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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."
Greedy bastards expect a 1time investment to make infinite profit. Is Comcast running these windturbines?
You have to spend money to make money
If the cost of removing old wind turbines is so high, why wouldn't the operators adopt the same business model the cell companies have used successfully for decades?
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Centrally planned economies and government subsidies often go horribly wrong in all kind of unintended ways. Let's stop subsidizing anything instead of thinking ourselves wise and just spending the subsidies elsewhere. It sounds good in theory, but once you legitimize a practice you have to remember that some of the people who will be deciding what to subsidize in the future will not sure your beliefs or may be quite opposed to them.
I don't know whether this is an actual issue as opposed to some anti-wind hit piece, but there's a much easier solution assuming that this is an actual problem. Add the cost of the eventual decommissioning into the tower when it's being constructed. If that makes it completely unviable financially then amortize the cost over the lifetime of the tower and have part of the turbines production be set aside to pay for its decommissioning.
Disclaimer: I work in manufacturing of wind turbine components.
You are correct.This is pure FUD. We sell hundreds, if not thousands of major components to repower aging turbine installations every year. The article makes it sound like a wind turbine is a one piece thing, and when it dies, you have to decommision it. The truth is there are a few main components that need replacing to repower it, and that cost isn't that much more than their estimate of decomissioning costs. Nobody is decommisioning wind farms. Even if they were, the total cost of decommisioning every turbine in the nation (at TFA's exaggerated cost) is less than decomissioning one nuclear plant.
I'll throw this out as well: Even though I work in the wind industry, I think new modern nuclear should be pushed for.
And what about the homeless?
They can live inside the abandoned wind towers. Or we could drape a large canvas over a cluster of towers to create a big tent.
On a more serious note, TFA is silly:
1. Turbines don't "wear out". Only the bearing wear, and they can be replaced.
2. The towers don't "go bad" either. They will stand for centuries.
3. Wind towers do not create a "wasteland". The surrounding land can continue to be used for grazing, crops, whatever.
4. Turbines contain plenty of valuable copper, steel, rare earths, etc. We should worry more about someone stealing them than abandoning them.
The problem is that neoliberal free market capitalism isn't exactly delivering flowers and unicorns in many situations either.
I'd argue that it's enriching the rest of the world at an alarming rate. Since China and India moved towards market economies, poverty has been eliminated at a staggering rate. I think the problem is that people like to compare the reality of free markets to the utopian promise of collectivism. Free markets don't look appealing because they only promise that total wealth generated will tend towards the maximal, not that everyone will be wealthy. Marxist doctrines always promise a great equity, but when you look at the results it fails utterly. It's not that the idea itself is bad, but it won't work for human beings due to our nature.
If you want to account for negative externalities, you need to make sure that there's someone who actually owns those things which will suffer negative externalities. Having the government do it doesn't work as they're not as good at caring about environmental damages as an individual person is. As bizarre or counter intuitive as it might seem its a better system in practice. A great example is private hunting operations in Africa that do a better job of conserving wildlife and protecting it from poachers. When your livelihood depends on an animal, you'll spend much more of your effort protecting it. A government will continue to exist whether or not the animal lives or dies.
but throwing one's hands in the air and saying we just have to sit around and let the invisible hand slap us repeatedly in the face is just a form of ideological fundamentalism.
People have some kind of view of "the invisible hand" as some kind of sky fairy or omnipotent presence like its the god of capitalism. It's none of those things. It's like the description of how the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. We understand that the internet isn't some conscious being making that choice. Rather it's the result of individual people acting in a certain way. In this case, the invisible hand is a whole bunch of individual people all trying to act in their own best interests to get what they want. If you want the market to do something, you need to get the individual people playing in it to all (or in large) want something. Outside intervention to the contrary is treated as damage that people route around in one way (black markets being an easy example) or another.
Except nuclear. For nuclear, the cost of ripping out the old one far exceeds any cost savings from being able to reuse the existing building, because you have to safely store all of the removed material for millennia, which means building a building or bunker or whatever. It is cheaper to just pump the whole thing full of concrete and entomb it in place, then build on a new site. Of course, they don't do that because they are not allowed to do so, but cost-wise, it is almost certainly the most effective solution. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
They said the same thing about Solar that the efficiency falls quickly, they'd wear out in 10 to 20 years max, and be littered everywhere.
Turns out 30 year old solar cells are still operating at a reduced but very stable and usable capacity.
No, I assumed that nobody has to escrow cleanup for a structure that contains nothing deadly within it. Nuke plants need the radiation cleaned up (the building can be left to rot just like an office building). Since windmills aren't radioactive, aren't filled with PCBs, and don't contain carcinogenic residue from burning coal, they need a teardown escrow as much as an office building does. Or a single family home for that matter.
Have you set aside the demolition costs for your house?
All this just convinces me conservatives actually do hate clean power with few downsides just because non-conservatives like it. It's the least irrational assumption left.
I had a big wind company who spent years courting me. They wanted to put 24MW of 400' tall wind towers on our farm's mountain ridge lines. We're in an ideal location at the end of a funnel of mountains. But, in the end I said no.
1. Their business model was based on the energy credits, not based on generating power. I only would get paid for power generated. Their presentation was grandiose but I'm good at math and the reality was I was going to see very little income from the project.
2. The turbine blades would throw ice 1,000' in an arc down wind covering extensive portions of my farm and forest. This ice would damage the trees I raise and endanger the lives of myself, my livestock dogs and my livestock as well as damaging my buildings and fences. They accepted no responsibility for this risk.
3. I asked them about end-of-life provisions and insisted that they setup a fund for decommissioning the system at the end of the 25 year lease or if they went out of business. They refused. They claimed that at the end of that time I would have very valuable equipment. I disagree.
I declined to work with them for these three reasons. I'm very pro green energy and all that good stuff. I farm organically. But the wind towers have too may problems, at least with how they were proposing.