SO these things don't last 30 years?
Mitsubishi provided the 1000A Wind Turbines for the Aragonne Mesa Wind Farm that was erected at the end of 2006 and early 2007
That would be a big nope.
Been looking for any info on why this particular one was demolished, haven't found anything yet. But a 1MW (peak) turbine is probably pretty small these days (think they are more commonly 5MW). It may have just been uneconomical to continue maintaining them. They might be going to replace them with new ones, but that will require new foundations (fuck loads on concrete and steel) and they won't be able to re-use the old ones as they won't be strong enough.
If they do replace them with newer bigger ones, they will likely fail as soon if not sooner, the bigger you go the worse the problems with differential loading of the main bearings (due to different wind speeds as elevation changes) are, all you need is a main bearing failure or a blade failure and the whole thing is a writeoff. That doesn't even account for the need for spinning dispatchable backup. Effectively you need to maintain double the infrastructure, the wind turbine (which will generate at ~25% of it's nameplate capacity) and backup generators that can kick in at a moments notice when the wind dies down.
So we should have been using nuclear-powered plants and improving them the last 60 years instead of falling for the bullshit international communist lie pushed by the international jew bankers?
Basically this
The only question that needs to be asked is:
"Did these turbines generate more income in electricity over their life times than it cost to build?"
All other questions are irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the main bearings broke so long as they broke after the system is profitable.
14 years generating electricity is a good long time to break even and maybe even put some money in the investor's pockets.
There's more to life than a quick profit. When you start looking at profit alone it becomes a race to the bottom (look at what happened to computer games and movies since the 90s)
You'd want to consider the cost and impact of disposing of the behemoth remnants, and whether the energy spent producing them was ever recouped over such a short lifespan.
(post is archived)