Wind Turbines: The Pruitt-Igoes of the Plains

J Droz

The above image is what I believe will be the eventual fate of wind farms in the Great Plains. 

Pruitt-Igoe was a Soviet-style housing project erected in St. Louis in the early 1950's. It was considered to be the future of urban housing. Instead, residents and neighbors hated it's awful design and residents hated the high maintenance and poor construction -- at 60% higher cost than the average public housing complex. After just 15 years, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began to discourage occupancy. It was dynamited in the 1970's. 

Pruitt-Igoe (P-I) became the poster child for urban blight and counterproductive urban development.

I thought of P-I fiasco when I was contacted yesterday about radar contamination during Sunday's storms.

That isn't an isolated instance.

Below is a map of wind energy radar blight from yesterday morning. Each of the circles is a wind farm.

Sunday evening, when violent storms occurred near Dodge City (left side of image), the wind farms clearly distorted both the wind speed and rainfall data (not shown).

And, as if these weren't enough problem enough, our misguided governor is announcing even more.

There is a reason wind energy for electricity was discontinued more than a century ago.

It is highly unreliable and expensive.

Today's wind turbines use rare earth minerals that could be used for far better purposes. Children are used to mine those minerals under abhorrent conditions. Of course, the media doesn't cover that because wind energy is politically correct.

Finally, even NPR has figured out the huge costs of wind turbine disposal.

To summarize, wind energy:

• Interferes with storm warnings
• Employs child labor
• Creates vast "toxic lakes"
• Highly unreliable 
• Requires 24/7 fossil fuel backup
• Expensive 
• Huge disposal costs

Global warming is a problem. If you want to decarbonize, which we probably should do as a hedge, the way to do it is with next generation nuclear, not with 120-year old windmills. 

Let's stop installing more Pruitt-Igoes on the Great Plains and save up the dynamite.