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Germany Now Faced With Thousands Of Aging Wind Farms
Submitted by Gaurav Agnihotri via OilPrice.com,
Germany has long been a pioneer in the field of renewable energy, generating a record 78 percent of its power consumption from renewables in July of this year. In fact, Germany is one of the very few countries in the world that is actually struggling with too much renewable energy. The latest testimony to this fact is the new issue of decommissioning its old wind farms.
2011 was a turning point for the European giant as it started moving away from nuclear energy (post Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster) and began to replace it with renewables. However, wind energy made its foray in Germany well before 2011. Germany started building wind turbines in the mid-1990s and now there are almost 25,000 wind turbines in the country.
However, the problem now is that a large number of the 25,000 odd turbines have become too old. Close to 7,000 of those turbines will complete more than 15 years of operation by next year. Although these turbines can continue running, with some minor repairs and modifications, the question is whether it makes any economic sense to maintain them?
(Click Image To Enlarge)
Image source: TriplePundit.com
Efficiency is the key
Beyond a period of 20 years, the guaranteed tariffs that are set for wind power are terminated, thereby making them unprofitable. “Today, there are entirely different technologies than there were a decade ago. The performance of the turbines have multiplied, the turbines are also more efficient than before”, said Dirk Briese of market research company called Wind- Research. It therefore makes sense to replace old turbines with newer ones. However, it is not very easy to dismantle an existing turbine and, while there are companies like PSM that specialize in dismantling of wind turbines, the costs of decommissioning can run upwards of $33,500 per turbine.
Decommissioning wind turbines: a growing problem?
The process of decommissioning a wind farm is a complicated one as it requires at least two 150 ton cranes which are used to dismantle the turbines, tower houses, rotor blades and other related equipment and parts. In fact, offshore wind decommissioning is even more intricate and expensive, as the availability of shipping vessels, cost of shipping the components back on shore and cost of removing steel pillars form seabed need to be considered too.
Wind farm decommissioning is indeed going to be a universal problem, especially for countries like the United States where a large number of wind projects are being developed. The U.S. has more than 48,000 utility operated wind turbines and more than 18 million American homes are powered every single year by the country’s installed wind capacity. Even corporations such as Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, IKEA, Mars, Walmart and Amazon have invested in the U.S. wind energy sector.
(Click Image To Enlarge)
Total US installed wind capacity as of 4Q 2014
Image Source: Awea.org
The numbers above suggest that the U.S. is going to face a similar problem that Germany is now facing may be in the next 8- 10 years when its oldest wind farms become outdated. However, a lot depends upon the efficiency and technology of turbines that are in use. Even if around 30 percent of U.S. wind turbines need decommissioning in the next five to ten years, the total decommissioning costs could reach up to $1 billion (when we consider a decommissioning rate of $55,000 and above per turbine).
What can be done with the decommissioned wind turbines?
A previous study that was commissioned by Scottish National Heritage (SNH) forecasted that there would be a need to ‘recycle’ approximately 225,000 tons of rotor blades by the year 2034. Something similar is happening in Germany, where the rotor blades are ‘reprocessed’ in industrial scale factories and then shredded and mixed with other waste. The final product is then used in cement manufacturing facilities as fuel.
Moreover, the second hand market for the discarded wind farms is flourishing in Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe and Latin America where the components can be re-used in applications such as building community wind farms. The issue of wind turbine decommissioning must be viewed more as an opportunity than a threat, as the wind decommissioning market (for both offshore and onshore) is growing at a rapid pace. The question is whether the global wind industry is prepared to seize this opportunity.
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They clearly need to import muslim windmills.
Another case of smaller is better.
the cost of replacing aging windmills may be sky high (get it? "sky high"?), but the cost of replacing the aging sun is astronomical.
get it?
"astronomical"
you can use this with your workplace friends.
tell them it's from your pals at zh
They are clearly in need of wind turbines that pass emissions standards, hey?
Give me some dynamite. I'll decommission the fuck out of those turbines.
I call bullshit.
well for fucks sake don't send any older turbines to Africa. Heir O-blah-blah has already dictated to his African brothuhs and sistuhs that they aren't allowed to have cars or air-conditioning or else they will blow up the planet and "tip the island over" (wink).
Besides...once the MENA is done emptying itlself northward into Europe then I'm sure Europe will need all the old turbines they can get to keep the fucking lights on 24/7 in order to keep an eye on the millions of prehistoric, stoneage, homicidal, illegal invader mugwumps roaming the streets looking to rape and murder every unarmed whitie they can find.
Decommissioning windmills got to be easier that decommissioning nookular plants.
Just hire Don Quiote
Concealed Carry coming to the EU soon. Hopefully it will come before another tyrant can personally kill millions more of his subjects.
u mad bro?
