On the surface, wind-turbine-generated electric power has been one of the green-energy success stories of the twenty-first century. In 2000, only about 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind power was installed in the U. S. In 2022, that number had risen to 434 GW, fueled by a combination of government subsidies, advances in mechanical and power technologies, and generally favorable public opinion.
But no large-scale technology is entirely without its problems, and one of the downsides of wind energy started showing up very prominently on Tuesday, July 18, when chunks of fiberglass-carbon composite material began to show up on a number of Nantucket beaches. They turned out to be from a blade of a wind turbine that had failed the previous Saturday about 13 nautical miles south of the beaches, in an Atlantic-Ocean-based wind farm called Vineyard Wind. The local environmental authorities shut down the beaches and called out Vineyard Wind for its failure to notify them promptly after the failure, according to reports in National Review. The system off the New England Coast is the second-largest ocean-based one in the U. S., and began operations only in January after receiving over a billion dollars in indirect federal subsidies.
Now, Vineyard Wind may be able to recover from this incident, in which no one was killed or even injured, as far as we know. It's not exactly clear why the turbine blade broke, but there is a possibility that manufacturing problems in France may have been responsible, as an identical type of blade also ruptured recently in the U. K.
Broken blades are not the only problem that wind turbines can cause. Vineyard Wind is in a prime commercial fishing area, and fishing interests opposed the installation because snagging an underwater power cable with a dragnet can capsize a boat. And there's also the bird problem.
Estimates vary, but one source says that up to a million birds are killed every year in the U. S. by wind turbines. This is a little-known but depressing thought which is easy to ignore, as the turbines are installed either offshore where they are out of sight to everyone except a few boaters (and those fishing boats), or in remote areas such as, well, Texas and Oklahoma.
This isn't the first time that governments have put their heavy thumbs on the scale of energy development. Many of the hydroelectric projects built in the 1930s, ranging from Hoover Dam to the multiple installations of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), were paid for partly or completely with government dollars. At the time, private utility interests protested about the unfair competition that such organizations as the TVA represented. But in the depths of the Depression, anything that put people to work and made the perceived blessings of electricity available to more consumers was viewed favorably, and history has shown that viewpoint to be substantially correct.
Things are different now. While demand for electricity is increasing, largely due to recent developments such as server farms for AI and cryptocurrency trading, we are not about to run out of electricity. If environmental concerns militate against building more coal or natural-gas-fired plants, the nuclear option is one that makes a great deal of engineering sense, but is burdened with a lot of cultural baggage and regulatory barnacles. In the headlong dash toward "net-zero" carbon emissions, the trendy thinkers and politicians have thrown billions at wind and solar power with more enthusiasm thsn discrimination, ignoring the fact that no hardware lasts forever, and it takes energy and physical stuff to build, and then when it wears out you have to put it somewhere.
I am told that after the carbon-fiberglass-composite wind turbine blades reach their end-of-lifetime date, which may be only a few years in some cases, the operators replace then and have to bury the old ones, intact, in the ground. Recycling them would probably cost as much as making a new blade, and they're too big to take to a standard landfill. And some of the chemicals in solar panels are nothing that you'd want to put on your morning cereal either, but acres and acres of them are going to have to be disposed of some day.
These are partly technical problems, and may have technical solutions. But it's surprising how the same people who talk about how every technology must be sustainable, tend to turn a blind eye to the life-cycle issues of their favored technologies, simply because while in operation, they don't use fossil fuels.
I'm sorry the beachgoers of Nantucket are having to stay out of the water temporarily while experts in haz-mat suits clean up the mess made by Vineyard Wind. But some thought should have been given to the possibility of something like this happening, and maybe just a few miles away from some very popular beaches wasn't the best place to put the turbines.
New England, unlike Texas, doesn't have a lot of good places on land to put wind turbines. About thirty years ago, a mechanical engineer I knew at the University of Massachusetts managed to erect an experimental wind turbine on a prominent "mountain" (really a large hill) visible from I-95 in Massachusetts. But every time I drove past it, I never saw it operating, and one day at a meeting, somebody finally asked him why they never saw it running. His reply? "It runs at night." Sometimes it's hard being a pioneer.
It's a matter of judgment as to whether our era has gone overboard in its fiscal and political enthusiasm for wind, solar, and other renewables,as opposed to the tried-and-true fossil fuels and the controversial option of nuclear energy. There are real hazards ahead if we displace too many old-style "dispatchable" sources (controllable on demand) with systems that depend on the wind blowing and the sun being out. We still can't store large amounts of electricity economically, and there are technical reasons that too much wind and solar energy on a grid can make it hard to control, although these may be worked out in time. And grid reliability is a vital feature that will affect the entire economy adversely if we lose it.
I hope people in Nantucket get their beaches cleaned up before the summer swimming season is over, but even if they do, I'm not planning a trip up there. This Texas wimp can't swim in water that cold.
Sources: I referred to articles on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nantucket-beaches-closed-after-wind-turbine-breaks-apart-sending-fiberglass-shards-into-ocean/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/the-biden-harris-green-crown-jewel-just-shattered-literally/. The statistic on birds killed annually by wind turbines is from https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-deaths, and the growth in wind energy in the U. S. is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/189412/us-electricity-generation-from-wind-energy-since-2005/.
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