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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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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.
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.
Yeah, but that also means they have as much metal as a small fleet of cars, once you factor in the support post. That's good recycling. :-)
But seriously, nobody in his/her right mind is going to tear down a wind turbine unless global climate change causes the wind to stop. In the worst likely case, when one of these things fails, the owners will temporarily take down the blades, replace the generator portion, and put the blades back up at a much lower labor cost than dismantling it, and at a far lower cost than building a new one from scratch. In the best case, they'll be able to repair it in place.
In other words, this story is pure FUD.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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?
one blade of a wind turbine weighs about 25-30 tonnes.
That's about the same as a small car in America, yes.
No sig today...
Does anyone do even a tiny bit of quality assurance on submissions? The person being quoted as saying we're in for an apocalyptic landscape littered with turbine blades is from the WindAction Group. That organization's website claims "Industrial Wind Action Group Corp ("The WindAction Group") was formed to counteract the misleading information promulgated by the wind energy industry and various environmental groups."
In other words, it's probably a fossil fuel front group.
Great job, whoever thought this was a good submission.
+1 Informative.
No sig today...
Wind power in Texas is often some of the cheapest electricity you can get. It's picking up momentum, and the incentive to keep it going is pretty high. I smell a slant in this article, likely from someone with money to lose from this trend. Say, coal industries.
https://www.chron.com/business...
In the worst likely case, when one of these things fails, the owners will temporarily take down the blades, replace the generator portion, and put the blades back up at a much lower labor cost than dismantling it, and at a far lower cost than building a new one from scratch.
Just like every other energy generating plant.
Oh, wait.....
"50 feet in the air" and "small car" is at least half and order of magnitude too low. Try 80-100 meters, and 10-15 tons. each.
However most wind farms are designed so that each individual turbine could be replaced with a somewhat bigger turbine without interfering with other turbines. If you're rebuilding a farm at EOL, you already have the cranes and expertise on-site, so the per-tower decom cost will go down.
Additionally in the contract phase of the project landowners should and often do demand decommissioning funds to be placed in escrow before any construction begins.
They seem oddly unconcerned about tering down old coal plants full of asbestoes, PCBs, and radioactive ash and slag.
Talk about a hazardous and expensive clean-up.
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
How can you possible say this is B.S.?
We already have huge fields of dead rusting wind turbines in California, and the south of Hawaii. Too expensive to remove so they just sit there, aging....
Given this is ALREADY A PROBLEM...
BECAUSE IT IS B.S.
Those huge fields of dead rusting wind turbines in California, and the south of Hawaii don't exist - or rather they only exist in the propaganda of the more unhinged climate deniers/fossil fuel shills who don't just distort the facts, they simply make stuff up.
I notice that when you repeat this B.S. you never provide links to your "alternative facts".
Note here is a lengthy in-depth discussion of the origins of this lie. It started with a climate denier doing the old distorted facts game - pointing out initially a large number of turbines were installed at the fields in California and Hawaii - but that there many fewer now. But omitting the correct explanation that it was because they were replaced by fewer, much larger, more efficient turbines. And no, the old ones are not just left there, they are removed over time. The actual percentage of non-operating turbines at any given time is about 2%. The fantasy version where there are dead fields (to say nothing of huge dead fields) is the result of climate deniers taking the original BS claim, and extrapolating from it in their imaginations, then posting it as if it was a fact.
I drive through two of the three California fields frequently, watched them go up and evolve, and they are impressive with the huge new towers spinning slowly, but producing far more power than the old ones - which have disappeared. Fields of abandoned turbines are nowhere to be seen. But who should I believe, citation-free climate denier rants or my own lyin' eyes?
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
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.
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.
Does wire and steel age in a large generator?
Yes, metal fatigue is a real thing.
Do the bearings give out?
Sure, but they can be repaired. They can be repaired only so many times though because the metal fatigue in the tower and other parts set a limit on the profitability of repairs over replacement.
Does it cost too much to clean the blades periodically and filth accumulation on the blades makes them less efficient?
All those bird guts do accumulate to a point. The rain washes a lot of it off. If it gets thick enough it cracks in the sun and wind and falls off. That's not the real problem though, the blades are under considerable stress in the wind and bird impacts stress it more. The stress deforms the blades and weakens them. So while the power output of the windmill is quite constant over the life of the windmill there will be a point that the windmill will have to be shut down for reasons of safety.