Excellent avatar.
Exactly. I recently read on ZH that German electricity costs around $.30 per KwH. How much BS can the Germans take? Suckers!
Save your dynamite for the dams.
I thought the decommisioning of the Twin Towers went well.
Thanks for posting the oil/nuclear propaganda piece.
Compare the cost of decommisioning a windmill to decommisioning a nuclear power plant
and the cost of storing high-level nuclear waste for the next one million years.
Could it be possible that buiding new turbines might create a business opportunity here in the US?
We might actually build things here again? Novel idea
As someone that sells equipment to windturbine service company I can guarantee they charge a LOT more than $55,000 to decommission a 300' tall wind turdine.
It takes cranes that cost anywhere from $10-15 million to take up and put down these things, plus a slew of other support cranes and trucks. You can easily have $55,000 just in "move-in/move-out" charges
These are not small
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfv6RDGspWc
WTF??? I'm no expert in wind turbines but... OK replace bearings. Now what? OK worst case is the you are better off replacing the entire guts of the turbine using the same case and prop. Worst, worstest case you gotta replace the entire turbine and adapt the old prop to fit.
You don't have to replace the footing and the tower! Come on, I call bull shit except some of them will eventually need an overhaul or replacement of the body with a more efficient one. Will that cut the cost in half what is presented in this article?
It's a whole engineered system. The tower is designed to handle so much weight up top and with X length blades.
The "upgrades" would include bigger generators up top with bigger reduction gear drives with bigger blades which all put greater stresses on the towers.
They do constantly upgrade the generators in the towers now, but the new generation turbines keep getting bigger and taller
Sounds curiously like HFT trading
Guaranteed tariffs, taxpayers paying for expenses of new. You are correct.
The tower, base platform, piles/footings and such all are still good even if you pull the entire turbine. The money is in charging the taxpayers for high profit new work. And you do not need to "upgrade" to a larger turbine when you already have all the rest in place.
You can see the signs of graft and corruption, once again associated with being "green", so if you protest you must be against "green".
Back to school! Fraudulent Fiat 101. The hamster wheel of fake money demands a complete turnover every few years. This is occurring in all fields. It means cheaper and crappier cars, houses, etc. that replace older ones.
The original ones lasted for centuries.
Right, but you might move the crane in once to decommission 100 wind turbines that are on a farm, so the move in and move out costs would be spread over the whole farm. I'm not saying that the cost is what they say it is, but with the way they set up wind farms, one turbine is pretty close to another when compared to how far you need to move a crane from where it is stored to the farm itself.
Hey why dismantle them, just get some Arabs to do a fly past in a threatening manner; the towers will spontaneously collapse in their own footprint.
could this be done cheaper with a heavy lift chopper ?
As far as I can see, the biggest heavy lift choppers have around 20 tonnes capability, whereas you need hundreds of tonnes capability for assembly / disassembly of windmills.
Someone tried to make an airship with four helicopters attached to make a super heavy lifter, but they went bankrupt and the hanger in Germany is now a tourist destination, with a tropical theme.
THIS!
You need this 320 Ton beast or larger .. with nice pictures to get this done.
http://www.craneserviceinc.com/crane-rental/crawler-crane-rental/item/liebherr-1300sx
Here is video of just pulling a "small" 210 model so that people understand what an operation it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82v4vtVMRU
$55,000 might be able to cover the insurance .
Wind farms can blow the earth off orbit.
http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-coal-lobby-warns-wind-farms-ma...
You laugh, but there is a limited amount of kinetic energy in the atmosphere. I saw a study that reckoned we will see adverse weather effects before we get to pulling out more than one tetrajoule of wind energy.
People throughout history have laughed at the idea we would run out of resources that seemed plentiful at the time...
We can use the energy from the wind farms to power fans. Stop worrying dude.
"Wind farms can blow the earth off orbit."
Based on my recent scientific studies & calculations, there are Hemet (area) to Tacoma free farm wannabees who can blow the planet off orbit as well.
So I guess we're all fucked in the end. Enjoy the ride.
Blades act similarly to turboexpanders taking energy out of gas at constant entropy. Reduces the temperature of the air and adds more water precipitation due to dropping temperatures. Fresh water problem solved. Too bad the rain may fall in the Atlantic.
More subsidies needed!!!
Timing is everthing, especially in markets.
The Germans are great at keeping time, like their brothers the Swiss, and exact to the minute day to day.
But its just that "long term thing" they need to do better...like the markets!!
Timing errors for the Germans 1..2..3..
Hitler, Russia invasion, the bomb, assault rifle, Jet fighter, ballsistic missiles...etc etc..
Good local time German friendos, but horrible calander timing..
