When Wind And Solar Projects Age

The U.S. has 1.4 million solar farms and 58,000 wind turbines (20% of them in Texas). Photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines break down and produce less energy than the energy it took to make them. So far, throughout the U.S. there are no plans for the replacement or decommissioning the millions of PV panels and the thousands of turbines when a project fails, when they become outmoded or when they are useless with age.

Perhaps we can learn a lesson from the past. Before the big rush to generate electricity from solar and wind in the 1980s, California's Central Valley was a vast grassland where antelope and elk grazed and wildflowers swept the spring landscape.

Then, in 1983, the Carrizo Plain Solar facility came with its 100,000 photovoltaic arrays. It was rated at 5.2 megawatts and was by far the largest photovoltaic array in the world. Eleven years later, in 1994, it was dismantled.

Today, the Carrizo Plain Solar facility, near the Carrizo Plain National Monument, is an abandoned, decaying eyesore where the wind whistles through a cyclone fence that encloses the remains of a once ambitious plan to generate power from the sun at one of the sunniest places in California.

Wind Energy

Thanks to the wind rush of the 1970s and 1980s there are dozens of wind farms scattered around the Western rim of the Mojave Desert near Tehachapi pass with as many as 14,000 abandoned, rusting, and slowly decaying wind turbines.

At Tehachapi in hapless Kern County, officials had no provision in law requiring developers to cover the future tear-down costs of the wind turbines. At first, that may not have seemed like a big deal. But the federal tax breaks soon dried up and the developers vanished, leaving behind thousands of rusty, cranking turbines standing in rows like soldiers on the windy plain outside Tehachapi.



If any spot was tailor-made for a wind farm it would surely be Hawaii. The gales are so strong and relentless that trees grow almost horizontally.

Yet the 27-year-old Kamaoa Wind Farm (left) is a relic of rusting wind turbines. As the Hawaii Free Press describes it, "A breathtaking sight awaits those who travel to the southernmost tip of Hawaii's stunningly beautiful Big Island, though it's not in any guidebook.

On a 100-acre site, where cattle wander past broken 'Keep Out' signs, stand the rusting skeletons of scores of wind turbines. There are five other abandoned wind farms in Hawaii.

The rush to renewable energy has been just a free-for-all in which get-rich-quick companies exploited ridiculously generous tax breaks to pepper the States with millions of PV Panels and thousands of wind turbines. It is a scam that has been working well as long as they can blame the destruction and expense on saving the planet.

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