A windmill run beyond it's safe operational life can suffer a blade failure, meaning bits of metal and composites come flying off the blade. The windmill is now off balance and the bearings are stressed to failure. No working bearings means that metal is grinding against metal and considerable amounts of heat and metal particles are produced. This fine dust of metal and the oil in the bearings will eventually ignite under the heat. This windmill, potentially still turning in the wind, is now burning. If it's hot enough then it can ignite the aluminum and magnesium parts in the nacelle. Now there's burning metal getting flung about in the wind, causing a fire hazard all around. This heat from the fire, if not extinguished quickly, will weaken the steel tower. The tower will fall, the fire will eventually burn out, and now you have a mess of half burned composites, melted aluminum and copper splashed all over the steel and concrete base, and if you are lucky no one died from flying debris or a grass fire.
Will a windmill generate less power over time? Yes, and they will stop doing so in a very sudden and spectacular fashion.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
But who should I believe, citation-free climate denier rants or my own lyin' eyes?
The answer is obvious - your eyes have been hacked.
#DeleteChrome
> The problem is that neoliberal free market capitalism isn't exactly delivering flowers and unicorns
Point of fact: It is delivering flowers and unicorns
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/aw...
Would you like next-day delivery, or free three-day delivery?
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.
HHAHHAHHAHHHAHHHHAHHAHAHHAHAAHA. Thanks, i needed a good laugh.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
More recently, the 556 MW Kewaunee Nuclear Power Plant in eastern Wisconsin was shut down in 2013. Kewaunee’s operator, Dominion Power, anticipates nearly $1 billion in total costs using the SAFSTOR method and estimates that work will not be complete until 2073.
That $200,000 is looking pretty good put up against that $1 BILLION plus....and 60 years to complete.
The capacity factor of a wind turbine is about a 1/3rd. The biggest wind turbines are about 2 megawatts. Kewaunee had a lifetime capacity factor of 84% for it's 39 years of service.
To replace Kewaunee's output with wind turbines, you would need 631 of the largest wind turbines available, for a cost of about 2 billion dollars. Since wind turbines last perhaps half as long as nuclear plants, figure $4 billion. That also doesn't count added costs with spreading them out geographically far enough to get reliable generation from them; nor have we touched the tremendous amount of land they need.
At a $200,000 per unit decomissioning cost for wind turbines, the total cost would for scrapping two generations of a 631 unit 'wind farm' would be $250,000,000, less than Kewaunee's billion..... but now you're starting to compare apples to apples.
New nuclear plants are double the output of Kewaunee- while they're admittedly expensive, they have the tremendous benefit of power-on-demand- something that's vital for a stable electrical grid.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Subsidies for uneconomic power technologies that were put in to make people feel good about saving the planet and not to generate electric power.
I have never met a green that could either see past their nose, or wasn't flat out lying about the problems of their religion.
Always blindsided by what anyone with a braincell can see
http://reason.com/blog/2017/09...
wow switch to renewables your power availability goes down and your prices become the highest in the world
or closer to home
https://www.pge.com/en/about/n...
and oddly enough your rates in the golden state are going way up
https://abcnews.go.com/US/stor...
Really if you live in CA and you run into someone advocating renewables do yourself a favor and knock out a few of their teeth.
It is simply that he made a false claim - that there were huge abandoned fields of turbines left to rust - which he is now trying to walk back without admitting the attempted deception.
Older turbines are being replace by newer ones that are more efficient (and profitable), the fields are not abandoned, their output is actually increasing with the new turbines, and the older turbines are not being "left to rust", they are being removed.
There were two small wind farms on Hawaii, that were built in the late 1980s that did deteriorate due to lack of maintenance by their owner/operators: the Kamaoa Wind Farm with 9.3 MW capacity, and the Lalamilo Wind Farm of only 2.3 MW, and which were shut down, dismantled and removed between 2006 and 2010. Meanwhile much bigger, modern wind farms have replaced them, in many cases at almost the same location (only a couple of kilometers farther away). For example the Pakini Nui Wind Farm of 21 MW is only 2.4 km from the old Kamaoa Wind Farm.
But those 11.6 MW of old small late 1980s era turbines have been collectively replaced by 206 MW of capacity, with 27.3 MW currently being added (which includes putting 3.3 MW of new turbines at that old Lalamilo Wind Farm.
Pretty much the same as any other new power system that is deployed as a pilot project, then eventually shut down and replaced by more modern versions.
