Jake Alexander me-retweet
No one should be surprised but what he left out is that this turbine costs an estimated $50-80 million to build and install. It only produces power 35-45% of the time because wind is intermittent. Its output degrades 12-16% over its 20-25 year lifespan. It requires hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, fiberglass, and rare earth minerals mined largely in China (his favorite country). The other 55-65% of the time you need backup power, which comes from natural gas. And it exists only because of massive government subsidies.
A natural gas plant of the same 26MW capacity costs $26-39 million, produces more than double the effective output, runs on demand 24 hours a day regardless of weather, and lasts 30-40 years. Half the price. Double the output. No weather dependency. No subsidies required.
But this was never about the environment. If it were, you would care that rare earth mining for wind turbines devastates landscapes across China and Africa, that thousands of birds and bats are killed annually by turbine blades, that the blades themselves are non-recyclable fiberglass rotting in landfills, and that natural gas produces half the emissions of coal with none of these problems. You ignore all of this because environmentalism was never your goal. It is your vehicle. The destination is what it has always been: government control of energy production, which means government control of the economy, which is socialism. Rand identified this decades ago. The green movement is not a scientific movement. It is a political one, and its target is not pollution. It is capitalism.
BladeoftheSun@BladeoftheS
The World's largest Wind Turbine 26MW. In its lifetime it will produce the same energy as burning 750,000 tons of coal. That's 44,118 truck loads. And that's just 1 Wind Turbine.
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