The Real Reason America Has Turned Its Back On Wind Power Energy 

Are there any real solutions to America's green energy problem?

I love at the 9-minute mark when they say, "government funding". There is no such thing. It is taxpayer/citizen funded. Once people realize that government funds nothing without taking in the form of ever-increasing taxation then maybe the citizens will wake up. I doubt it though.

I’m No engineering genius, but if I wanted a swimming pool in my backyard, I’d dig the hole before I filled it with water 😂.

One major problem with wind and solar is they often make power when it's not needed, and fail to make power when it is needed. Hot still days and cold dark nights being two common events.

After watching the hard work that goes into creating and maintaining machines like this, I understand why my old man always said that the stock market is the closest man has gotten yet to alchemy. Creating stupendous amounts of money out of thin air. Humanity always wanted it easy

To save you 10 minuets, it's because they haven't got the power distribution network.

The grids are close to maxed out and yet there is a push to transition to EVs and changing from natural gas heaters, water heaters, and stoves to electric versions. The grid needs to be upgraded first.

What a colossal boondoggle. Those windmills piss me off because they kill hundreds of thousands of birds, hawks, owls and eagles every year.

Basically the national infrastructure is badly need of repair and expansion: roads, bridges, utility systems, airports. Decades of neglect.

It's not that simple, you can't just say "let's throw money at the problem" to build more infrastructure. Wind turbines are intermittent, meaning their production doesn't follow demand, meaning you need to find some way to absorb the power they generate when it's not being consumed, and some way to compensate for their missing production when you need a lot of power but there's no wind. That's the main issue, and the main reason grid operators aren't investing more into connecting further turbines to their grids. This is a fundamental technological problem, and it won't be solved overnight.

The first "you will be shocked" almost made me stop watching. The second granted you a dislike and an interrupted watching. *Stop* telling me and your viewers how they will feel. That's a lack of respect.

Subsidy is never the answer. Subsidy for some is eventual Poverty for all.

Way back in College in 2004 in Environmental 101 we would get into raging debates over wind, I was stanchly anti wind, still am, it's great for isolated places, and specific scenarios but overall it's bananas to even think let alone try and build these mega projects on the scale they want/are. I can't believe we are at this point.

This presentation makes a valid point about connecting to the grid but ignores several key factors in renewable energy alternatives. One, the amount of energy needed to make windmills / solar panels is greater than the energy returned by their operation. They cost more to make than they give back in energy. Two, the environmental impact of disposing of broken/worn out/damaged windmills and panels - as well as the impact while in operation - is completely ignored here. Birds die when they hit the blades. Grass dies when the panels block the sun. Lastly, any project that makes a demand on federal government to fund it/support it/prop it up, is something to be wary of. Governments do not make money, they take money and redistribute it. That money comes from us and, more importantly, comes from thin air when they simply print more and more of the phony funds to cover the costs. We all lose in the end here. Much to think about beyond the limitations of the grid.

It's naïve to believe that this interconnection problem can solved with a check from the federal government. All of the new connections must be reviewed by state and local governments. Substations and control systems must be added. It's not like adding a few extension cords.

The solution is NOT having the government cough up a wad of cash to fund improvements to the grid. The solution is to reduce the regulatory burdens on the power industry so that they can find effective, market-based solutions. As usual, government is the problem, not the solution.

Texas is a lesson that needs to be remembered. An ice storm coated the windmills and solar panels making them useless. They were 48% of the grid. Demand for one of the coldest winters in Texas caused the grid to collapse. People froze to death.

What your saying is: if things were very different, wind turbines would work really well.

This is comedy gold! "100% 'clean energy'". Ha ha ha ha. Everyone is a tool. Every energy production scheme is 'dirty'.

Sanity must be infecting these companies.

Remember this number 0.04%. That is the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. The question is how much are we going to spend to lower this already minuscule percentage of CO2. In my mind we have already spent too much. To continue the pursuit of lowering CO2 is folly... You can't produce a windmill without using the very fuel you despise. The whole idea of lowering CO2 by making electricity cost so much you can't afford to use it is actually the aim here. Environmentalists goal is to send us back to the Stone Age. You see people on the streets in tents? That is their goal for all of us. If you have seen these encampments you know they are full of trash, a nightmare of pollution. The end result of their quest is the very thing they say they are trying to fix.

