“Like dropping garbage in a field” — Trump

Indeed, Trump did not hide his true thoughts on industrial turbines blanketing American states:

They litter our country, they’re littered all over our country like dropping paper, like dropping garbage in a field … They’re rusting, rotting, closed, falling down … And they put new ones next to them because nobody wants to take them down, because why should they take them down? It’s very expensive to take them down.

President Donald Trump, Reuters, January 8, 2024

Littering the Globe

The lack of reclamation of industrial wind turbines at their short end-of-life stage is a growing concern. Wind Europe admitted that “an international standard for decommissioning wind turbines does not exist today.”¹ Just how many are abandoned in the United States is unclear.

As of October 2022, over 70,000 land-based wind turbines with a combined capacity of nearly 138 gigawatts (GW) were installed across the United States, with more being deployed to reach state and federal renewable energy goals.2 While some of these wind turbines are newly installed, others are part of an aging fleet that is coming to the end of their expected design life and will need to be partly or fully repowered to extend their life or be decommissioned (which removes a wind energy project and involves land restoration), says the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.2 Texas Law Review states that, “Of America’s earliest wind farms, six were abandoned in Hawaii. At one wind farm, 37 derelict wind turbines [sat] ‘idle’ for six years before being removed. Early developers in California also walked away from several large projects — some think that as many as 4,500 abandoned turbines remain in place in California.”³

Below is a short video of Patterson Pass Wind Project in California. Built in 1985 by EDF Renewables, at its peak it generated 20.50 MW of power and was in operation until 2014 when it was shut down and abandoned.

As cited in Harvard Business Review, “The first major wave of decommissioning [in Europe] is also imminent, with around 34,000 onshore turbines close to retirement.” Most of the aging capacity is in Germany, followed by Spain, Italy and France.¹

One of the biggest challenges to decommissioning turbines is what to do with their toxic blades. The enormous structures contain as much as 40% Bisphenol-A (BPA), one of the most toxic man-made substances. 1 kg of BPA is enough to pollute 10 billion litres of water.⁴ Few solutions exist on how to recycle them. Hence, officials in Wyoming and Texas are beginning to complain that some areas in their states have become dumps with thousands of these enormous blades being stockpiled or partially buried in the ground.

Big Cost to Bury

Trump’s claim that it is expensive to reclaim turbines is also true. The Institute for Energy Research reports that, in Minnesota, Xcel Energy conservatively estimates that it will cost $532,000 (in 2019 US dollars) to decommission each of its wind turbines—a total cost of $71 million to decommission the 134 turbines in operation at its Noble facility. Decommissioning the Palmer’s Creek Wind facility in Chippewa County is estimated to cost $7,385,822 for decommissioning the 18 wind turbines operating at that site, for a cost of $410,000 per turbine.⁵ Again, with inflation, those numbers today are considerably higher.

Ironically, the wind turbine industry — billed as the antidote to Big Oil — is at risk of following in their footsteps. The oil industry is notorious for having left “ghost wells” in the wake of last century’s boom. These orphaned sites are in some cases an environmental disaster. This concern over abandoned wells — and the wind industry repeating the same mistakes — has been raised by Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith whose government is looking at forcing wind corporations to pay up front for reclamation costs:

It’s like 850 cubic meters of cement [in the ground and] a tower the size of the Calgary tower; blades that have to be taken away and buried. It’s at least a minimum of a million dollars for reclamation for each one of those sites. Some of these farms have 50 turbines. So, is anyone putting aside 50 million dollars to make sure that the landowner isn’t stuck with that cost? Those are the things that I am worried about. I don’t want somebody 20 years from now saying, “Didn’t you guys learn from oil and gas? Why did you allow the same thing to happen here?” So, we have to have consistent policy…. we have to make sure that there’s going to be some logical way of setting money aside so that at the end-of-life, there’s money set aside in order to reclaim.

Premier Daniel Smith, Alberta Climate Summit, Calgary, Alberta, October 26, 2023; youtube.com

While Smith was less graphic than Trump who described wind turbines as essentially “litter,” her government has also taken steps to protect “pristine viewscapes.” A 35km buffer zone around mountain viewscapes was finalized this past December (2024). And the Premier has suggested that protections are forthcoming to protect rural owners who are increasingly forced to have their farm and acreage landscapes become hosts to turbines, some reaching over a fifth of a kilometre into the sky.

You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage site; or on Nose Hill; or in your neighbor’s backyard. We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.

Premier Danielle Smith, Press Conference, February 28, 2024; YouTube

The Premier, however, has yet to make good on that statement — to the disconcertion of rural Albertans still fighting against these monoliths (or “garbage” they might say in agreement with the US President).

While Trump’s promise to kill wind farms is no doubt considered an ecological sin by climate alarmists and the progressive Left who treat wind turbines as ideological trophies, it’s refreshing to hear yet another politician boldly declare what citizens around the globe have been saying all along: wind turbines are ugly, short-lived, unreliable and expensive.

It’s the most expensive energy there is. It’s many, many times more expensive than clean natural gas so we’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built.

President Donald Trump, Reuters, January 8, 2024

We couldn’t agree more. As our Mission Statement here at Wind Concerns says, “We support the use of sensible energy programmes. We do not support the use of technologies that seriously harm people, animals, birds, or the environment. Hundreds of studies and even court decisions now clearly show the harm of industrial turbines to both the environment and economies. It is time to “follow the science.”

“Wind Concerns is calling for local, provincial, and federal governments to finally say “no” to wind projects and “yes” to clean energy projects.”

Click image below to watch “decommissioning” of turbines:

1. windeurope.org[↩][↩]
2. energy.gov[↩][↩]
3. William S. Stripling, texaslawreview.org[↩]
4. cf. Toxic Blade Time Bomb[↩]
5. instituteforenergyresearch.org[↩]