Broken wind farms, dirt cheap oil, and VW...Oh La La...
Oh yeah, and invading France, you should do that now!!
I always think of Swiss as Germans that live in the mountains, and the Dutch as Germans that like sailing.
Is that wrong?
No, it is not wrong.
However, you do not understand the situation in Germany. I repeat: YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND IT! Germany is in complete CHAOS. A chaos that is widely underreported. 300.000 people came to the country without registration. More and more are coming. 230.000 people came in September!
A small state like the SAARLAND will take 40,000 refugees. They had about 900.000 people before the refugee crisis. And this happens all over the country. Many of the state ministers don't even know how many people are traveling through the country.
GERMANY is about to erupt and dissolve. You do not seem to grasp this.
THE UNITED STATES - how many are they taking? What? 20.000? Over what period of time? 2 years? 5 years? Germany is taking 10,000 people per DAY! There will be civil war soon.
I talked to my German friends - they are all stocking up - and I am talking about ammo.
Yes, we saw that. German politicans have sodomized their own peoples.
However, now those European Yutes no longer need to sneak all the way to the ME to join isis; they can simply sign up at one of the 20,000 local isis branches there in the EU itself!
How does that work? They can't even take a firearm out of a gun club let alone ammo from what I understand. I know there's a bunch of old stuff buried around the country from the war, but how are they managing to get ammo without mass arrests?
Look at it this way, how are Americans able to acquire such large quantities of illegal drugs?
Perhaps you missed the organized migration earlier this year on the U.S. southern border.
You don't seem to grasp that the United States, with a population of 320 million, has 45+ million foreign-born residents. The EU, with a population of 500+ million, has about 35 million foreign-born residents.
Even at the rate you claim, the EU would have to take in refugees at that rate for 3 years to match that 45 million, and then still the percentage of the population would be less.
The United States has done a better job of assimilating those foreign-born residents, too. Maybe not a perfect job, but the best job on this planet. No banlieues, no carbques, no 'no-go' zones, at least not yet.
Dempgraphics have doomed Europe for quite some time. These events are only the climax, the result of decades of suicidal policy and public opinion.
At least Latinos are Christian. White Europe is facing annihilation, as planned by the UN/NWO.
"THE UNITED STATES - how many are they taking? What? 20.000? Over what period of time?"
America takes in 70,000 immigrants per year, scheduled to increase to 100,000 per year in 2017.
HELLLO!? What did I just write? The smallest STATE of Germany - Saarland - about the size of Luxemburg - takes 40,000 refugees alone! A little more than half of what America takes as immigrants per year.
Saarland:
2.570 km²
USA:
9.857.000 km²
Saarland (refugees this/next year):
40,000 people (registered)
USA:
70,000 people (registered)
These numbers - Germany gets them now in a week.
Man, you don't really know what's going on in Germany. A 100,000 Afghans leave Afghanistan per Month right now. Some of them will settle down in Iran. Most of them want to go to Europe. I heard a press conference by the interior minister of the Saarland. And oh boy - this guy was no Boehner - but he said that Germany is in UTTER CHAOS right now.
Some of the interior ministers don't even know the real numbers anymore. Could it be 200,000? Or 250,000?
He also said that these refugees steal - they don't want to touch the hands of DRK (German Red Cross) women - because they are impure - they demand a lot. You may laugh about this. But you won't laugh when Germany has a civil war on their hands. And you won't laugh when Germany will - after a bloody war - name the United States as main reason (because of their failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria). The German LEFT already does this. The German RIGHT also.
I am really surprised that Tyler does not report about this. The situation Germany is at a tipping point.
To give you another example: Many communities in Germany have begun to snoop on peoples property. They report every empty house. And the state will claim them. De facto - something is happening that only existed in RED COMMUNIST COUNTRIES.
German people are kicked out of community houses. To make room for 'refugees'.
Sorry, but if this goes on for a couple of months - Germany will have civil war.
I was not disputing what you said, just showing how many America officially takes in.
America is not the primary cause; the primary causes are:
1. over the last hundred years, humans have increased their populations tremendously. Muslim nations have in general grown their populations ten-fold since WW2 - more than double the population growth rates of most other nations.
2. Droughts. Whether it is AGW or solar cycle or whatever, is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is millions of people being displaced due to their soil becoming dead, their livestock dying, their livelihoods disappearing.
More people plus less food equals chaos. Same as it ever was. The Arab Spring was not about democracy; it was starving people who lost everything to drought, desperately seeking to acquire more resources.
Turn them into condo's for banksters. EZ-Suicide.
Or rent them to the immigrants. A room with a view.
We wind fucked some folks
Better a problem with aging windmills than aging nuclear reactors that must be protected for 500,000 years after they are shut down
Molton salt reactors don't have that problem.....
