The math has always been clear to all willing to see but the narrative driven policies from our progressive DC mega-church have never really cared. On rare occasions reality does manage to shine through the gaping anti-intellectual holes in the modern Green ideology…Powerline did their part earlier this month with the following quote in a post titled WIND ENERGY WILL NEVER BE AFFORDABLE:

Electricity from wind is not cheap and never will be. The latest auction of rights to build offshore wind farms failed to attract any bids, despite offering higher subsidised prices. That alone indicates that wind is not cheap or getting cheaper.

But the real reason for the lack of interest in the auction is that, for the first time, bidders are not free to walk away from their bids when it suits them. In the past, they could put in low offers, boast about them being cheap, then take the higher market price later. The Government has at last called their bluff, so they are having to admit that electricity prices need to be higher to make wind farms pay.

No bids? Interesting that no one was interested in even submitting a legitimate bid based on the actual market value of the energy to be produced. Is it that the “market” is so convoluted and corrupted that such an analysis is not really possible? Or is it that no one wants to be the first – at the peril of all future business within the con – to put a number on the actual scope of the con? Inquiring minds want to know.

Regardless, it is a con…one that will be with us (i.e. costing us money and time as well as opportunities for doing things that are actually productive) for quite some time longer. And the con will leave some lasting “scars” across the American landscape.

Those future “scars” are what I see while on my driving treks across Oklahoma and Kansas several times each year. As we come upon each “field” of wind turbines I never miss the opportunity to launch into my sermon – believe me, the wife and kids can now recite most of it along with me – about how those now expanding fields are going to be dilapidated eyesores in 25-30 years, long since abandoned by a bankrupt industry. I tell how the realization of the bad math used to get us into this will begin to squeeze…for years the normal preventative maintenance will be neglected, then actual repairs will be put on hold, and then – even as the companies involved continue to pump the stock so executives and insiders can sell as various pension funds for the little guy buy it up – the whole field will just stop one day. The con will be over. There will be no one coming around to clean up the thousands of sites scattered across each “field” so that all is well and good before declaring bankruptcy and disappearing into the woodwork. That is not how it works.

That leads me to another story I ran across not long ago. This one is titled: Thousands of Old Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up in West Texas – Officials in Sweetwater say an out-of-state company has made their town a dump for the seldom-seen trash created by renewable energy. The basics of the story:

About forty miles west of Abilene on Interstate 20, Sweetwater has unwittingly become home to what is possibly the world’s largest collection of unwanted wind turbine blades. … Thousands arrived over several years, eventually blanketing more than thirty acres. …

The blades were brought here by Global Fiberglass Solutions, a company based in Washington State that announced in 2017 its intention to recycle blades from wind farms across the region. Instead of ending up in landfills, they would be ground up into a reusable material that could be turned into pallets, railroad ties, or flooring panels. Global Fiberglass is one of a few companies attempting to develop a viable business from recycling blades.

Besides the main boneyard—behind Meyer’s apartment—stacks of blades also occupy ten acres a couple miles south of town, and the company is storing blades in other locations in the county. “They have, in my view, abandoned them there,” said Samantha Morrow, the Nolan County attorney. “The county doesn’t have and cannot find millions of dollars to clean this up.”

[Emphasis added]

(I suggest Yucca Mountain for a disposal site for these scrapped turbine blades. At least we could get some use out of another monument to corrupt government. But I digress.)

See, just to foot-stomp the obvious, when the fact that the math doesn’t add up can no longer be hidden the mess just gets abandoned. (I wonder what it says in the contracts for use of the plots of farmland regarding restoration and/or return of use?) I don’t suspect many farmers are going to clean up the abandoned wind turbine sites themselves. Will counties? Or states? How long will these monuments to bad math and corrupt government stand, rust, and slowly fall apart while the fight goes on about who will pay for the clean-up.

I’m not sure how many of these massive fields of wind turbines already exist across various parts of the nation or how many continue to be erected at breakneck speed in order to milk every last dime out of this con, but (unfortunately) I strongly suspect that many future generations occupying this part of the world will have massive reminders of where bad math and corrupt government ultimately leads. I just hope a functioning fraction of them are smart enough to understand the lessons.

I am not optimistic.