But never fear, the next time wind power comes up SuperKendall will be making this claim of the fantasy of huge abandoned wind farms left to rust again, even as at all of the locations he claims have been abandoned continue to expand their wind power production with new modern turbines.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
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.
So you agree that there is a fund to decommission nuclear power plants? Good. I'll take that over not having anything at all like wind power.
The claims have been that the nuclear power plants are not being cleaned up. This can be shown to be false. It may be taking a long time, it may be running over budget, but the mess is being cleaned up. The problem with windmills now is that they've been leaving the mess for others to clean up, and walking away with the profits.
The nuclear power mess would be cleaned up more quickly if the Democrats had not been holding up the construction of nuclear waste storage sites. I'm guessing what would also help is issuing licenses for new reactors on the old sites. They'll get real motivated to clear the site if they know that by doing so they can put a new reactor there. The Democrats have been holding up the issuance of nuclear power licenses too.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
But in TX,itâ(TM)s much cheaper to use wind over nuclear.
Let's just pretend that less than 1% of the world population live in Texas. Let's also pretend that there are lots of people that live on islands, where land is expensive, and the neighbors to this island don't like them very much so they can't just buy their electricity from them. Let's also pretend that this describes many hundreds of millions of people in the world. What then?
We are not going to live in a world powered by wind. We are going to have to figure out how to make nuclear power work. This is going to take a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of effort. We got solar and wind to be far cheaper and therefore more viable as energy sources with lots of time, money, and effort so it's not like this has not been done before.
Mostly what nuclear power needs is practice. The USA has built only a handful of new nuclear power plants in the last 40 years, after building over 100 in 20 or 30 years. These 40, 50, and 60+ year old reactors will have to be shut down soon for safety reasons. We're going to get a lot of practice decommissioning those plants, that should bring down the costs. Something will have to replace them and it will be nuclear power, except for maybe those that live in Texas.
The US used to see a new nuclear power plant come online every 2 months. Estimates are that with growth in demand since then and the retiring of old coal and nuclear we will have to bring one new nuclear power plant online every month. Assuming they last for 50 years then that means we will have to keep bringing one new nuclear power plant online every month because after 50 years of building nuclear power plants we'll have to start replacing those we are building now. That's assuming zero growth in energy demand. Those new nuclear reactors would be replacing only existing capacity.
Maybe Texas can go with wind instead, and Arizona use solar, but for the rest of the USA the only thing cheap enough to replace the aging coal and nuclear plants is new nuclear.
You want to claim that wind and solar will get cheaper? Then I'll just say that nuclear will get cheaper too. Today nuclear is cheaper than solar. Except for Texas we find that today nuclear is cheaper than wind. What will the prices of these energy sources be in 50 years? I don't know, but we know that right now if we want cheap energy then it's going to include nuclear power.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
(Hint: Infinity is quite a long time).
OTOH, if the turbine produces $1k worth of electricity a month, spending $200 to send somebody with a 50c replacement part up it to keep it working for another year or two is a no-brainer....
Oh, wait, so is the president!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
It's not quite that simple. In order to be cost efficient, wind turbines are practically a one-piece black box. To do extensive repairs you practically have to take it down or replace large parts of it.
Wind turbines, like solar panels are a unit that's only somewhat cost effective if you don't ever have to maintain, recycle or replace them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I realize I'm replying very late, but for the record:
> schwit1 shared this article from Energy Central News:
No, it's not from Energy Central News. Energy Central News is a news scraper. If you actually look at the link, the very first line clearly states its from the "Valley Morning Star". If you Google that, you'll find its a very small regional paper in Texas.
> said Lisa Linowes, executive director of WindAction Group, a nonprofit which
> studies landowner rights and the impact of the wind energy industry
Ummm, no. As the article points out;
"Its funding, according to its website, comes from environmentalists, energy experts and public donations and not the fossil fuel industry."
Which is funny. This statement is what they say, you can go to the web site and find it. But when you do, you will find that this same page also states that the entire purpose of the group is...
"to counteract the misleading information promulgated by the wind energy industry and various environmental groups."
Ah. And when you poke about a bit more, you'll learn that the Group was formed "by Jonathan S. Linowes, a self-proclaimed Tea Party activist and climate change denier."
Linowes, as in the husband of the person writing the article, as in the founder and co-founders.
So yeah, once again total BS gets onto the front page of /. Thanks fact checkers!
https://checksandbalancesproject.org/lisa-linowes-and-the-disinformation-of-industrial-wind-action-group/