[stainablesteel]

feel free to present the arguments rather than just name-calling

the post i replied to didn't present any substance either

there's serious ecological problems with these turbines, the materials cant be recycled, and their uninstallation is incredibly costly

they just don't seem like a great source of energy

[eigenspace]

GP was mocking you (not calling you names) because your comment was just a classic uninformed (some would even say stupid) opinion, and was presented as you "looking at wind as objectively as I can"

Maybe if you look at the comment context a little more objectively, you'll agree there's some thing quite funny about it.

_______________________________

Putting that aside though, lets look at your claim:

> there's serious ecological problems with these turbines, the materials cant be recycled, and their uninstallation is incredibly costly

First of all, it's only one subset of the materials (the fiberglass in the blades) that are difficult to recycle, the vast majority of the actual material is highly recyclable steel. The blades in a modern offshore turbine usually weigh around 80 metric tons at the high end.

Your typical modern offshore wind turbine has rated output of around 15 MW of power, with a yearly capacity factor of around 40% at the lower end, so an average output of around 6 MW. Multiply that by the more or less standard 25 year rated lifetime of the turbine, that means you can expect the turbine to produce around 1300 GWh of electrical energy over the course of its life.

How much energy is 1300 GWh? Well, to get 1300 GWh of electricity out of a high-efficiency (i.e. 50% efficiency) natural gas power plant, you'd need to burn around 175,000 tons of natural gas, (dumping all of the waste product into the gigantic open sewer we call our atmosphere).

That's about 3 orders of magnitude more mass in natural gas that will need to be burned (and don't forget, natural gas is non-recyclable!!1!!1) than the blades weigh.

This means that you went and tossed a thousand wind turbine blades in an incinerator for every turbine you actually install, you'll still break even on the amount of non-recyclable material

So forgive me for not taking your complaints very seriously.

[stainablesteel]

There's all the same waste products being dumped into the atmosphere during the production of the entire turbine itself, it's not entirely different.

And you didn't address the environmental damage to the oceans. this case is specifically greenlighting off-shore windfarms. Iif this was on land, i wouldn't care what people do with their own money and resources. But it's got serious implications for whales, of which there's a decreasing amount of. It's not foolish to care about endangering species that are important parts of underwater ecosystems.

You should take complaints seriously in general, I'm not mocking you for your point of view, those are nice details, and I take them seriously, so why are you mocking me? Mocking people over serious topics is just a display of insincerity. you seem to care a lot about the topic, so why not represent yourself better?