Last week, on my way back from CPAC, my flight went over my old home state of Iowa. Most of the central part of that state, unlike my old stomping grounds of Allamakee County, consists of open, gently rolling prairie. That prairie is, these days, home to a lot of big, ugly, ponderous windmills, for electricity generation. The problem with this system, as with so many "green" energy systems, is that they are a low energy density, high-cost proposition. To put it simply: They don't work.
That being so, more and more American counties and municipalities are rejecting these windmills and the "green" energy they provide, writes Telegraph op-ed contributor David Blackmon, whose bio says he retired from "a 40-year career in the US energy industry."
He says:
In a story filled with all the standard climate alarmist narratives, USA Today recently reported on the rising movement by local governments in the United States to refuse to permit unwanted wind and solar industrial sites in their jurisdictions.
After setting the stage by parroting the Biden administration goals of “100 per cent clean energy by 2035, a goal that depends on the building of large-scale solar and wind,” USA Today points to the reality that such big, intrusive, ugly, and destructive industrial sites have been rejected by twice as many county governments as approved them. The writers complain that the rejections come about by some combination of “outright bans, moratoriums, construction impediments and other conditions that make green energy difficult to build,” but don’t go on to describe why the rejections are taking place.
The U.S. Department of Energy—an agency which, one should remember, has absolutely no constitutional authorization to even exist—is touting the entire "100% clean energy by 2035" horse squeeze, supported by the Biden Administration. There's a problem, though: It won't happen. Not without sacrificing our modern way of life. Of the varied "green" energy schemes, wind power is one of the worst: Big, ugly, inefficient, and damaging to local populations of birds, bats, and anything that flies.
Blackmon explains, though, that it gets worse.
Simply put, these huge industrial sites – we simply must stop using the friendly-sounding term “farms” to describe them – create all manner of negative consequences for local communities. Consequences like loud noise from wind turbines, hundreds of dead birds and bats sprinkled across the countryside, thousands of acres of productive farm or ranchlands taken out of production for many years if not permanently, spoiled views, enormous “graveyards” filled with 150-foot blades and solar panels popping up all over the place, and impacts to local wind and weather patterns that are only now beginning to be understood.
One West Texas "blade graveyard" alone contains thousands of used blades; these blades cannot be reused, nor can they practically be recycled. Another graveyard, this one in Newton, Iowa, contains a similar eyesore. One of the companies that manufactures the blades, Global FIberglass, has pledged to find a way to begin recycling the blades, but this has not yet happened—and the blades continue to pile up.
These are far from the only problems, environmentally and financially, that these boondoggles are causing.
See Related: New Data Shows Offshore Wind Farms Responsible for Whale Slaughter. Where Are the Environmentalists?
Despite Massive Subsidies, the Green Energy Transition Is Floundering
Remember, all of these schemes run afoul of the same thing: Energy density.
These huge industrial sites, with hundreds of ugly, ponderous windmills covering many square miles of prairie, are nothing more than fake green, quite unlike the real green the taxpayers are being soaked to subsidize these schemes. They are unreliable, relying on the wind—a wildly varying input—to generate power. They rely on batteries to store power for intervals when the wind is insufficient, and as of yet, no matter how many square miles we cover with them, they cannot and will not replace gas, oil, and nuclear energy generation.
It's all energy density; it's always energy density. To maintain a modern, technological society, like ours, requires greater energy density, not less. The federal government should be held to account; the Energy Department should, at a minimum, stop subsidizing these boondoggles (and, ideally, should be defunded and disbanded). Our society depends on abundant, cheap, high-density energy. Everyone who understands energy density and economics knows this. It’s even become apparent in Germany, whose citizens are having to move back to coal for power generation after their green energy plans haven’t worked out and their supply of Russian natural gas was cut off. Oh, and after they shut all of their nuclear power plants down.
Fortunately, we already know how to achieve abundant, clean electricity. We just need the various levels of government to get the hell out of the way.