This environmental and financial disaster is now being rolled out all over Australia. The capital costs will keep driving our bills up, and the environmental disaster along Australia's east coast and prime farmland and nature reserves is a dreadful. Meanwhile we have just produced record grain harvests due to higher C02 levels in the atmosphere.

any story that starts out "the real reason" is going to be about somebody's political opinion

Real solutions for America's energy problem A natural gas combined cycle power plant's efficiency can reach upwards of 60% because it captures and uses the plant's hot exhaust gases to spin a secondary turbine, which generates more electricity.

No doubt the electrical grid infrastructure needs rebuilding. . So the priority should be updating our grid.

This video raises good points that I don't see in other news. One of the biggest problems with solar/wind is that it is inherently diffuse. The grid was designed to transfer power from large, point sources. Solar and wind produce a little bit here and a little bit there, requiring a much more costly, and humanly objectionable, grid. No one wants ugly high-voltage lines ruining their scenery and TV/radio reception, and causing problems with high-voltage fields in their house. And people don't want to pay a lot more for their electricity to fund all the extra transmission lines and transformers. Also, the intermittency of solar/wind require fossil fuel backup. (And don't say "big batteries" unless you have many hundreds of billions of dollars you want to donate to pay for them.) Germany had the highest electrical rates in Europe BEFORE the Ukraine war, due to its reliance on solar/wind.

I live in the US and 25 years ago our tax dollars subsidized big corporations to install 44 wind towers ($300,000 just the tower) made in switzerland or germany. Last year my electric doubled in price and has never went down during that period. This year they tore down those 44 and replaced them with bigger towers ( I'm sure we all paid for these new ones too). When and where am I going to get that green energy. From my perspective it's just a money grab.

This is what happens when government bureaucrats interfere with market forces.

It's not easy at all. Much easier would be to develop nuclear power plants based on thorium.

The wind turbine business is a unicorn farm. It sounds great, makes you feel warm and fuzzy. But in the end it’s BS.

I worked in the Wind Industry over 3 year as a Commissioner ...The Wind Industry depends on the OIL Industry, every Wind Turbine has a gear box almost the size of a Volkswagen , that has 40-50 GALLONS of OIL in EACH ONE,,,, Wind Industry is alternative energy but NOT GREEN Energy

I bought an electric lawnmower and found out the hard way that if I let my grass grow longer than three weeks then my mower can't handle it.

Lets do a back of the envelope calculation for electricity storage. Conditions for the calculations: 1. Windmill rated power output 1MW. 2. Battery used: 100kWh Tesla Battery 3. Average cost per battery: $161/kWh x 100 = $16,100 4. Storage time: 100 hours, duration of the February was about 100 hours of little wind not uncommon in cold high pressure systems. 5. No grid, efficiency or power conversion costs. A 1MW windmill produces at nameplate capacity produces 1MWh of power every hour running at capacity. To back up this with a battery will take 10 batteries to provide the same power for 1 hour. The battery costs will be 10 x $16,100 =$161,000 for one hour of backup For 10 hours of backup would require 10 times that number or $1,610,000. For 100 hours it would require 10 times the previous amount or $16,100,100, 1,000 batteries. This is for one windmill. If you have a farm of 100, that means that you will need 100,000 batteries at a cost of $1,610,000,000. This is for one wind farm, last count I saw was that there are 70,000 windmills and to provide battery backup would require 70,000 X 1,000= 70,000,000 batteries at a cost of 70,000,000 x $16,100= 1.1270 trillion dollars. This is to just backup the windmills we have currently. The current battery production at Tesla is 139k per year. To provide for just the installed base would require 500 years at the current production rate. That would mean no production of car batteries. At the end of 100 hours, the batteries are spent and while the wind is blowing, power must be generated to charge the batteries, and provide power to the grid.Since windmills average a 30% capacity factor, you have to build >3x the required amount to supply the grid, and at least twice that number to recharge the batteries. We also haven't included the optimal operating range for Li Ion Batteries which is from 20% to 90%. Thus you will need 1/70% additional batteries or 1.429 times that battery total. Thus the cost of the batteries is $1.6105 Trillion Dollars! This is just a rough estimate and not inclusive of all the costs involved, and the time frames available. In other words we can't get there from here, and the only reason we are trying is because the government if throwing money at people without thinking or doing basic math.

