Wind turbines generating regret; $100,000 turbines to create $1.50 in electricity monthly

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• Forget the value of the electricity they will produce, or the value of the "education". The real question is will they produce more power than it took to get the raw materials (including get the workers to the place the raw materials were gotten from), transport them to someplace else, make the parts (including workers getting to the place to manufacture the parts), transport them to someplace else, then manufacture the damn things, transport them to the park, and bring in workers and machines to install them.

  I think the biggest energy savings would have been to not make these things in the first place.

• "The wind spires were not intended to generate enough revenue to pay back the cost"

  Well, I found your problem. When I had a wind generator at my home in Joshua Tree, it cost five hundred dollars to add to my solar system. It generated a couple hundred times what these worthless pieces of crap generate, but it wasn't as pretty. It also got kinda noisy when the wind was really going. But I didn't buy it to be trendy, or to look pretty, or to educate anyone. I bought it to produce electricity.

• they are not blowing that money

• Not to mention they slice and dice birds like the Ronco vegamatic.....

  • Thanks for the laughs nss, I needed them this week. It slices! It dices! But wait, there's more...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK2p5TAhd0s
    http://kaya.pk/image/data/0000000/3/Genius%20Veg-O-Matic%20in%20Pakistan-4.jpg

    But if you call right now, we'll include K-tel's 33 1/3 album of the greatest hits of the 70's, Ronco!

    • Don't laugh but as a kid I had several of the K-Tel Albums. The quality was poor, songs faded out before they should have and when the eight tracks came along the tape player would change tracks and the song would just end in the middle...Then came cassettes and while cruising one night with friends down main street the damn thing burst into flames and we had to stop and throw it out on the street..ah yes the good old days... :)

    • [edit] and you thought Gallagher was the first?

• Only government can produce something that stupid and still try to defend it. $107,516 to produce $1.50 of electricity per month, $1.25 of which will be spend lighting the park in which the stupid things sit, for a net gain of twenty five cents per month. If we ignore maintenance costs and obsolescence (which they actually did believe it or not), the wind turbines will pay back their investment in 430,000 years. Unfortunately for that rosy scenario, the stupid things will be lucky to last ten years and the maintenance costs will be far higher than twenty five cents a month.

• I'd love to see Congress pass a law which requires California, New York, and D.C. to use only solar and wind to generate all of their electric power, starting today.

  • Unnecessary in the case of California because they are slowly but surely meandering toward that level of stupidity on their own.

    • Meandering isn't fast enough: I'd like to see them start suffering the consequences right now