Using molten salt instead of solid fuel pellets in rods does not change the waste products. It may theorectically remove the need for fuel reprocessing, but decommission and waste storage remains the same.
Look, you'll upset their world view that everything really is better with Blue Bonnet on it...
Thorium salts fission products have short half lives, but plutonium and uranium can be used to produce short half life products, plus it's inherently fail-safe.... It's not perfect but nothing is and it will work NOW. Not someday like fusion....
Yawn, still waiting...Tell you what, why don't you just crowd-source one to get the molten salt reactor revolution off the ground.
It's already happening....
True, it's just going slower because what government wants a nuke plant that can't produce nuclear weapons?
Thorium is not used to produce power, the thorium becomes protactinium becomes uranium 233 - after a month or so.
Perhaps U-233 is a better fuel than U-235, and may only need several hundred years instead of 10,000 years for waste storage.
The claims of cheaper construction for a Thorium molten salt reactor fail to take into account that the reactor must be practically impervious to terrorist attack; the thick cement walls are there at least as much to secure the facility from attack and accident as it is containment.
I think he meant Thorium LFTR technology.
I read somewhere that molten salt catch fire in contact with air. If true,Isn't that extremely dangerous to have around nuclear power plant?
It's not air, but water/water vapor...
If you travel down the leftmost column on the Periodic Table of the elements, the earlest "molten salt" plants used sodium, and sodium as everyone should know, does not react well with water. PLenty of google videos where people see how well alkaline metals react with water.
Now yesterday someone corrected me, and said that the new "molten salt" reactors are different. So I did some research, and they now want to use a fluoride salt which has other problems which are usually glossed over by the "molten salt" reactor worshippers. Note I said fluoride not fluorine. Fluorine has the same problem as sodium when it comes in contact with water... (fire!)
Of course, the two biggest problems are the same as always. Corrosion and Neutron Embrittlement.
Standard Disclaimer: And yet nuclear fuel is not recycled... Absolutely brilliant. /s
Not to worry, Monsanto will make toothpaste out of the radioactive fluorides.
Amazing, 2 down arrows. Care to state why? Or do you prefer to remain your typically cowardly selves and remain in the shadows?
34929 people have read this article, just 19 rated it.
Taking 2 down arrows personally is being just a little bit over sensitive.
Keep calm and ignore votes. In fact I'm going to downvote you too, just for my fun of course. Don't take it personally.
"500,000 years?" he asked incredulously...
"Well, sometimes I just pull numbers out of my ass", JustObserving replied.
"So actual science is not your forte?"
"Look, screw science, I'm just in it for the up-arrows"...
Watch this video on Thorium LFTR: https://www.patreon.com/thorium?ty=h
Decay chains are a bitch and the numbers are already known.
Standard Disclaimer: Come talk to me after you've actually 1) Operated a nuclear reactor, 2) Been in a reactor compartment, or 3) Slept with a nuclear weapon not 10 feet from your feat.
So there isn't really a problem?
Of course it's not.
decomissioning nuke power plant *is* a problem of another magnitude
But renewables aren't going to deliver, either. Nuclear, wind and solar are reliant on fossil fuels all along the manufacture and maintenance pipeline. Wind and solar power need a legacy grid in place just to manage voltage fluctuations they create. I'm about as "green" as they come, but I long ago realized that "renewables" are just part of the "magic will save us" technotopian dreamscape that is serving very well keeping people from making hard choices regarding their lifestyle choices.
Soon enough it all falls down.
Perhaps you need to sit down with a friend of mine. He decommissions nuclear plants for a living. I forget how many he's done now, but he usually let's me know in advance so if our paths cross we can sharean Arrogant Bastard Ale.
What's the value as scrap metal? Not so good, either, eh? Well, at least the insiders cashed in on another green-scam.
I don't think the BLADES need to be recycled. The turbine itself, sure. But the blades can be re-USED. Like for another wind turbine, in the 3rd world, as mentioned in the article.
The blades are subjected to repeated stresses as they enter the shadow of the mast and unload-reload. Like multiple micro-aggressions ;-) They wear out. Gearbox sizing matters, overpower the gearbox and let out all of the smoke as in the picture.
Helo blades same-same, although there are other effects in translation. Gives a Huey its distinctive whop-whop-whop sounds.
- Ned
Metal Fatigue + transport costs. But, if you say so...
BTW, aren't there already thousands of these things past their service life just rusting away in CA alone, already?
Here ya go: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html
Blades are generally made from glass fiber or carbon fibre re-inforced plastics.
No scrap metal, no metal fatigue.