OUR POLITICIANS WOULD RATHER SPEND OUR MONEY ON OVERSEAS WARS THAN ON INFRASTRUCTURE

The segmented nature of the US power grid is a benefit in that the whole thing can really never go down... if it WERE ONE SYSTEM the entire country could lose power at once, additionally without ZERO KELVIN cooled powere transmission lines there is huge amounts of power lost during transmission of power over long distances... it's not as though you connect a wind farm in Mass or Conneticut to generate power for Chicago.... but most people DO NOT KNOW THIS!

One of my sons and my daughter graduated from a university that had a wind turbine on campus. It burned down in 2021.

Real power plants plan transmission connections and fight the red tape in parallel with construction so they can actually use the resource their investors paid money for. Red tape by local individuals and environmental groups is big reason for transmission planning to be a multi year process.

My understanding is that to achieve 'net zero' we will need to produce as much copper (for new grid connections) as has been produced in the whole of human history. We are now mining copper ores with about 1% Cu content, while back in the 1970s the mean content was 4%. It takes about 16 years, from identifying an ore deposit, to get it producing metal. I may have got all this wrong, interested to note any feedback.

Here in the UK we have the same problem with the slow connection to the grid.

I like how he said it wasent about money then proceeds to explain how it’s definitely about the money

This video is full of hot air. The real reason wind is failing is it is expensive, unreliable, isn't green and eats up an enormous footprint. It is not a viable source of energy for grid power. Companies were only getting involved when they knew governments guaranteed them vast profits. That subsidy gravy train is over.

If we can't get a basic grid upgrade to harden it against a Carrington Event, EMP strike or fire risks, then it's back to the drawing board for renewables.

Soldiers talk production (tactics) , generals talk grid (logistics)

Basically the same problem as charging EVs. The power grid (in virtually all countries) cannot cope with rapid changes requiring massive upgrades in network capacity.

But we keep being told 'Wind energy is soooo much cheaper than fossil fuel ' it certainly doesn't sound like it. I'm in the UK and we just can't afford to go net zero!

So, the smartest people in the industry didn't realize that they'd run into this problem? Before a man builds a tower he should consider the cost... Also, wind energy is not green. The balsa forests in Ecuador are being decimated because of the "clean green energy"

Oil and gas are renewable sources of energy because they are made on Earth , not on stars like matels . Solar panels are made with silver, and there is not enough silver to cover all the solar panels. Wind energy requires a lot of maintenance, which increases the cost of LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) .

There is so much that is misleading or left out of this article. First of all, it is not simply a matter of hooking up the wind farms to the grid: It is about the storage of the electricity, in tremendously expensive battery banks or other, for wind-less and high use times. He makes it sound like "plug and play", but it is not. Also, the idea that these farm are totally green is ridiculous... they have a limited lifespan, both the windmills and the solar cells... and disposing of them is a giant issue. The vanes when they have reached their lifepan must be removed, and cannot be recycled. They usually bury them. And the farms themselves, if not rebuilt, leave thousands of tons of concrete in the ground. And what about the trees cut down to allow them? The disruption of winds? The birds killed? The whales confused, and lost and beached? This article is a white wash.

Gas is clean and a good transition fuel. The cost to plumb in renewables in the EU is estimated at 3 trillion. Collected from the public of course. Stripping out the viable gas infrastructure will cost 1 trillion.

I'm curious how to do maintenance and repairs the huge quantity of the wind turbines. Also the wind turbines don't produce electricity when wind isn't blowing thus require to have backups such as natural gas power plants. It seems ROI of wind turbines is very low considering their high cost, taking allot of land, using power lines to each turbine, maintenance, etc.

Thanks to government regulations and NIMBYism, this situation will not be resolved quickly.

Government funding = higher taxes.

