Wind Turbines at utility scale both in their individual size and the wind “farm” geography are enormous and expensive failures. Having been the “owners” manager on two utility scale wind projects in the Midwest and Northwest this writer can report they are expensive to build, operate and maintain, and without the massive government subsidies are so unprofitable that no bank would finance them, as they would not make it past the first credit committee meeting. Their performa would be binned in a matter of minutes. So we come to the measuring the warming of the ambient air temperatures at the surface to 1000 feet and find they are disturbed and warmer than normal, when the blades are turning. Anyone ask the local bird population what they think? Well if the loss of habitat, bird strikes and loss of bird population is any indicator, the birds don’t think much of a 400 foot tower with a single wide120 ton trailer on top that has 380 foot blades spinning with a speed at the tip breaking the sound barrier. That’s all before we get to shadow flicker and noise.
Then the real shake down. Grid reliability which is always negatively affected. Who needs an additional 300 mega watts of power at 0200 when everyone is sleeping? Exactly, no one. We could go on going but why spoil the beauty of their failure with facts.
It has been a glorious 30 year grift. Some got rich, most just paid for the mess in the guise of higher home rate payer bills. It’s not over yet! While decommissioning of these projects is baked into the financing model you can be sure the money isn’t there and the rate payer will pay again for the privilege of removing the mess they paid to build. One need only watch the Governor of Massachusetts flip a giant sized switch on the wall in February in gleeful excitement that only a two year old or mid wit politician can muster when “she” turned on the power with Hydro Quebec. Poor dear, no one told her about the Force Majure paragraph in the Power Purchase Agreement. Turns out it gets cold in Quebec in the winter months, well colder than usual. So they keep the electricity for their own customers. The deal for 20% of Massachusetts electrical load goes “poof” in the night. Best turn on those old coal boilers…whoops! You can make any of it up. More bad will follow the do gooders, they are all like bad weather at sea, with us always.
I attend a fair number of hearings on the applications of these wind developers, and the decommissioning costs , as you point out, are an interesting issue. Down at the county commissioner's level, if a person brings up the bogus decommissioning costs in the application, the county commissioners are very likely going to stop your comments and say "that's the business of the Industrial Siting Council (the ISC)". Highly siloed responsibility among half a dozen government entities is easy for developers to exploit.
Xcel energy did a big study of decommissioning costs across a spectrum of their generating assets -- coal to solar, and found that true decommissioning costs for wind plants could reach half-million per turbine. Meanwhile in applications the average cost is said to be under 100,000. In fact, in one application that I read the developer promised to take the turbines down piece by piece, but in the small print in their spreadsheet of costs they allocated less than $60,000 per turbine and stated they planned to use explosive demolition. You are correct that ratepayers or taxpayers will eventually get whacked.
Acoustics? We don't have a lot of folks who live near wind plants out here in Wyoming, but there is a plant that expects to build soon within a development of ranchettes. The noise calculations were done using ISO-9613-2. I tried my best, in 45 minutes of testimony, to explain to the ISC that ISO-9613-2 does not apply to wind turbines, and all one has to do to see this fact is to read the standard. It was to no avail.
Then, the regions impacted by flicker are minimized in the applications by claiming that shadows from the blades are no longer seen when the Sun is several degrees above the horizon. This might be true in hazy/humid air like the EBBs territory. However, in the exceptionally clear air in the West, the image of Sun is visible below the horizon, which extends both the range and duration of flicker. When I tell people that they can see the Sun below the horizon they think I've lost my mind.
Very interesting details. Wondering if you can share insight on the questions below:
a) Did the wind turbine performance match the initial forecasts?
b) How did the operating cost align with the initial economic forecast?
c) Is there a major maintenance task (i.e., a gearbox overhaul, etc.) that would drive retirement of the turbine if it occurred toward the end of the turbines life due to economics? (similar to a scenario where a gas turbine needed a major overhaul within a year or two of retirement)
1. Yes and No, the WTG can meet the standards, but the wind is fickle. Most banks required at least two meteorological towers that captured at least a years worth of wind data, and there was always a lot of empirical data say from. Local airports. But in the end, projects didn’t really generate as promised. The wind blew just not when and where it was supposed to.
