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Simply put, these huge industrial sites – we simply must stop using the friendly-sounding term “farms” to describe them – create all manner of negative consequences for local communities. Consequences like loud noise from wind turbines, hundreds of dead birds and bats sprinkled across the countryside, thousands of acres of productive farm or ranchlands taken out of production for many years if not permanently, spoiled views, enormous “graveyards” filled with 150-foot blades and solar panels popping up all over the place, and impacts to local wind and weather patterns that are only now beginning to be understood. //
One West Texas "blade graveyard" alone contains thousands of used blades; these blades cannot be reused, nor can they practically be recycled. Another graveyard, this one in Newton, Iowa, contains a similar eyesore. One of the companies that manufactures the blades, Global FIberglass, has pledged to find a way to begin recycling the blades, but this has not yet happened—and the blades continue to pile up. //
It's all energy density; it's always energy density. To maintain a modern, technological society, like ours, requires greater energy density, not less. The federal government should be held to account; the Energy Department should, at a minimum, stop subsidizing these boondoggles (and, ideally, should be defunded and disbanded). Our society depends on abundant, cheap, high-density energy. //
redstateuser
10 hours ago edited
One of the links in this article brings you to an article that I think is well worth reading in its entirely. I found it eye-opening as to the waste going on with windmills:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/
In Google Maps, I found the dumping ground located in Sweetwater, Texas but, inexplicably, the aerial view had been doctored to make most of it look like raked dirt, poorly doctored yet detectable. Here it is, and you can compare it to the unretouched image in the linked article: