Food forThought!
Right nowthe average wind farm is about 150 turbines.
Each windturbine needs 80 gallons of oil as lubricant and we're not talking aboutvegetable oil, this is a PAO synthetic oil based on crude... 12,000 gallons ofit. That oil needs to be replaced once a year.
It isestimated that a little over 3,800 turbines would be needed to power a city thesize of New York... That's 304,000 gallons of refined oil for just onecity. Now you have to calculate every city across the nation, large andsmall, to find the grand total of yearly oil consumption from "clean"energy. Where do you think all that oil is going to come from, the oilfairies?
Not tomention the fact that the large equipment needed to build these wind farms runon petroleum. As well as the equipment required for installation, service,maintenance, and eventual removal.
And justexactly how eco-friendly is wind energy anyway? Each turbine requires afootprint of 1.5 acres, so a wind farm of 150 turbines needs 225 acres; Inorder to power a city the size of NYC you'd need 57,000 acres; and who knowsthe astronomical amount of land you would need to power the entire US. All of whichwould have to be clear-cut land because trees create a barrier & turbulencethat interferes with the 20mph sustained wind velocity necessary for theturbine to work properly (also keep in mind that not all states are suitablefor such sustained winds). Boy, cutting down all those trees is gonna anger alot of green-loving tree-huggers.
Let'stalk about disposal now. The lifespan of a modern, top quality,highly efficient wind turbine is 20 years.
Afterthat, then what? What happens to those gigantic fiber compositeblades? They cannot economically be reused, refurbished, reduced,repurposed, or recycled so guess what..? It's off to special landfills they go.
And guesswhat else..? They're already running out of these special landfill spaces for theblades that have already exceeded their usefulness. Seriously! Those blades areanywhere from 120 ft. to over 200 ft. long and there are 3 per turbine. Andthat's with only 7% of the nation currently being supplied with wind energy.Just imagine if we had the other 93% of the nation on the wind grid... 20 yearsfrom now you'd have all those unusable blades with no place to put them... Then20 A years after that, and 20 years after that, and so on.
Gollygee, how green is that?
Oops, Ialmost forgot about the 500,000 birds that are killed each year from windturbine blade collisions; most of which are endangered hawks, falcons, owls,geese, ducks, and eagles. Apparently smaller birds are more agile andable to dart and dodge out of the way of the spinning blades, whereas thelarger soaring birds aren't so lucky.
I'm surethe wildlife conservationist folks are just ecstatic about that.
I'm soglad the wind energy people are looking out for the world. Thank You JohnKerry. And this doesn’t take into account the need for each turbine to operateat 75% efficiency for a minimum of 60 years just to off-set the co2 emissionscreated in its manufacture; but hang on, each turbine only has a lifeexpectancy of 20 years . . . oops!!!