2. No
3. Gearbox failure 400 feet in the air is a major maintenance problem. You need a 400 ton crane to make a change out if the gearbox fails. A 400 ton crane arrives on 52 tractor trailers and low boys. Then has to crawl to the down WTG. Most private equity firms and developed have Major maintenance in the budgets, but they skimp and defer minor and major maintenance all the time. Then are shocked when something big breaks.
I didn't see the hydrocarbon investment to make and maintain the turbines accounted for. Concrete is not green. Each turbine requires many gallons of oil for the gearbox. Some studies suggest 20-30 years is overly optimistic for a lifecycle, and disposal is still an issue. Also, back up peaker plants are required for when the wind doesn't blow. That also has a hydrocarbon coat.
Earth's surface is warmed by absorbed solar and infrared, and simultaneously cooled by radiant emission and bulk heat transfer (Latent and sensible heat) from the surface. Because wind turbines absorb about one half the kinetic energy in their intercepted flow, they reduce wind speed near ground, which reduces the bulk transfer portion of cooling. It isn't so much that they redistribribute heat, but that they hinder one of the surface cooling mechanisms, leading to another to pickup the slack, but at a slightly higher temerature.
There are ex-colleagues of mine who will swear that a temperature rise of two degrees Fahrenheit will extinguish raptors and this is why we must build wind turbines. But building wind turbines will raise the temperature by a fair fraction of those two allegedly deadly degrees plus provide new hazards for large birds to navigate. I grow pretty weary of debating anything with these folks.
I personally have found it so sad that emissions / climate change has completely taken over the environmental movement that began with people wanting to protect ecosystems, wild places, and stop water and air pollution. The clean air act and the clean water act really did help reduce pollution for a while (although growth and deregulation has undone a lot of that), the ESA has helped a few species, but ecosystem destruction has continued apace. Solar and wind are energy systems that contribute to that destruction.
But now when you say "I care about the environment" people automatically assume you mean "climate change".
No, I (and a few, but not many others) still care about the *total* environment, about wildlife, about habitat, and about pollution. Emissions is one piece of that, but compared to habitat loss and broad spectrum pollution from things like plastics, PFAS, and other synthetic chemicals, catastrophic wildlife loss, and so on, emissions is a fairly small piece of the predicament.
Building so-called "renewable" energy systems, systems that require mining and refining materials (destroying vast amounts of habitat), manufacturing, installation (again, destroying vast amounts of habitat), and then of course their short lifespans before it must all be done again, is not "caring about the environment."
My theory for why climate change / emissions took over the environmental movement is that it was the one thing that industry could claim a "solution" for. They created propaganda that convinced people these energy systems are "clean" because they can claim they are "emissions free" during one tiny part of their lifetime. It's a giant scam. And enviros fell for it!!!!! That's what's SO infuriating. And now here we are, where enviros are clamoring for MORE INDUSTRY (solar, wind, cars, etc.) instead of actually protecting ecosystems.
Wind and solar are often described as messianic technologies but only by the people who forget that we used those technologies 800 years ago because there weren’t any alternatives.
“As of early 2026, U.S. solar and wind power are rapidly approaching parity in installed capacity, with solar growing faster while wind still generates more total electricity annually. In 2025, combined wind and solar accounted for 19% of U.S. utility-scale generation, with solar adding the majority of new capacity for 22 consecutive months.”
This kind of surface-level info. really gets Bill McKibben juiced up. His Substack is still number one in subscriptions in its category. Of course he never mentions the many shortfalls of solar & wind as stabile grid-level power sources.
It's just mind boggling that all this effort is being spent on wind when the same money could have been used on a proven, dispatchable, and emission free generation source like nuclear. A "solution" looking for a problem.
