It is apparently possible to make wind turbines useful, somewhat to my surprise.

[NNadir]

Wind turbines remain useless at slowing the rate at which extreme global heating is accelerating, since trillion dollar expenditures have done nothing but to increase the rate of atmospheric degradation, but they clearly were "useful" for what they were intended to do, to prevent nuclear energy from doing what it might have done to make the world sustainable. Feel free to join in the gloating.

I find it nearly impossible to be happy about the state of affairs related to extreme global heating, for which I personally hold antinukes responsible, but it does appear that wind turbines can be useful, according to this article from the MSM, even if they are apologists and normalizers of the orange pedophile in the White House. This clearly isn't selective attention from CNN's Jake Tapper, propagandist, but rather from another "journalist" at CNN:

Wind turbines are tough to recycle. These architects are transforming them into micro homes.

From the text:

Sitting inside the minimalist-chic interior of Nestle, you’d never guess it used to be a wind turbine.

From the outside, though, the tiny home’s former life is more apparent. Nestle has a caravan-like aesthetic: a cream-colored, elongated metal box topped with four solar panels and a single skylight. Inside, glass doors and windows at each end create a surprisingly light and airy space in the compact 35-square-meter (376-square-foot) pod.

Nestle — a loose homonym of “nacelle,” the part of a wind turbine containing its engine — is made from a decommissioned, 20-year-old V80 2MW turbine donated by Business of Wind, a Dutch company that purchases used turbines for reuse...

Recently I remarked in this space how wonderful this forum at DU is about noting "firsts" as the world burns:

We hear about lots of "firsts" here at DU. "First hydrogen helicopter," "First hydrogen 30 MW turbine," "First hydrogen Walmart truck," "First hydrogen hybrid scooter," "first hydrogen BMW"...on and on.

One of the first things a high school science student should learn about, in my view - and anyone in a decent college or university taking a physical science course must learn - would be the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which has something to say about hydrogen if one is capable with even a shred of comprehension of said physical law, which apparently some posters here lack.

And now we have another "first," again, so wonderful that I have to link it again: the first recyclable wind turbine blade in the UK.

Wow! We're saved! The British have introduced recyclable wind turbine blades!!! I learned about it right here at DU.

Well here we have another "first:"

...Marking the first time a nacelle has ever been used for housing, the Dutch building code-compliant home is an ambitious demonstration of the possibilities of upcycling, says Jos de Krieger, co-founder of Blade-Made, the company behind the project...

The enthusiastic underlining, bolding and italics are mine, since I want to be among the happy people cheering for firsts, even if the planet is burning.

We're saved, right?

Yep! We're saved! Right?!?!? You can read the short full article to experience fully this "first" saving you.

I would point out that the wind turbine that became a tiny house was about 20 years old. Presumably it failed some time before being made into one of those fashionable "tiny homes," we hear about. Better I'd like to suggest, than living in an old refrigerator box, an abandoned metal ship crate, or, um, on the street.

The less than 20 year lifetime for the "recycled" wind turbine is consistent with my analysis some years back of the Master Register of Wind Turbines that used to be updated at the website of the Danish Energy Agency. It gave information on every turbine in the country, it's capacity, date of commissioning, date of decommissioning, the dishonest peak power rating from which the capacity utilization for each could be calculated. They stopped updating it in 2022. They probably realized at some point that the Master Register was bad for marketing their wind industry. They replaced it with a far more "generic" spreadsheet that obscures the lifetime of these pieces of junk.

My analysis of the more detailed spreadsheet for all wind turbine lifetimes is here: The Growth Rate of the Danish Wind Industry As Compared to the New Finnish EPR Nuclear Reactor.

Text:

A word on the accuracy of the data: In many cases the total energy - and they are in units of energy, kwh, not in units of power, watts - of an individual turbine is given, but in other cases, they are clearly given as an average for a particular facility. For example, it extremely unlikely that the 10 Bonus wind turbines in the Copenhagen area (København in the spreadsheet) each produced exactly 5,065,907 kwh of electricity in 2002 and then again, each produced exactly 3,356,086 kwh in 2021 as the spreadsheet indicates. Therefore, the average for the facility and type has been applied to each wind turbine. There are many other examples of this in the spreadsheet. I don't have a problem with that, but again, data in most cases seems to refer to distinct turbines.

