New York's First Wind Turbines Blown Up.

[NNadir]

Madison Wind Farm implodes its wind turbines

by: Clare Normoyle

MADISON COUNTY, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — Seven wind turbines came down, as the Madison Wind Farm said goodbye after years of support.

The company had a sequential implosion of the turbines at noon on Sept. 17.

Prior to the implosion, the Town of Madison put out a notice to let people know that they shouldn’t be alarmed, as there was no threat to public safety.

“At the time of Madison’s construction in 2000, the wind farm was anticipated to have an operational lifespan of 20 to 25 years,” the company’s website stated. “As of 2025, the project has come to the end of that lifespan and is no longer considered economically viable, primarily due to the current turbines being out of production, making repairs and obtaining replacement parts increasingly difficult and costly.”

Madison Wind Farm was the first in New York State when it was built in 2000...

Unlike Iowa, where a correspondent told me wind turbines last forever and ever and ever and ever, albeit without providing any reference to support the claim other than "I'm involved..." apparently wind turbines do turn into landfill in a relatively short time.

Despite the claim that Iowa's wind turbines last forever, there does seem to be a wind turbine waste problem in that State, according to the Des Moines register: Iowa sues company accused of dumping disused wind-turbine blades at sites across state

The state of Iowa is suing a Washington state company and its executives for allegedly dumping tons of old wind-turbine blades around Iowa, in violation of the state’s solid-waste laws.

The lawsuit alleges that over the past seven years, Global Fiberglass Solutions has failed to properly dispose of decommissioned wind-turbine blades and stockpiled them at multiple locations across Iowa...

...The lawsuit claims that General Electric, which provides parts and equipment for wind turbines, and MidAmerican Energy, which owns wind turbines in Iowa, each hired Global in 2017 to recycle their decommissioned wind-turbine blades.

MidAmerican and General Electric paid Global “millions of dollars,” the lawsuit alleges, to cut up, transport and recycle the blades. Typically, such blades are about 170 feet long and weigh roughly 16 tons...

The article contains a swell picture of a wind turbine waste dump:



The caption states that these Iowa wind turbine blades have dumped in South Dakota. How long, does one think, before all that debris morphs in to micro and nanoplastics?

I've was informed by an antinuke here, some time ago, not one in the fossil fuel can be hydrogen greenwashing set, but one in the battery worshipping (Tesla) set, that new turbines will last longer than old ones because big wind turbines are better than smaller ones, again without a single reference to support the claim.

Happily I was able to provide a reference to refute this handwaving bullshit, and did so:

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

I'm perfectly happy with the level of detail I provided in that post, and a the risk of being called rude by stating something called "truth," I provide a few excerpts of that post, of which I remain proud:

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...

...There are 1,230 commissioned wind turbines in Denmark that are larger than 2000 kW (2MW). There are 40 decommissioned wind turbines in Denmark that are larger than 2000 kW (2MW).

There are commissioned two wind turbines in this class that have operated for more than 20 years, both have a power rating of 2300 kW, 2.3 MW. One, the oldest in the set, is a prototype, a turbine located at Ikast-Brande. It's not performing well. If one takes the average of its two highest years of energy production, and compares it to the most recent complete year of data, that of 2021, one can calculate that in 2021 it produced just 36.01% (in "percent talk" ) of the average of its two best years.

Another commissioned large wind turbine, an 8600 kW (8.5 MW) wind turbine listed as commissioned on October 5, 2018, the turbine at Thistead, produced 23,031,560 kWh of electricity in 2019, 24,986,470 kWh of electricity in 2020, and 6,161,830 kWh in 2021, having apparently failed in the latter year. It's produced zero energy in all of 2022 thus far. The capacity utilization of this turbine was thus 30.55% in 2019, 33.14% in 2020, 8.17% in 2021 and 0.00% as of this writing in 2022. Over it's lifetime, through March 30, 2022 - the date this version of the Master Register ends - the capacity utilization of this broke down "commissioned" turbine operated, its overall capacity utilization was 20.6%. If it has not been repaired as of July 17, 2022 - if it ever will be - it's capacity utilization will have fallen to 19.0%.

The largest commissioned wind turbine listed is the 14000 kW unit also at Thistead. It was commissioned on December 9, 2021, but still has not produced a single Joule of energy.

Of the 1,230 commissioned wind turbines larger than 2MW, only 471 have operated for more than 10 years. So there is no data to support that they will last more than 20 years other than the two 2300 kW (2.3MW) turbines, which may or may not prove to be outliers, to support a handwaving assertion that agrees with the statement of the antinuke that because of the putative "simple concept" that each generation of windmills improves on the previous - in operational efficiency and durability.

The average age of a decommissioned wind turbine in that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole of a country, Denmark, was a little over 17 years, not 25 years.

There is no information about how long and how well the imploded New York turbines functioned in the last years of their lives, but now they are all garbage needing to be hauled away by diesel powered trucks. There's no word on where they'll be dumped.

Twenty five years from now, today's newborns, as young adults born into an increasingly toxic world, will face the same issue since the wind industry has expanded enormously, at a cost of trillions of dollars, in the last 25 years, this while having no effect on extreme global heating other than allowing it to accelerate. They will have to do so in a world of extreme weather, depleted resources, abandoned mines, leaching who knows what, vast stretches of wilderness containing rotting "renewable energy" infrastructure and one would imagine, do so in a wasteland filled with hopelessness.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

[hunter]

1. Better to remove them than leave them to rot.

There's still a few places in California littered with dead wind turbines.

None of the wind turbines I visited in the early 'eighties are still operational.

[NNadir]

2. The question, as is the case in Iowa, is where to put the garbage after they fail. It's particularly a problem...

...with the turbine blades, but it's not limited to them.