TL:DR The price quintupled due to integration costs that were never considered by anyone but critics. It's only profitable to make and sell the machines due to subsidies, the cost to make them transmit power is too high due to entire electric grid needing to be overhauled with modern systems that can support energy from intermittent unpredictable sources that don't give utilities reliable control over power generation that can always meet grid load demanded.

Watched this back in the late 70's and early 80's. Stock market can take you to the poor house overnight. Be careful, can destroy you quick

I am originally from California and have seen Wind Farms in the Altamont Pass. Over time many of the wind generators have stopped working even with strong wind, plus yearly there is heavy bird death as this is an north-south migration path. The Wind Farms and Solar Farms are a poor solution compared to Nuclear, Natural Gas, or other fuel power plants.

My power bill has increased 21% in the last 18 months. Between that and taxes, these useless windmills are costing me big time!. I find it strange that the grid handled everything fine before windmills.

I put solar on my house. Three months and two inspections later, I finally got permission to connect to the grid.

Here's an idea for all those "stranded" wind farms. Use them to power electrolysis cells to produce Hydrogen from water, then use the Hydrogen to fuel Rankine-cycle powerplants. Or, use the wind farms to pull CO2 from the atmosphere, react it with the electrolysis products, and produce methanol that can be used to fuel real cars (if they're converted to burn it).

You've got to remember that any grid has to balance the amount of wind and solar it has relative to its producible base load. You just need to look at Alberta's situation where all of its coal was phased out rapidly, and then the wind and solar that replaced it developed a lack of base load situation for the province.

Seriously, as a German engineer who happened to work in the U.S. in the late '90s, I must say, our networks in Germany are not perfect, but when compared to the networks in the U.S., they are the gold standard 😉. While most ordinary people seemed not to care and assumed that everything in the U.S. was supposed to be the best in the world, all electricians actually agreed. You NEED to upgrade your networks or you will face more and more black outs. And if you do- prepare them for renewable energy. It's by far the cheapest and there are already good solutions to storage the energy. And one note i.e. In Denmark, 50.1 percent of 2017 domestic electricity production came from wind - at times 100 percent - but the country averages only 15 minutes of power outages a year, compared with TWO HOURS in the United States!!

brilliant government minds

What am I missing in the Geothermal option department? Tons of thermal energy down there, but tons of $$ drilling too.

The main problem here is the absurd timescale that has been arbitrarily imposed for these developments.

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) - Clear the path to install 5,000 in small to medium size towns and cities. ZERO CO2 - VERY Safe. One reactor is the size of a school bus.

Meanwhile, the UK is on target to generate approaching 50% of its electricity from wind power in January 2024.

One major challenge is the struggle between upgrading the existing grid versus building out more renewables. Each side needs labor intensive products such as large power transformers. Gone are the days of GE and Westinghouse manufacturing plants. Further, and perhaps maybe more challenging, might be the struggle between steel manufacturers deciding to make electrical steel for EV motors versus transformers. Transformer OEMs have 3+ year lead times partially due to electrical steel suppliers. Pick your cause, but understand that one affects the other!

This is why I have said for years that wind and solar are not the solution. Upgrading existing power stations (for which the distribution networks are already in place, and or could be more cheaply upgraded) to Nuclear has got to be the solution.

The thumbnail showing a wind turbine on fire was pretty misleading... Now PJM isn't the only one looking to put a freeze while they work though a backlog of interconnection requests -- the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) on Feb 8, 2024, asked federal regulators for permission to cancel its annual interconnection study process for any interconnection requests submitted this year so it can deal with a “tsunami” of existing interconnection requests. It's not just money that is needed. It's a byzantine system in which any new transmission lines require permission from multiple layers of governments and landowners. Any single one disagreeing can shut down a project. The Volts Podcast by David Roberts has a number of good episodes on these issues.

Day vs Night Consumption: Old school powerplants for night loads. Solar/Wind for the increase during day? No mention of storage for night loads.

Remember one word when discussing energy - "RELIABILITY." Anything short of that ain't worth talking about.

The capital costs have gone up since interest rates went up from 0.25% to 4.5% in three years. Plus the cost of materials has gone up a huge amount. The UK just raised the price cap on its CfD auctions by 66% that support wind projects. The cost of CD contracts in todays money is £98/MWh. That is the same as the current elevated market price for gas fired generators. If gas prices fall, wind energy will look extremely expensive. Add in huge amounts of transmission build that needs to be done and wind looks its like a bad option compared to conventional energy or even roof top solar.

