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Found on Twitter:
This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.
To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.
Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.
It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.
Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)
So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
Václav Smil explains it better here.
The US is the size of continental Europe and also has Canada and Mexico grid connections. If you put enough density of turbines and solar panels - chances that there won't be enough trough all of the areas are quite slim. By the time that there is peak in NY the sun is still shining in California. 6 months of the year you have very long days in northern Canada.
It is doable. Half of the year with the surpluses we could split corundum into al and oxidize, in the winter burn it as thermite.
It’s viable if those panels and turbines are produced in Chinese coal powered factories and the US forever prices itself out of any competitive industrial production. It’s pretty damning that the production of renewable electricity generating devices never seems to use renewable energy itself.
Also after many times multiplying your electricity costs, you will still have to deal with blackouts regularly. Which means home generators for the rich and just “dealing with it” for the poor in practice.
California has outlawed home generators, which means New York will be next, and then the country. So it's darkness for everyone.
Yes, the blue states will be crushed by their contradictions any day now, just as the dialectic predicts.
No, the victims of blue state policies will be crushed, and the perpetrators will profit.
Nybbler is wrong: California has outlawed portable generators, but exempted the $40,000+ full-mansion backup generators like the Obamas have at their estates.
What's the profit in banning generators again?
Lots. Employing regulators and enforcers from your party, using the law to prevent competition from better products, exploiting the pain your policies caused to generate demand for relief and subsidies... Which your party will control and profit from.
That all of this is negative sum wrecking and looting doesn't stop it being extremely profitable for the perpetrators.
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This surprised me, are you sure it's true? I seem to be able to buy quote-unquote CARB-compliant generators online, or at least generators that have a sticker claiming it, and the price premium for extra emissions controls appears to be small. There are also provisions to run a non-compliant generator in declared emergencies.
It phases in over the next four years to boil the frog slowly. The lawn equipment ban started this year, and the full "zero emission" rule for generators in '28.
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Looks like it takes effect in 2028. I think it was supposed to be this year.
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