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Retiring Worn-Out Wind Turbines Could Cost Billions That Nobody Has (energycentral.com)
schwit1 shared this article from Energy Central News:
Estimates put the tear-down cost of a single modern wind turbine, which can rise from 250 to 500 feet above the ground, at $200,000... Which means landowners and counties in Texas could be on the hook for tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars if officials determine non-functional wind turbines need to be removed. Or if that proves to be too costly, as seems likely, some areas of the state could become post-apocalyptic wastelands steepled with teetering and fallen wind turbines, locked in a rigor mortis of obsolescence.
Companies will of course have the option of upgrading those aging wind turbines with new models, a resurrection of sorts. Yet the financial wherewithal to do so may depend on the continuation of federal wind subsidies, which is by no means assured. Wind farm owners say the recycling value of turbines is significant and recovering valuable material like copper and steel will cover most of the cost of decommissioning... Yet extracting valuable materials from the turbines is not as easy as it sounds... "The blades are composite, those are not recyclable, those can't be sold," said Lisa Linowes, executive director of WindAction Group, a nonprofit which studies landowner rights and the impact of the wind energy industry. "The landfills are going to be filled with blades in a matter of no time...."
Unlike Duke Energy, some of the smaller wind farm companies operating in Texas, with fewer financial resources, may be tempted to just walk away when aging turbines no longer spin a profit. Linowes believes such moves may begin occurring even before wind turbines outlive their useful life as manufacturing warranties on the big turbines expire. "At what point does the cost of maintenance tip over to the point it's not worth maintaining a turbine?" she said. "We're in something of an unknown or uncertain territory... It could be a very ugly situation in the next five years when we see turbines need work, and are no longer under warranty and not generating enough electricity to keep running them."
Companies will of course have the option of upgrading those aging wind turbines with new models, a resurrection of sorts. Yet the financial wherewithal to do so may depend on the continuation of federal wind subsidies, which is by no means assured. Wind farm owners say the recycling value of turbines is significant and recovering valuable material like copper and steel will cover most of the cost of decommissioning... Yet extracting valuable materials from the turbines is not as easy as it sounds... "The blades are composite, those are not recyclable, those can't be sold," said Lisa Linowes, executive director of WindAction Group, a nonprofit which studies landowner rights and the impact of the wind energy industry. "The landfills are going to be filled with blades in a matter of no time...."
Unlike Duke Energy, some of the smaller wind farm companies operating in Texas, with fewer financial resources, may be tempted to just walk away when aging turbines no longer spin a profit. Linowes believes such moves may begin occurring even before wind turbines outlive their useful life as manufacturing warranties on the big turbines expire. "At what point does the cost of maintenance tip over to the point it's not worth maintaining a turbine?" she said. "We're in something of an unknown or uncertain territory... It could be a very ugly situation in the next five years when we see turbines need work, and are no longer under warranty and not generating enough electricity to keep running them."
End the endless wars (military homicide sprees) which we've been involved in since 9/11/2001. Spend part of the money saved on subsidizing clean energy, whether it be wind, solar, or (yes!) nuclear. Put all the out-of-work coalies to work building and repairing clean-energy infrastructure.
Smells like BS
Most of the decommissioning costs I've seen are a fraction of that. They also seem to be planning to take the tower and foundations away, which makes no sense. Surely you are going to want to put another turbine in its place.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Agreed. Pretty much every wind farm I've seen has nothing else around it for hundreds of feet, so just put some explosives at the base of the tower and down it comes. Then chop it up and send it off for recycling - seems very unlikely that you couldn't turn a profit that way. Gets a little more expensive if you need to avoid hitting other windmills, but odds are that all the windmills in a given farm are going to be decommissioned at about the same time.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Unless we get electricity too cheap to meter, the old wind turbines will be replaced with new wind turbines. These old turbines are located in the best wind resource (and already paid the fixed infrastructure cost to connect to the grid), so the most desirable to repower.
There are many examples in California where turbines were first installed in the 1980s which have already, or are in the process now, of repowering.
I don't know how this story made it out of Firehose, it's so obviously propaganda from butthurt coal and oil interests.
What is so special about this specific type of power generating infrastructure?
Isn't a water or nuclear power plants just as expensive to retire?
Who sits on those billions?
We replace cars because they cost $50 to tow to a dump.
But we do not tear down and replace a building or a hydroelectric dam merely because it is old.
Yes, repairs are costly, But the tear down cost is $200,000, then guess what, repair becomes a better option.
I think most wind turbines will end up being repaired multiple times, probably once every 10 years or so. But their lifespan, including repairs will probably be in excess of 50 years.
Note, the repair business will also mean that when we tear down the ones that really can't be repaired, those expensive composite blades will be checked, and if in good condition, used to cheaply repair other turbines whose blades failed. They will end up stockpiled, just like airplane parts, not dumped.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
All nuclear power plant projects are required to have a fund to decommission the plant. No funds to decommission means no license to build the plant.
One reason the utilities run these nuclear power plants for so long is because each plant is potentially billions of dollars in sunk costs, after running for 40 years it's been paid for. Another reason is that each reactor produces somewhere around one gigawatt of electricity, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, with short shutdowns every few months (maybe years) for inspections, refuel, and repairs. Shutting a nuclear reactor down and not having another to replace it means they have to keep running it or they run short on electricity generating capacity by one gigawatt.
In the USA there are about 100 nuclear reactors producing power. Nuclear energy produces about 20% of the electricity we use. Losing a single reactor might not be a big deal because that's only 0.2% of the nation's electrical generation capacity. But what happens if we shut down 10 reactors? That's 2%. Perhaps not a big problem but it's starting to get in the territory of a concern.