All this said it is clear that merely reporting the average age of existing wind turbines in the ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned," tab in the data base, which as of this writing is 17 years and 18 days, is a bit misleading, since it contains examples of wind turbines that should have been, but haven't been, decommissioned, as well as those whose performance has seriously degraded.

To understand the average lifetime of wind turbines, it is almost certainly better to look at those that have been decommissioned, those listed in the the afmeldte, "decommissioned" tab. Denmark has built 9,740 turbines and decommissioned 3,444 of them, roughly 35% in "percent talk." The average age of decommissioned wind turbines is 17 years and 317 days, slightly longer than the 2018 figure I calculated back then, which was 17 years and 283 days, an improvement of a whopping 34 days.

My analysis of the more detailed spreadsheet referring to large wind turbines (written in generic response to a generic claim by a Musk worshipping antinuke claiming big turbines were longer lived than smaller turbines.) is here:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

The Danes may have downsized their wind turbine reporting to cover some realities. Happily they still have pages up for offshore oil and gas drilling leases, in case you're thinking of investing in fossil fuels, albeit also less detailed than they were years ago:

Oil and gas are important to the Danish economy

Licensing info for new drilling is here: Licences (sic) for oil and gas

The fossil fuel industry, in my perception - perhaps I'm wrong - has generally stopped crowing about carbon sequestration bullshit as they've done for several decades to greenwash their product. They've switched to rebranding their product as hydrogen - which for them is a good thing since making hydrogen from the steam reforming of fossil fuels (the overwhelmingly dominant process for hydrogen despite all the solar cell pictures in the ads here) requires more fossil fuels than burning them directly does - but it looks like Denmark may have missed the updating memo.

One could register to "sequester" carbon and get paid for it, and if you're a good liar, there may be money in it. If you actually have to find a way to "sequester" carbon (including that used to make hydrogen bullshit sound "green" ) that may be more problematic.

Info on the bullshit window dressing, a follow on to Norway's failed Sleipner project here: Danish tender for CO₂ capture and storage enters next phase.

Don't worry. Be happy. Norway has a new sequestration scam running now.

Previously they sequestered a million tons of CO₂, this on a planet where humanity (as of 2023) dumped 37.6 billion tons of CO₂ from fossil fuels in 2023, with other contributions coming from land use changes, bringing additions to over 40 billion tons. Norway, where power is almost entirely generated by destroying rivers for hydroelectric plants, in 2023 reportedly was responsible for 38.9 million tons of dumped CO₂ from fossil fuels into the planetary atmosphere. This makes them the 63rd worst offender in CO₂ dumping, with China (at 12.0 billion tons in 2023) in first place, and the far less populous United States in 2nd place with 4.1 billion tons of CO₂ dumping.

These figures for carbon emissions can be obtained and used for calculations from the data here: Global Carbon Project The figures therein are reported as atomic carbon (Atomic Weight 12.011 g/mol) and I have corrected them for CO₂ (Molecular Weight = 44.0095 g/mol) by applying the correction factor from the ratio, 3.644.

I trust and hope you will enjoy the holiday weekend.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

1. I'll bet you are really fun at parties....

Lotsa info but I can't determine what you are trying to tell me. Can you distill it down a bit?

[EYESORE 9001]

2. I'll give it a shot

🤑☢️

[NNadir]

3. Well, I'm not sure I'm trying to tell you something, but I'll try to distill it.

Although I am proud to regard myself as a "dyed in the wool liberal," I oppose land intensive and material intensive so called "renewable energy," despite it's rather knee jerk popularity on our end of the political spectrum.

I have shown many times that spending trillions of dollars on "renewable energy" that it has nothing to do with environmental goals, in particular, addressing the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

I regard the true goal of enthusiasm for "renewable energy" was, and largely still is, to attack nuclear energy.

Ever since Chernobyl established the worst case for a nuclear plant failure I have been a pronuclear activist.

I hope this helps.

As for whether I'm fun at parties, it would depend on the personal taste of the party goer. Party goers who have a taste for sarcasm might, occasionally think me fun, but to many people, I may be a bit of a bore. I'm fine with that. I understand that personal tastes vary.

To be frank, in recent years I've cut down greatly on party going, preferring to stay home and read a lot before I run out of time on the planet, which is approaching at my age.

[Gore1FL]

4. The posts usually distill down to:

Nuclear: Good.
Everything else: Bad. Even if it isn't directly bad, it's bad because it could have been nuclear.