I live in a windy part of the country and windmills just aren't consistent, even here. They also really screw up the grid with their surges, but President Zippy is going to leave (inflict) a 'legacy' of green atrocities for our children.....
Actually, Obama has been a disaster for the renewable energy industry. He has used renewables simply as an opportunity to channel money to political cronies. And his insistence on tying renewables to carbon credits and the global warming scam has also helped ruin the industry, by alienating republican support.
His entire tenure has been that way all across the board, so at least he's consistent in a horrifying kind of way....
Yep, they are changing policies year by year, which effectively rules out any possibility of long-term planning and development by most wind developers...
What policies? I haven't seen anything like a real policy since he took office.....
Can't they print their way out of this with a 3-D printer...?
PRINT MOAR!
If you don't factor in depreciation when economzing these things, you're an idiot.
You get these people saying "free energy" that have no concept of economics.
Apparently the idiots in the nuclear power industry didn't get your memo. They were promising "electricity too cheap to meter."
Care to factor in depreciation and decommissioning costs for Fukushima?
They need to pump water up a mountain into a reservoir with the unused capacity and then run the water through a turbine when they need the power. That is of course if they can serviced.
the pump is run backwards as the turbine, the motor becomes the generator. Check out Northfield Mountain or Cabin Creek. - Ned
http://merrillcreek.com/
Privately owned, too.
Yep they have the right idea.
Thats how wind power should have been done and everyone should have known it. Consistant base load is what is needed. Peak load is better done with fossil fuels.
Its a shame because wind power could have been a contender. If done right. Cheap small windmills pumping water in stages up to a big pond. 5 hundred foot of water colum is a great way to store and recover energy.
There is no problem. Just replace the old windmills with new ones. as needed. There is zero need to remove the foundations. Reuse them.
Repurpose offshore drilling and supply ships to do windmill work. That would fit in nicely with slowing down the pumping and exploration of oil from the North Sea and Norwegian Sea.
Look, this article does not describe a problem. The whole point of the article is to get people excited about an OPPORTUNITY, so that later, when the next article describing the investment comes out, people wil buy.
But the case or need is a bit overstated, if you ask me.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Odd that they don't last longer. How about building them sturdier, so only the bearing surfaces need replacing? Why the fuck would a propellor, housing or tower wear out?
Gearboxes are--by far-- the most vulnerable component of a wind turbine system. They are subject to variable and unpredictable stresses, run continuously for days or even weeks at a time, and have to be available 24/7/365. A major engineering challenge.
You would be amazed at the amount of natural sandblasting Mother Nature creates.
Worse case scenario, dismantle old wind farms and send them to Asia to be reassembled as.... wind farms. Genius. I can see we've got a real problem here but it has nothing to do with power generation.
check out Altamont pass and the farms above Palm Springs. Good candidates for your theory. - Ned
14000 dead wind turbines in the Altamont, Tehacapin, and San Gorgonio passes. Thats right we get to stare at 14000 dead useless taxpayer funded windmills in CA alone.
then clearly nukes are the answer. [/SARCASM]
Hey wait just a minute!!! They said that windmills don't have a carbon footprint! what's that black stuff?
Rhode Island has this problem as well, check out the PROJO for like June 7, 2014. Not enough kWh left in the machine to pay for the repairs.
- Ned
Sounds odd, quite frankly...this article doesn't seem to be written by someone expert in wind turbines.
For one, the location of a wind turbine is determined by the wind being present at that place. So if they sited a turbine in a location, the wind is probably still there. Therefore they just need to replace it, not decommission it.
Second, you have a very sturdy supporting structure already - why not erect a larger platform, put some tools up there and take it apart, then lower it piece by piece via pulley and chain? Or why not rebuild the turbine with newer, better parts?
Do the old turbine blades no longer work properly? Have they radically redesigned them in the preceding 15 years?
Yes, thay have got bigger and bigger and bigger.
Space based solar was to be the answer. Cheap lofting of the parts to space was the issue, but that cheap energy threat was solved when the man who pioneered the space rail gun was murdered. Since he had gone to Iraq and worked for Saddam Hussein, friend of the USA, he presented a threat because his designs could be used to hit precious Gehenna, er, Israel. Or whatever. He's dead now.
Tesla had a crazy idea to use the Earth's magnetosphere to generate electricity. But he was a nut that had to be silenced and ridiculed. Crazy people, eh? Oh well, he's dead too.
Wouldn't using the magnetosphere to generate electricity on a large scale, cause it to collapse?
Sounds like the realm in which CERN likes to play. IMO we shouldn't be fucking around with that shit.
Nor should we be f*cking with the atmosphere, changing it's make up to what WE think it should be. Talk about arrogance and hubris!
Shipstone development has slipped a bit.
