Dozens Reasons Why Wind Power Really Can't Replace Fossil Fuels

by Rudy P. SysAdmin at howtofindthemoney

Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable. Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will use fossil fuels to crush it and permeate it with toxic petro-chemicals to extract the metal from the ore.

Then the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.

Here are the list covered below in this post:

Windmills require petroleum every single step of their life cycle. If they can’t replicate themselves using wind turbine generated electricity, they are not sustainable
SCALE. Too many windmills needed to replace fossil fuels
SCALE. Wind turbines can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossils
Not enough rare earth metals and enormous amounts of cement, steel, and other materials required
Not enough dispatchable power to balance wind intermittency and unreliability
Wind blows seasonally, so for much of there year there wouldn’t be enough wind
When too much wind is blowing for the grid to handle, it has to be curtailed and/or drives electricity prices to zero, driving natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plants out of business
The best wind areas will never be developed
The grid can’t Handle Wind Power without natural gas, which is finite
The role of the grid is to keep the supply of power steady and predictable. Wind does the opposite, at some point of penetration it may become impossible to keep the grid from crashing.
The grid blacks out when the supply of power varies too much. Eventually too much wind penetration will crash the grid.
Windmills wouldn’t be built without huge subsidies and tax breaks
Tremendous environmental damage from mining material for windmills
Not enough time to scale wind up
The best wind is too high or remote to capture
Too many turbines could affect Earth’s climate negatively
Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant global warming. A Harvard study raises questions about just how much wind should be part of a climate solution
Less wind can be captured than thought (see Max Planck Society)
Wind is only strong enough to justify windmills in a few regions
The electric grid needs to be much larger than it is now
Wind blows the strongest when customer demand is the weakest
No utility scale energy storage in sight
Wind power surges harm industrial customers
Energy returned on Energy Invested is negative
Windmills take up too much space
Wind turbines break down too often
Large-scale wind energy slows down winds and reduces turbine efficiencies
Offshore Wind Farms likely to be destroyed by Hurricanes
The costs of lightning damage are too high
Wind doesn’t reduce CO2
Turbines increase the cost of farming
Offshore Windmills battered by waves, wind, ice, corrosion, a hazard to ships and ecosystems
Wind turbines are far more expensive than they appear to be
Wind turbines are already going out of business and fewer built in Europe
TRANSPORTATION LIMITATIONS: Windmills are so huge they’ve reached the limits of land transportation by truck or rail
Windmills may only last 12 to 15 years, or at best 20 years
Not In My Back Yard – NIMBYism
Lack of a skilled and technical workforce
Wind only produces electricity, what we face is a liquid fuels crisis
Wind has a low capacity Factor
The quality of wind resources is location specific, with the best locations often found far from the load center
Dead bugs and salt reduce wind power generation by 20 to 30%
Small windmills too expensive, too noisy, unreliable, and height restricted
Trucks are the basis of civilization, when diesel runs out, collapse will follow. Trucks can’t be electrified
Germany has been spending more for much longer than other nations, and Energiewiende is a huge failure
Wind turbines more expensive to decommission than construct so often not recycled
Transmission lines need to be much longer than for fossil plants, and likely to spark firestorms causing billions in damage
Decommissioning wind turbines costs as much as $500,000 per wind turbine