14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines in the USA (Pioneer)

We could have had some of these on Wills Ridge in Floyd, if we had just gone with the flow and decided to be green at all cost. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and we can observe what others have done. Wind turbines may play a part in our future, but more work has to be done before they can be considered environmentally safe or economically sensible.

Abandoned wind turbines
To see more images: http://knoxville.craigslist.org/pol/3746100243.html

The US has had wind farms since 1981, 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.

There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the
pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird
choppers, the blight on people’s lives of noise and the flicker factor
and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these
blots on the landscape. 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.

“Some say that Ka Le is haunted–and it is. But it’s haunted not by
Hawaii’s legendary night marchers. The mysterious sounds are “Na leo o
Kamaoa”– the disembodied voices of 37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned
to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm. . .
The ghosts of Kamaoa are not alone in warning us. Five other abandoned
wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles–but it is in California where the
impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. 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. . .
California’s wind farms– comprising about 80% of the world’s wind
generation capacity–ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa.
In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply
abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but
bird kills. . .”

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. Imagine the outraged
Green chorus if those turbines were abandoned oil drilling rigs.

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. He asks:

“If wind power made sense, why would it need a government subsidy in the
first place? It’s a bubble which bursts as soon as the government
subsidies end.”

And 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.

Altamont’s turbines have since 2008 been tethered four months of every
year in an effort to protect migrating birds after environmentalists
filed suit. According to the Golden Gate Audubon Society, 75 to 110
Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-tailed Hawks, and 333
American Kestrels (falcons) are killed by Altamont turbines annually. A
July, 2008 study by the Alameda County Community Development Agency
points to 10,000 annual bird deaths from Altamont Pass wind turbines.
Audubon calls Altamont, “probably the worst site ever chosen for a wind
energy project.” The same areas that are good for siting wind farms are
also good for birds of prey and migrating birds to pass through, shame
for the birds that none of the Green mental midgets who care so much
about everything in nature, thought that one through when pushing their
anti fossil fuel agenda. After the debacle of the First California Wind
Rush, the European Union had moved ahead of the US on efforts to
subsidize “renewable” energy–including a “Feed in Tariff” even more
lucrative than the ISO4 contracts. The tax payers who paid for the
subsidies to build the wind farms, then paid over the odds for an
unreliable source of power generation, will ultimately be left to pick
up the bill for clearing up the Green eco mess in the post
Man-Made-Global-Warming world.

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