MSNBC Now Faced With Thousands Of Aging Wind BagsSorry, couldn't help myself.
Beyond a period of 20 years, the guaranteed tariffs that are set for wind power are terminated, thereby making them unprofitable.
That pretty much sums it up. If not for tax dollars supporting this shit, they would have never been built. Just more misallocation of resources.
Eroei is too low to maintain BAU. To continue business as usual an eroei of at least 1:40 is needed, windmills give 1:5, including the maintenance and exchange over time. By 2025 there won't be enough money for maintenance. But hey, you can at least hang 3 to 4 bankers at each windmill. So if you're a German banker, i'd move.
I remember driving through Palm Springs in California and looking at those vast windfarms, dozens where burned out, dozens where broken down
AND NOWHERE WHERE REPAIR CREWS.
America has the same problem, Spain also....
It's another hoax so to speak.
AND THE BEST PART:
Windfarms have been investment vehicles for years where people could invest in. A investment of 1 million made you a owner of a windwill. And a lot of retired people bought shares.
GUARANTEED RETURN!!!
untill they break down and become to old...
Nobody fixes anything anymore. From Ithingy's to Auto's, just junk it and buy new.
Fixing something is akin to saving which these days is bad. Spend all you have and going into debt is the new mantra.
aging wind farm?
I am a human being!
With digestive issues!
It's genetic!
The Germans followed the advice of their army and went on a path of renewables early. Their strategic branch predicted that the wheels would start coming off the system within the decade beginning in 2015. I have seen nothing yet that discredits the original premise put out by the strategic branch.
Granted that these are massive systems but repairs have to be cheaper than a scratch build. Plus the Germans have a good bit of experience with these turbines. If anybody can pull it off they can.
What we are seeing in oil prices is the result of chaos entering a system running up against Liebig’s Law of the minimum. Chaos by its very nature defeats economic models and expected outcomes. Its presence is an indicator of pending systemic collapse.
What they don't say is the price of electricty in Germany is almot 40 cents per kWh. That's double the most expensive electriciy in North America, and FIVE times the cheapest cost.
Companies were planning to move out of Germany becasue of the high power costs. So what did the governemnt do? The companies get a subsidy for their power costs. Who pays those subsidies? They are added to consumer power bills...
"The United Nations intends to replace Capitalism and Free Enterprise with its Green Economy, or Sustainable Development. However, its concepts of development and economy are deeply flawed ....
Leaders from virtually every nation on Earth jumped on the bandwagon and made politically binding commitments to rapidly implement Sustainable Development in their home countries. Of course, the United Nations will be there to help them every step of the way.
The catch is: Who will specify and enforce the envisioned “sustainable production and consumption” practices that are only mentioned in passing as a requirement for Sustainable Development and Green Economy?
In fact, we should demand answers from these would-be social engineers and technocrats as to exactly who will be making all of these decisions for us, and on what criteria."
http://technocracy.news/index.php/2015/09/29/the-united-nations-green-ec...
what effect would an EMP have on a solar panel?
I'm sure that Leo knows this.
A solar panel is basically a diode/LED working in reverse. Compared to wind they have no moving parts, but unless you are putting down some significant wattage in a field you will be eaten alive in installation costs. Seriously, home solar is a roofing job, not an energy job when you break down the costs of installation vs. parts.
This coming from a guy who really likes solar and can regularly be found wiring projects together. Solar has great niche uses but at $1-2 per watt for panels, plus the frame, installation, inverters, batteries, etc. it is not yet a serious contender as a replacement for mainstream power.
The key statement is here:
"Beyond a period of 20 years, the guaranteed tariffs that are set for wind power are terminated, thereby making them unprofitable."
Without subsidies wind power isn't profitable. Thus once they reach 20 years of age they need to be replaced with a new installation to reset the subsidy clock.
Stealing money from us, handing it to the owners of these mostrosities and calling it profit. Well, in a sck way, I guess it is. That's government for you!
Bail 'em out with governmenmt money, what else?
Most of the bigger ones will be left to rot is my guess. More mess left for the young to clean up.
Like the auto industry the good money comes from sale of the NEW.
In Russia they had this funky little car the Skoda I think it was called. They made them out of fiberglass with a nasty diesel smoker moter. There is no way to get rid of those cars in a cost effective manner. So lots of them can be found in ditches all over the country. Maybe they have gotten rid of them by now but I doubt it.
What is the scrap value on one of these? 2 maybe 5k ? And just where do they plan to dump a three hundred foot composit tower?
Craddle to grave? Wind power was done wrong and they knew it too.
What is the cost of taking them out of service per kw-hr compared to a nuclear plant?
That depends on if you decomisssion the nuke plant befor or after it melts down.