You think that can be replaced by wind power? Wind takes 10 times the concrete and steel per generating capacity over nuclear. Does that sound like too much to you? Consider that for every tower sticking up in the air there is a very large block of reinforced concrete buried in the ground to hold it up against the wind. Also consider that those big concrete domes you see over a nuclear reactor is mostly hollow.
If the problem of getting rid of those old nuclear power plants concerns you then there's a really easy way to speed up the process of shutting them down. All the government would have to do is allow for replacement reactors at those sites.
We now know how to build reactors that can burn the spent fuel from those old reactors. These fuel rods still have plenty of fuel in them, it's only that the old light water designs we've been using are not efficient enough to use up what is left. Have the replacement reactors be heavy water designs, molten salt designs, or whatever else we have now, and they can dispose of the spent fuel on site by burning it more completely. We'd be getting energy without having to make any new fuel.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
the maintenance costs are not properly calculated... which is why despite being told repeatedly that this tech is economically competitive, no private money wants to invest in it absent heavy public support as an investment. Sure, companies might build solar or wind as a publicity or good will campaign move... but to make money?
To be very clear, I want renewable energy to be competitive and efficient and for it to replace most of our grid power.
Appreciate what I just said there.
I want that.
But... if we are to do things responsibly and sustainable then it is very important to not lie on the funding proposal sheet. It may get us to build more things in the short term but it will reduce trust in future proposals and will incline programs that could have been successful to fail because problems could not be addressed early.
In effect, the people pushing this stuff past its legitimate place are sabotaging future more ambitious projects. If the maintenance costs are 50 percent higher than we were initially told, then we need to know that so that we can alter the plan to avoid that problem.
Maybe some wind turbines are better for that then others. It depends. Its something we have to do... put it all in an excel spread sheet and go through a few different scenarios.
What bothers me about these projects is that people believe so much in the "the cause" that they feel they have to lie about the numbers.
You're not helping when you do that. Please stop lying. We can afford to build these things at a loss. And we often go into these projects with our eyes open that it isn't the most economical option. That's okay. But if you lie about the numbers on top of that then it makes everyone very suspicious, nervous, and generally avoidant regarding these projects.
You'd have bigger buy in if the reports were more reliable. Consider that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
One of the things that would improve Facebook would be some kind of quality-based selector for the first visible comment after each story. That "first post" tends to direct the conversation, but more often than not, it directs the conversation in some nonproductive direction, amplified by the brokenness of the moderation system that quite often gives the FP an insightful moderation. (Many discussion systems attempt (halfheartedly) to implement a solution with sort-order selectors.) Yet another example of the kind of feature I would be interested in helping to fund if only Slashdot had such a funding alternative--and if you disagree, then you could fund other features or none at all.
Anyway, returning form meta to my primary reaction to the article, this story is obviously a framing lie (Level 3). You can approach the reality ("machines wear out") from the perspective of a problem that needs to be solved, for example by making wind turbines that last longer and are easier to repair, or from the perspective of a new business opportunity, but this story quite deliberately frames the situation in apocalyptic terms.
Now I'm going to look at the rest of the discussion. Of course I'm seeking "funny", but with the slimmest of hopes these years. I'm also going to look for insights such as the real motivations of whoever published this story. Were I a gambling man, I'd bet on Exxon right out of the gate, but that particular corporate cancer has become rather clever about hiding the money trail...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Actually, the big concern is that nobody wants to buy the power from them, as alternatives keep springing up. This gets them antsy as the reactors need to distribute the power, and they are useless without being able to do so. And that means...no funds to retire.
Two things here...
First, you want me to believe that no one is willing to buy electricity from a nuclear power plant? Bullshit. No body cares where the electricity comes from, especially not a business that has work to do. Saying "nobody" is a bit hyperbolic since there's always some hippy that can't stand nuclear power but such people are also the kind that put solar panels on their roof and go off grid, they aren't paying any utility bills anyway.
Second, if they have no funds to retire, because no one is buying, then they will keep going until the do have funds to retire. If you want that nuclear power plant to have money to shut down later then you buy the electricity now. Oh, and there has to be a plan for these people to keep making money after the plant is shut down, such as being able to build a new power plant.
Sorry, but none of those ideas have panned out. They aren't appealing even with the tens of billions of subsidies they've gotten.
They haven't panned out because the government has never issued a license for them. The government is very risk adverse, to the point of being crippled to make any changes to the rules on licensing. We've been making the same reactor with minor variations on a theme for 60 years. People ask for a new license and the government says, "We don't know if this is safe." The response is, "We'd like to prove to you it is safe by building a demonstration reactor." "How can we know that is safe" "We can do that with these plans and simulations." "We'll need to see a working prototype first." "That's what we are asking for, a license to build a working prototype." "We can't issue a license to build anything until you can show it's safe."
Subsidies are worthless no matter how much is spent without a license to build a real world reactor. The simulations are only as good as the data used to create them and to get that data means building a prototype to get that data from.
Nope. Sounds like scare tactics to me, as you try to create a hysteria over an image, without actual robustness to your examinations.
You can live with your delusions of a nuclear free world only so long, then reality bites. Go read a book or something.
They just can't get those gen 3 reactors to deliver on their promises.
And they can't deliver on those promises until the government starts issuing licenses to build those Gen3 reactors.
Sorry, but it turns out we could have literally built homes for Americans that would have reduced energy costs by more than we've gotten from nuclear subsidies.
Sorry, but a growing population and a shrinking number of operating nuclear power reactors means that at some point those lines on the graph crosses and the space in between the lines is the growing energy shortage. If you want to see an ecological disaster then make energy so scarce and expensive that people will be cutting down every tree in sight for firewood to stay warm.
And that isn't even counting the wastefulness of nuclear subs.
Go take a long walk off a short pier.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.