Not So 'Green': Wind Turbine Bursts Into Flames, Will Likely Be Left to Burn Itself Out
Something about that monument to clean energy, a failed giant wind turbine belching lots of smoke into the atmosphere, makes me think of an old Road Runner cartoon.
Coyote sets up a giant whirling device entitled “Acme Bird Catcher,” and somehow Road Runner — beep beep — eludes it and breaks the device, leaving a charred coyote atop the wrecked machine.
Look closely. Can you see the coyote?
UK – Oops …. Wrong kind of wind today.
wind turbine in Scroby Sands has burst into flames, kicking out more carbon today than it would have reduced in its lifetime.
Oh… pic.twitter.com/DnwXb0zgs5
— Bernie’s Tweets (@BernieSpofforth) August 15, 2023
Naw. Me neither.
But we can see one Acme Planet Saver not doing its job. And, when one of these things catches fire, how do you put it out?
After all, this 200-foot tall turbine is a mile and a half off of the east coast of Britain.
What can you do?
Nothing. The fire will just have to burn itself out, with all that smoke going into the atmosphere, probably providing more pollution than it was designed to replace.
The turbine is part of the Scroby Sands wind farm offshore from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, U.K. RWE, the German company operating it, said the wind farm’s 60 megawatt capacity can provide power for more than 48,000 homes, the BBC reported.
Except this week — the fire shut down much or all of the wind farm for perhaps 24 hours. And the British Coast Guard is enforcing a no-go zone of about 1,500 feet around the broken machine.
There are problems with these would-be magic energy producers. True, a fire is an exceptional event, and such an incident can shut down any other kind of power plant — coal, gas, hydro, solar, or nuclear.
But both wind and solar power are especially susceptible to disruptions of the natural kind — if the wind doesn’t blow (or blows too hard) or if the sun doesn’t shine, these power sources are out of business.
And as governments attempt to replace the laws of physics with their own laws mandating more dependence on this iffy green energy, power companies are having a more difficult time ensuring cheap, reliable power.
Ask Texas.
That state’s close brush with total electrical grid failure in a cold snap in 2021 came due to over-dependence upon green power generation, energy expert Jonathan Lesser told Fox Business last year.
Of course, liberal media blamed obscene-profiting natural gas companies for the crisis since they didn’t properly winterize their facilities.
That said, for my money I’ll go with Lesser’s explanation, given that parts of Texas seem to have a gas well on every other acre, and somehow I think Texans can figure out how to get the stuff to the power plants.
Back to the burning wind turbine. While I realize road runners don’t fly very often (and run slower than coyotes, but that’s another story), the plight of birds and the big windmills are intertwined.
Wind turbines have long been known to kill birds. Lots of them — the American Bird Conservancy estimates the U.S. turbine bird death toll as being up to 700,000 annually.
But the ABC seems reluctant to put out this figure since, don’t you know, wind turbines are preserving the climate. And after all, they say, look at those evil old power lines. Why, they kill more than 30 million birds each year.
The ABC almost seems to be saying — What are a few hundred thousand birds if we save the planet? Funny how so many of these left-leaning NGOs think the same way.
But look at it like this: What if we knew those more than half million birds were being killed by, say, Peabody Coal or ExxonMobile?
Liberal media would be up in arms, with nightly images of dead birds, and activists would be sending stink-bomb-laden stuffed animals to the companies’ board members.
But not so with problems related to green energy, which shows a lot of this is about more than science or technology or rational thinking.
It’s about religion. And the climate gods must be appeased no matter how much the sacrifice or the hypocrisy.
But at this rate, we may be headed for a declining standard of living and perhaps — no pun intended — a new dark age.
Even as we put up more of our shiny new Acme Energy Machines.
Beep Beep.
CORRECTION, Aug. 17, 2023: Roadrunners can fly, although they do so “only when necessary,” according to Audubon. An earlier version of this article said otherwise.
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