On the Penn Turnpike near Johnstown up went some wind farm about 10 years ago. 5 years later about a third not turning.

Almost every time I drive by and see windmills, they aren't spinning, they are just sitting.

You missed the fact that interest rates have rise to the highest levels since 2008 possibly earlier, oil prices are currently $90 and likely to go higher and inflation is rampant.

The way things are going in the UK with these short panic deadlines with reliance on wind power and little else the winter death toll if we have a calm month is going to be massive. The sun does not exactly dump much energy on the British Isles so not much hope there. Our government is increasing taxes on anytime that we earn, spend, move house or die yet struggles to run what we have. We sit over vast amounts of coal and the irony of all the people freezing above this because nobody is even thinking about how to use it and contain the carbon is very sad. There was a an long article once in a paper many years ago that said that our coal energy resources were greater than North Sea oil but it will just sit there now.

Is their no way for them to build more Hydro power stations? They are pollution free and will out last any other method, or is it too hard to make legalized thieving from them, what is the reason for not having them built?

The net zero scam is running out of stream

No offense to you Impossible build, however you aren't correct on the wind turbine issues. Reliability, grid stability and power generation are the main issues. Wind blows too hard, got to lock down the turbines so not to damage, wind blows too little, and you need to disconnect them from the grid or else the feedback from said grid will turn the turbine. Even when you have the blades turning, it doesn't mean they are producing a set wattage or voltage. It goes up and down during production which in turn makes it difficult to balance the grid. On small scale this isn't noticeable but on a larger scale, well there been some fried grids. Combine the lack of stability with the reliability and you have to have a backup source which means more transmission lines, more substations more monitoring and rapid response power plants like natural gas power. This is where the hidden cost is that doesn't get shown on that nice clean invoice sent to the government. Let's discuss backups real fast, Lithium battery storage is the current way to store this energy. It takes a lot of battery banks to store just a days' worth of power and sometimes you can go weeks without correct wind rates. Lithium also has this little problem even when its tightly wrapped up and covered if it reaches a certain temperature, it can self-ignite. The ship called The Dutch Oven carried EV cars and this happened. You can't put out a lithium fire. Therefore, you need a better backup, natural gas works on that. I won't get into CO2 in this rant. So, you have to not only build the turbine which you have to destroy the landscape to do so, remember some Countries destroyed millions of trees just to put in a few farms that produce less power than a single natural gas plant which takes up much less space. You also have to build the infrastructure to transmit the power then you also need backups. The places that have neglected this tends to have higher energy cost and more rolling blackouts than those who have forgone renewables. This isn't a cost problem and lazy evil government, its an engineering problem that is so complex that we struggle to figure it out. You want emissionless power, build nuclear stations and carbon capture such as oxy-combustion and integrated gasification combine cycle power plants. Takes up less space, less resources per wattage and is more stable and reliable.

Renewable energy is the biggest boondoggle in human history.

I'm from the government and I am here to help - the scariest phrase known to man! So where does government get its money? In the end the consumer ends up paying for it. Most of these projects cost the people money even when cancelled thanks to laws written for the utility companies. They can charge customers for stuff that never actually gets implemented.

Very informative. Always seems to boil down to money and politics.

Similar in the UK, with a 5-10 year wait for grid connections. 2035? Good luck with that one 🤣 Just like Tesla, UK EV chargepoints are starting to use generators to make up for demand due to lack of supply.

I am not sure I believe all that was said here. However, giving it the benefit of the doubt, these are the things that can happen when the "woke" government decides to force change rather than allowing the change to happen organically.

The reasons stated are excellent, but The Harvard Gazette's studies (2007 and 2012?) had shown that solar farms had increased surrounding area temperatures by almost two degrees, which actually increased at nighttime. Their studies on wind farms had shown that the winds had decreased to zero after passing through "x" number of windmills. This had several negative impacts on the environments surrounding these wind farms which included increased temperatures. All of which impacts the environment negatively and increases global warming significantly.