That's not a good comparison. What you need is to figure out the life cycle cost for each kw generated.
Wind power costs about 12 cents per kwh. Nuclear, including refurbishment of reactors is about 6 cents per kwh. Decomissioning nuclear is a tiny fraction of a cent per kwh generated.
+1
You really can't talk about pros and cons of a given energy source until you can measure in terms of per kWh generated. This is also true with environmental impact; what is the cost of mining silver, indium, and other metals needed for solar panels vs. mining coal?
BTW, silver is a significant part of solar panel chemistry. Another reason to buy.
Every power generator reaches the end of its usefulness and must be decommissioned. Coal, gas, and nuclear plants also need to be decommissioned at the end of their lifecycles. For coal and nuclear plants, that includes quite a bit of toxic waste that needs to be safely stored. Although their lifecycles are longer than 15-20 years, I would be surprised if this decommissioning process was cheap. $33,500 per turbine just doesn't seem particularly expensive.
That number seems way to low to me. Add a 0 or two is more likely.
Everything I find put the average decommision/removal of a wind turbine tower at around $150k each. So multiply that by the 14,000 decom'ed wind towers in CA. That puts us at roughly 2.1 billion dollars to remove the dead wind towers in CA alone.
Well, I doubt coal has a half life of 700 million years like uranium 235, 4.5 billion years for uranium 238 or 24,000 years for plutonium 239 used in power plants that the greens just adore to death... literally.
That sounds really cheap. They are probably including cost recovery of recycling the materials from the windmills.
"Hem, hem."
Just paint pictures of Allah on the turbines that need to come down. The infidel wind turbines won't stand a chance against those angry muzzies.
This is goofy, it had to all be priced in when they built the things, there are no surprises. And if it's just a takedown then dynamite is fine and lots more fun. Or else, reuse the tower and get some new turbines built with newer technologies to fit, outside of the improvement nobody will notice (Groucho).
Understanding
Strive to understand, and the equations required for your propulsion will present themselves. In and of itself, the General Theory of Relativity is useless, as is technical analysis, unless you want to be a communist, a gang of hammers looking for a nail. Whether it was oil, gold, or anything else, what most witnessed was noise.
The majority is always in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing, but they have every right to do so, always caught somewhere in the denial, anger, depression loop. Don’t go in that black hole expecting anything else, but a counterweight.
If you listen to the majority, you can only give up your future and spend all your time trying to fix the past, or separate only to repeat it, from the beginning. The equations of gravity confirm the assumption that you can’t go anywhere, due to their time limits, derived by the ‘best is the enemy of better’ and ‘you can only improve the system from within the system,’ best incremental, objective-based business mentality, of apes trying to corral monkeys.
You want to spend some time each day working on the future and reflecting on the past, to provide a continuum. I haven’t given you the equations for quantum statistics because they can only take you backwards, with explosive results, without balance. Monogamy makes no sense to the majority, which the Court confirms, yet nature rewards it. As a parent, you have children moving into the future, and parents moving into the past.
Without labor, America could only devolve, and if you think about it, that told you what was going to happen to CADoil, which WAS the focal point making sense of all the noise, circuit analysis. In the final stage of an empire on the margin, the majority, Caesar, gives itself the right to take your children, to perpetuate its Ponzi, until it can’t and those children make the future.
The only way to have faith is to build it, with experience, but you will run into no end of critters who now nothing of faith, presenting themselves as experts. Ultimately, you have to build the bridges to your future yourself.
If it were easy, everyone would do it for themselves. There would be no global market, for the insecure seeking security, in the form of false promises espoused by any number of false prophets, who can tell you everything there is to know about a box in which you don’t belong, so you will spend all your resources trying to belong.
Whether life is chaos or order is a matter of perspective, but in any case, life is what you choose to make of it. The majority is always discontinued accordingly. Cancer is just a physical DNA short. The market shorts life and the shorters wonder why their equations make it worse.
Funny, I spent the least amount of time in class and got the best grades, and the communists, including the majority of teachers, wasted their time hating that. My pop got me a replica John Deere, with a wagon, and I would peddle down to the market/post office to talk to the old-timers, who taught me how to work. To this day, the critters can’t figure it out, and come up with ever more elaborate schemes to hunt me down with capital controls, as prototypes for others, strangling themselves with the arbitrary processes.
Public education is about teachers employing majority peer pressure to control the minority. God is not what you see. The City is what insecure humans make of their inheritance, a short. Whether you complete the circuit, to keep it running, is always up to you.
Hey, green weenies,,, Ask the birds what they think of our chop em and cook em wind and solar technology.
