a year.
785 cubic yards X 400lbs of CO2 per yard concrete = 314,000lbs of CO2 released = 143 metric tons CO2. We haven't even got to all the emissions from producing and shipping the iron rebar.
I calculated that an equivalent CO2 for a power plant burning natural gas is 3 metric tons. Can that be right?
A wind turbine produces about 500 kW per year. I read somewhere that the lifetime of a wind turbine is about 30 years. I don't remember where. For a total lifetime energy production of 15 MW.
Natural Gas emits 0.2 kg of CO2 per kWh. 15,000 kW * 0.2 kgCO2/kW = 3 metric tons.
That can't be right. Tell me it isn't so. Just the concrete?
concrete curing releases CO2. that is what he is talking about.
It takes large kilns to produce cement powder to make concrete. You have to use natural gas or coal for those large kilns.
I'm not sure this math is correct. I was looking online and found the following (assuming a 2MW turbine running at 25% efficiency).
2 MW × 365 days × 24 hours × 25% = 4,380 MWh = 4,380,000 kWh
This would be for 1 year, so assuming 30 year lifespan that would be a total estimate of 131,400MWh.
If you take that number and multiply by the amount of co2 per kwh of natural gas, it would be 26.28M kg of co2. (If I did my math right)
The co2 released by the concrete alone wouldn't come close to the co2 emissions from natural gas for a comparable lifetime power output, but as there's a lot more co2 released in other aspects of wind turbine production (rebar, material transport, mining, manufacturing, assembly, maintenance, cables, etc) it's hard to say how efficient they really are. This would be something cool to look into.
Thanks. Yeah, that looks better.
Shit, all the energy it takes just to create the concrete, rebar, and other misc., items to create that foundation.
all that for a 2-3 MW capacity. That is what it is capable of, not what it produces, which is measured in MWh. That varies wildly with the conditions of course. They do not produce 2-3 MWh 24/7 all year, unlike the rated capacities of non-peaker CC and nuke plants.
Bud, you have not even touched on Rare Earth Minerals yet that are required for the turbine to function at its stated efficiency...dwarfs the concrete cost in devastation.
Not to mention the giant diesel guzzling machines used to strip the gravel in the concrete out of precious Mother Earth leaving giant raw scars on her beautiful surface. And look at all that steel. How many trainloads and trucks of iron ore have been ripped out of our mountains, trucked to a filthy smoke belching factory before being processed and then trucked out again?
Enough to change the magnetic poles of the Earth. Seriously, some of what is attributed to global warming is the overmining of the iron range changing the rotation of the Earth.
It’s not just that... The production of Portland cement is one the biggest sources of CO2 pollution. From Wikipedia:
“The cement industry is one of the two largest producers of carbon dioxide (CO2), creating up to 8% of worldwide man-made emissions of this gas, of which 50% is from the chemical process and 40% from burning fuel.”
NOT ONE turbine has generated more electricity than it has consumed.
Exactly. Even the most modern turbines, which constantly run under the best theoretical conditions and are optimally maintained, will never generate as much energy during their service life as was necessary to produce them.
You beat me to what I was going to say, and you did it in a more aggressive fashion, good on you pede!
When I worked with NATO I enjoyed pointing out that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who use the metric system and those who have successfully put men on the moon. :)
That's a cube, where each side is 3.28084 feet long.
Or more relevant for concrete: 264.1729 US Gallon (1000 liter = 1m³)
Yeah! Use freedom units or fuck right the hell off!
Freedoms units, not commie units.
100 percent built top to bottom with oil products and huge amounts of fossil fuel . Tits on a boar hog .
Fun fact: The energy harnessed by windmills will never be enough to pay for the materials used to produce that windmill.
GREEN ENERGY! DERP!
The arms do not survive very long. They are made of fiberglass and have to be cut into 3 sections and buried in land fills. There is no recycling for fiberglass and once it degrades it is as harmful for lungs as asbestos. I have seen for myself the bird graveyards.
Green is anti-green. Double-plus good.
Green is the color of money. Democrats like their kickbacks for all those wasteful subsidized programs.
Concrete requires high heat to produce. It takes 2,775 MJ to manufacture one cubic meter of concrete, equivalent to the energy ~1/3 barrel of oil. Therefore, you need 200 barrels of oil (equivalence) just to manufacture the base of the turbine. That's just the base, and that's not factoring in the joules (ie, oil) you need to spend to build it. That also does not factor the CO2 that's emitted in the process of burning that oil for concrete production. How many joules do you need to spend to build these things, and how many joules do you get out of the turbine with its ~20 year lifespan?
Solar panels return joules spent within two years of operation. Do you even break even with these turbines?
Fun fact: Concrete is 8% of man-made CO2 emissions. Yet, leftists insist on building the one energy source that takes more concrete per capita than any other source of energy.