The wind farms take massive areas of land and seas. As a function of the kilowats generated it is pathic. Life span 20 years max. Creating a mass extinction of avian life forms.

We knew this big issue from the get go, but it was ignored in favor of rushing forward for early easy money.

There is another sollution if you wanna go renewalble: Minesto Dragons (D12 is the biggest one) are kite-alike turbines that use the liftforce of 100% predictable currents to move at 8-10 times faster rate in a figure of 8 and generate100% plannable electricity and cost effective since the turbines are very lite. About 5 times less material per MW than wind. They can also, as the only technology, operate cost effectively in slow currents, so the 24/7 Gulf is available.

Apart from the flimsiness and maintenance problems of wind turbines, the principal problem is the amount of land required for a single wind farm. It's like spreading a traditional electrical power station over dozens of square miles. This cluttering of the landscape is leading more local governments in the U.S. to veto new projects.

In my home, Denmark, we have an effective power grid, 220/380 volt and produces so much Green Power (Solar and wind) that it is enough for our daily use. We also was among the very first to evaluate modern wind power and now produces around half of the worlds wind power machines (Vestas).

I hope grid and distribution issues have the Government and corporations "turn their back" on EVs, but I'm not optimistic. They are coming no matter what.

EMF from high power transmission lines is assumed to have no negative health impact. Make the CEO live under one,see how they get on.

They are not green. Those turbines need to be replaced every 2 years and they are not recycled. Where do they go? Landfills, colossal landfills.

The key to understanding is, 5 times more electricity will be needed. Re:Allan Fels, the Australian government adviser. Transmission from central generation is the killer cost. The national grid is fragile, just off broke. 100years to build and massive national wealth. 5 national grids is stupendously stupid economically, resources and fossil fueled mining. Decades and decades and decades. EV big batteries and rooftop solar PV and the existing national grid is almost free. 100kWh EV storage + 6.6kW rooftop. Central Electricity generation is stupid. Fossil fueled Nuclear fission Nuclear fusion Renewables solar farms Renewable wind farms The centralised generation models are all stupid because of transmission costs and the decades and decades to construct the increased transmission capacity. In my street we have 30 homes and 60+ vehicles and gas supply to the homes. When no petroleum EVs, and no gas supplied for heating and cooking and hotwater then it is obvious the poles and wires in the street are way too small for distant central supply.

The only people I know in California that are really in love with the green deal, own their home, installed $30k of solar PV, another $30k of storage own two teslas, and don’t understand the rate system. Their buddy who convinced them to get a Tesla told them electricity was $0.04/kWh. It’s not - the cheapest is about $0.36/kWh. They are off by a factor of nine in how much it actually takes to charge. And they NEVER understand the utility cost of the $100k Tesla and the $60k of PV/storage. My panels produce about half as much in winter. It’s going to be very cold in New England (oil heat) when they go all solar. The sun is MUCH lower in the sky and the panels will be covered by snow. NO ONE IN POWER WANTS TO ANALYZE THE DATA.

This problem to me seems similar to the lack of charging stations for EVs. Not enough investment and build-up of the grid that is required.

The solution is local solar power. The billions of dollars used to build these inefficient wind farms and solar farms and upgraded transmission lines should instead be spent on installing solar power on the roofs of homes and commercial buildings along with installing energy storage systems. Instead of spending billions of dollars upgrading the electrical grid to handle increasing electrical demands, we would distribute the power source among millions of homes and businesses. Wouldn't it be great to have a infrastructure power outage that had no effect on most homes and business because these homes and businesses were getting their electricity from their solar panels and power walls. The video did not point out that the manufacturing of these gigantic windmills is also harmful to the environment. Research needs to be concentrated on improving the efficiency of solar panels and reducing the harm to the environment caused by the manufacturing the solar panels.

We have/get the exact same problems here in Germany and Europe. Just the 'green' government doesn't take notice and go on daydreaming...

Corrupt politicians

Orstead has canceled 2 offshore New Jersey wind farm projects after losing $5+ billion in those projects.

We should have also been building new generation nuclear power stations. Same as for EVs, the infrastructure cannot support the timeframes being pushed. All for little gain as all these things require a lot of emissions in manufacture which are offset over time.