Having listened to a Board Member of a major German Utility explain that in Crackpot Germany it was ECONOMIC for a man to plug in a UV lamp to the power supply and shine it on the solar cells at night so excessive were the feed-in tariffs. Germany is headed for over supply of electricity at unpredictable hours of the day
Why not have the tower include a mechanism to raise and lower the turbine. More cost up front, less cost down the road for maintenance.
Thats like lipstick on a pig. The costs of putting that into the tower is huge.
You should walk up close to one of the modern turbines. Their size is jaw dropping. What you propose isn't feasible.
The hub/generator of one of the typical, new 2 MW turbines is about 400 feet off the gound. The diameter of the blades is 360 feet, so maximum height at the top of the blades is just under 600 feet high. That's right, a 60 storey building.
....aren't they being over run with Muzzies? Take all the hoopty planes in Europe, hire Muzzies to fly into the wind mills and tell them they'll get an EXTRA 30 or so virgins when they meet Allah. See? Ya just gotta think outside the box and use the resources available.
Here in the uk turbines are dutch supplied, use neodymium magnets (materials from one single rare earth chinese mine with questionable environvental and worker ethics), cant be erected fast enough to even keep up with projected national wind energy share at key future milestones, kill a high no of birds aswell as being non functional in high winds. erecting one a day would not meet projected criterea. one a day is not ever going to be possibe.
cameron defunded thorium research in the uk, sheffield, old mining town, has one of the best r&d teams into this in the world
tidal has been funded to again non uk manufactured tidal devices that will gain the queen who "owns" the coast, 3 million a year (prince charles of course loves these), probably de-oxygenating dependent organisms in the process (not press covered)
u.s development is going on in business circles for minuature nuclear reactors, which we here build anyway for subs but are not similarly developing commercially (not that i agree with this, neighbourhood bunker buster targets?)
in short, no uk jobs provided other than maintenance (with german training), no long term scaleable benefit as shown by increasing solar and bio efficiency, (this may be possible using nano machine based wind capture devices but not right now), increased fuel bills, highest energy cost in most of the world per kwr, no future plan, no damn idea at all other than meeting a target (which will not be met), not including the variable cost of rare earths supplied by china who own the bottleneck and can do what they want with the price until it can be mined off the ocean floor.
so i would like to know who advised tony blair on this plan. and presumably is a trans party advisor.
a long time ago i read in new sientist of an accidental discovery of a material called "black silicon" , which would allow multiple angle capture of light at mega high efficiences enabling cloudy nations to use solar. investment=interested university r&d persons only=glacial
and i have to agree with "the donald" , the smug erection of wind in scotland insight of the particular golf course as a reaction to his involvement says all you need to know about salmon, and now sturgeon (you couldnt make these names up!), one policy nutjobs all.
i want to out all advisors and their funding mechanisms which cost us all dear and really, do we believe they give 1 shit re environs!
Mein Führer , dieses komplett bläst!
Now that's funny!
and nuclear, man alive, all our engineers (they took our jobs!!) sold down the river by gordon brown for a palty few billion, and now the arguing continues over cracks in reactor casings as to who will carry the can for that, which is why french and chinese are being bribed to get involved, not to mention that 911 targets were initially considered power stations (and why new dutch designs have the processed fuel and key parts underground) (the same dutch who leaked centrifuge designs to pakistan), and the analysis of an attack like that showed the uk would suffer a ten times higher contamination event than chernobyl, making the island uninhabitable.
dutch designed french and chinese built reactors on uk soil. and a patch it job on the cracked ones. great job! what could possibly go wrong what with 100k people marching on london protesting charlie ebdo cartoons
Just take the propellers off and leave the tower and nacelle there and sella as trendy apartments.
I was thinking replace the props with pulleys to make a powered chair lift that stretches all the way to the middle east.
generating a record 78 percent of its power consumption from renewables in July of this year
100% pure bullshit
First of all another writer who cannot distinguish between "electricity consumption" and "power consumption" <facepalm>
but best of all the mark of 78% electricity produced by renewable sources was in July, not for July - true for exactly one day 7/25/2015!!
see http://www.bee-ev.de/home/presse/mitteilungen/detailansicht/neuer-rekord...
If they are obsolete, why not demo them in place like a bridge or water tower? There are plenty of companies that can drop these things with explosives, is the problem their salvage value prohits destroying them?
And the fact that they are 600ft tall and in very wind prone areas. Blowing them up just isn't an option.
I would like to load one on my singlewide
NM, double post
This has probably been mentioned here already but...here goes. When the initial installation of the turbines is first being considered, I would expect the planners consider 1) machine cost 2) installation cost 3) subsidies 4) maintenance costs and...5) decommissioning costs.
Subsidies are the more interesting part of the lifecycle, since they are required to make wind power cost competitive with conventional power sources (that consider the cost of pollution an externality).