I work with someone who was duped into the windmill scam. He was told 20 yr payback period, which is high to begin with. He was promised it’d cost him something like 60k, ended up actually costing him 100k because nobody mentioned the base. Then the repairs. Then the maintenance. Turned it into never being able to pay itself off. Just a massive pile of garbage more needy than a newborn baby that can never be removed because that’d be a monumental expense too.
That math is ~, but the impact is worse than the meme shows.
Turbine base, e.g. (piled raft)= ~32 piles @ 18"x18"x33' +
= ~70 cu m per turbine @ 150lbs/cu ft or 4,050lbs/cu yd or 2,400 kg/cu m
That's a "piled raft;" it's at the very low end, concrete-volume-wise. A Pile Group or Raft would be 2x to 5x as much concrete.
Which means, the smallest conceivable concrete turbine base is ~168,000 kg or 370,376 lbs. CO2 from production of one lb of concrete? .9lbs of CO2 per lb.
I.e., at the LOW end, the turbine base causes the release of ~333,338lbs of CO2 FROM THE CONCRETE ALONE, before you get to mining and transportation of the materials, manufacture and transportation of the component parts, assembly and transportation of the assembled parts, site preparation and machinery required for installation, feeding, housing, transportation, and clothing of the installation workers, resource extraction, refinement and transportation, manufacture, assembly, and transportation and installation of the transmission lines necessary to convey electricity generated at the turbines, etc, etc, etc.
https://structurepoint.org/publication/pdf/Tall-Wind-Turbine-Tower-Reinforced-Concrete-Foundation-ACI318-14.pdf
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3296&context=all_theses
If wind turbines lasted as long as dams, there would be no problem with this.
Concrete produces almost 8% of the world's carbon dioxide. If the concrete industry was a country it would be the third worst carbon footprint.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/23/saturday-silliness-wind-turbine-photo-of-the-year/de-icing-wind-turbine/
Concrete is a CO2 emmitter as well. It's not environmentally friendly.
There is no green energy without nuclear. Change my mind.
Nuclear also has its flaws. The US government is surpressing the amount of radiation actually being leaked by the aging US power plants.
We said in the US that we are too transparent to have a Chernobyl, but that was before we had the modern FBI.
I think it's something we need to work on, because it's incredibly helpful if done right, but it's not without consequence. Especially when you have woke police and corrupt politicians degrading the standards of even the most important infrastructure.
Nuclear's biggest downsides is the waste and threat of meltdown. Both these issues go away when we start using thorium reactors instead of uranium. Yes thorium technology isn't perfect and has a way to go. But it's a viable clean option and has more benefits vs other so called clean options.
With how we know society is run, you really want to avoid having a part of the "public" infrastructure built in such a way that it becomes dangerous with underutilization.
Humans are really really good at fucking things up. Success through failure is how humans work. Best design infrastructure to fail in non-devastating ways.
This is how modern nuclear plants are built, but they still have serious maintence issues that can be papered over to make for dangerous circumstances.
Just imagine how much coal they had to burn to make the coke for that steel rebar and how much natural gas they had to use to bake the lime to make all that concrete. Then factor in all the diesel fuel they burnt digging and crushing the aggregate and then hauling everything to the construction site. So many barrels of oil in every green project.
Fitting monuments to the destruction of animal life and creation's beauty.
Follow T. Boone Picken's advice and invest in the natural gas industry and gas turbines. Each windfarm requires these to back them up when the wind doesn't blow.
At the end of their useful life, no one will spend the money to remove these monstrosities, furthering pollution and a visual blight upon the land.
Why is concrete bad?
It’s not inherently bad. It’s just funny when they are being hypocritical by pouring large amounts for useless structures like windmills. The amount of energy required to produce cement emits a lot of CO2. Concrete producers use pozzolans (fly ash, slag, silica fume) to reduce the carbon footprint of cement production and to make better, more durable concrete. They have even begun injecting CO2 into concrete during the mixing process to help trap the gas and form small limestone particles.
Takes massive amounts of energy to produce and can't really be recycled. So we'd better use it effectively.
All they do is mix up a few ingredients....like making cake batter....I still don't understand how concrete can be bad....maybe if you didn't wash it off your hands while you were pouring it......but really.....
To be fair, it's the concrete powder that takes enormous amounts of energy to produce. I'm no expert but I believe it's a certain type of sand which has to be heated and dried at very high temperatures.
Mixing it with water only takes a fraction of that energy. :)
Environmentalists are carefully touching the topic, knowing that if people know that concrete isn't very environmentally friendly, they might choose to live in wooden single family homes instead of commie blocks. Some of them even goes so far that they wanna build commie blocks and even parking garages in wood instead of concrete. Now that's insane.
