The Folly of Wind Farms.

Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic. Solar power requires even more cement, steel, and glass – not to mention other metals. Global silver and indium mining will jump 250 per cent and 1,200 per cent respectively over the next couple of decades to provide the materials necessary to build the number of solar panels. World demand for rare-earth elements will rise 300 per cent to 1,000 per cent by 2050 to meet the Paris green goals.  2050 is 27 years away and net zero CO2 is a pipe dream.

As of October 2022, there were 94 operational wind farms in Australia, totalling 9,234 MW in capacity. The largest wind farm is Coopers Gap Wind Farm in Queensland, which began generating to the grid in June 2019, with a capacity of 453 MW.

With up to 123 turbines, Coopers Gap will be one of Australia’s largest wind farms.   That means at Coopers Gap there will be…110,700 tons of steel, 307,000 tons of concrete, and 5535 tons of non-recyclable plastic. There are 94 operational wind farms in Australia, the figures are enormous. The tallest in Australia is 250 metres from base to tip. NO CO2 emissions in that lot. But that will be in China so that does not count. This is all when Australia’s anthropological contribution is 1 part per 6,000,000 of the innocuous gas CO2.  We’ve been conned by those with self-interest.

A good quality Wind Turbine should last for about 20 years.  What happens when all the wind turbines reach their use-by date?  Not to mention the land degradation where they are built, along with the 28,000 kilometres (the whole coastline of Australia is 34,000 kilometres!) of transmission lines yet to be built.  Do not talk about that, someone else’s problem, the next generation who will be using NUCLEAR. These useless monoliths will be left on every hill, epitaphs to a time when the world went bonkers.