Sea walls for rising oceans, duh /s
We'll go ahead and look the other way on that one, hmmm k.
Are carbon fiber composites used for the blades? I thought they were or at least are desired to be if the cost of CF comes down. CF manufacture is very very CO2e inefficient, the equivalent of 50 kg(CO2) / kg(CF). Once you make that into a composite, perhaps double. For reference just about all main synthetic polymers are 1-4 kg(CO2)/kg. Wind farms have been known to alter local micro-climates too. Rebar is likely not CO2 cheap, I cannot speak for concrete.
Concrete has very high energy content as the key ingredients are transformed in a huge kiln, which is in addition to mining, transport, and processing costs.
https://www.cement.org/cement-concrete/how-cement-is-made
The huge blades are subject to very high stresses and wear. Disposal is literally a huge problem as modern blades are often 300+ feet (100m) each.
they typically are FRP, not carbon fiber.
Wind turbine blades are fiber glass.
15 years ago there started a great push to move away from GlassFiberRP towards CarbonFRP by making CF cheaper. I thought they might have achieved that to some level, but I guess even with CF being the lowest cost almost ever it is still not low enough. It would only become low enough if another CF precursor is found to make good general purpose CF.
The reasoning is reduced density of CF compared to GF, and the much greater specific strengths and moduli of general purpose CF compared to general purpose GF.
It’s even worse in American cubic yards. 787. That is a lot of mud
Mines, Minerals, and "Green" Energy: A Reality Check
Mark P. Mills
July 9, 2020
"Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy."
Some day a future people will dig these up and determine they were used for ancient religious ceremonies.
FYI for land owners. If you're letting people lease your land for these things, make sure it's explicitly stated in the contract when they will be removed and who will be covering the cost of disposal. People have been fucked hard in the past.
For the turbines in the ocean, do they require a similar concrete base? Do they pump the water out to pour it, or do they just drop it onto the ocean floor, and let it land on top of whatever sea life is down there?
Great question, for what I know they use concrete all the way up to a few meters over the surface, and in any case there's gotta be a massive concrete foot to prevent the structure from tipping over.
These structures can be up to 150m tall, plus 50-100m for the wing. The old WTC twin towers was 400m tall. Burj Khalifa, tallest building in the world is 828m tall. All that for a maximum of 8MW, if it's windy.
A modern nuclear reactor gives an output between 1GW - 2GW
If the left cared about actually going green we would have been primarily on nuclear decades ago. As always, they are full of sh*t.
What most don't know - solar and wind power requires special battery banks to store the energy, and certain elemental components of said batteries are only found in 2 small countries in the world....so we would be at their absolute mercy. They are already starting w the Green New Deal bullshit, cancelling that pipeline and new fracking permits
Wind turbines aren't easily recycled as they are made from composites. They are dumped and buried when they develop cracks.
The blades last less than twenty years and aren’t recyclable.
Fun fact: concrete production emits an enormous amount of the 'scary' CO2 leftwits fear.
Wind is the dumbest source of energy, those things are often dead on arrival they don’t work. The energy “crisis” has been solved for decades but they still want us to quarrel of crude.
not to mention the 80 gallons of industrial lube that runs everywhere when they break. Where's that lube come from? Oh right petroleum products. Smh.
Green is a euphemism for redistribution of wealth.
Understand that and you understand what is happening.
On top of that they don't work worth a shit
There is no Reduce Reuse or Recycle in wind or solar power. Well, maybe reduced power output...
Pipelines power the nation. As they go, so goes the country.
Holy crap!
And they can't recycle the fiberglass blades.
Amazing
Meh.... none of this matters....
The real issue with Wind/solar is the batteries needed to support the system.
I love concrete though...
But yeah nuclear is the future!
If we’d just deregulate the building materials industry we could be using any number of alternatives that just haven’t been rated by municipal building codes. Construction should be so much better but we’re operating at a huge disadvantage because of regulation.
Just think, something that tall is gonna have a concrete pier/footing that is as deep as it is tall.
And another thing average people don't understand, is commercial or heavy use concrete has to cure for weeks. What this means is the concrete has to be kept at a certain temperature for a few weeks in order to get the required strength. Often times, especially in the summer, after the concrete is hard enough, crews will put a water sprinkler system on the concrete and cover wet burlap blankets on top to help keep the concrete cool. I've worked on bridges where we tapped right into a fire hydrant, and ran water continuously for 14 days, in order to keep the bridge deck cool. That was one bridge. About a quarter mile long, and 100' long, pretty average bridge.
I wondered what the rebar grid looked like for a wind turbine pad. It is a mass pour "footer" with a ring wall for the turbine base. Interesting
All that alkalinity going into the ground water.
And that's just a small one, the current massive ones have a base 4 times the size of this.
The wind turbines are never removed
was all that rebar and heavy machinery made with green energy???