Informative article on an aspect of wind turbines I've not seen before. I think everyone would benefit from the unbiased, transparent assessment of all types of generation resources including wind turbines. Instead there's been "angelic" assessments that present a very one-sided perspective and substantially rely on government subsidies.
Some observations from analyzing a few wind project Power Purchase Agreements (PPA):
- Optimistic performance projects - no performance degradation over 20/25 years including the absence budgeting for leading edge blade replacement.
- Heavy reliance on Production Tax Credits (PTC) - PTC's make up a substantial portion of initial revenue. In addition, some projects seem to count on a repowering to extend the PTC's once the initial construction PTC's end in year 10.
- Assume the wind turbine manufacturer's full estimated turbine life - the economic analyses assume that the turbine's are economically to operate for 30-years without an increase in O&M expenses. Given that the current turbines have not been tested and or operated that long, it may be prudent to use a slightly shorter life for economic analysis purposes.
It would be very informative to assess the actual generation and economic performance of the wind turbines installed over the last 10 to 15 years. My guess, based upon my limited analysis, is that they are on average under-performing.
So turbines do not actually increase global warming, they may just have a warming effect locally and just while the blades are generating. This could be seen as positive. It gets pretty cold in the mid-west on winter nights; a degree or two of warming might help lower domestic heating bills. And grass and cereals growth start in spring is temperature dependent, agricultural production may increase with earlier growth start. That's if you believe all this. I don't.
What happens when enough "local" areas become a large area that impacts global wind and weather systems? Also, according to climate researchers, warmer nights (which they say is caused by climate change) are making forest fires worse: https://phys.org/news/2026-04-wildfires-night-climate-prime-hours.html
I wasn’t aware of the Harvard study on how turbine blades affect the local temperatures. Thanks for highlighting it. California's plan to mitigate global warming includes lots of batteries. (1)
Have you seen any studies looking into the warming effect of all the BESS facilities that have been Contracted and/or in Development over the last few years?
"The BESS facilities that have been Contracted and/or in Development over the last few years" are "a pee hole in the snow" relative to the BESS capacity which would be required to reliably firm a renewable plus storage grid.
The ~90% round trip efficiency of grid scale BESS suggests the ~10% of the energy sent to storage is dissipated as heat. Heat dissipation increases dramatically when they catch fire.
Last year’s inferno at the Moss Landing BESS facility led to a lot co2 being released during the sausage making efforts to update/improve building codes around the state/country.
Table 1 in that document shows that nearly 80% of the new resource is batteries or paired battery/solar and measured by nameplate. Perhaps battery storage helps solar achieve slightly less curtailment, but batteries are not generating resources. Considering that their round-trip losses are around 20% they are a new load on the system.
...and pumped hydro has larger round-trip losses (25-30%) while Green Hydrogen round-trip losses would exceed 50%.
Replacing a 500 MW baseload fossil powerplant would require ~2,000 MW of solar and ~9,000 MWh of storage, or ~1,500 MW of wind and ~8,000 MWh of storage. Large nameplate capacity, large land area requirement, large CAPEX, large annual depreciation and large removal and disposal costs. Poor economic decision, writ large.
Let's put some numbers to this: 1,500MW of wind will be around 2.5 billion based on the projected costs of a new 600MW (nameplate) plant near me. 8,000MWhr of storage? $2.4 billion based on another recent proposal. The 500MW power plant? My estimates are getting a bit old, but a bit over a billion unless the PUC insists on CCuS...so let's just say $1.5 billion vs. $5 billion
The utility of course loves the more capital intensive option, because it can be built faster and they'll earn maybe 10% on the invested capital (around 7.5% on the addition to rate base in other words).
The 8,000 MWhr is probably greatly more as it is only 16 hours of 500MW output, but storage requirements are just informed WAGs anyway because it's all probabilistic.
This analysis concedes that emissions cause warming, very much an opinion.
Doubling of co2, not going to happen, only leads to a small increase in temps, everything is made up positive feedbacks, imaginary. Never happened in the past when co2 was much higher, won’t happen in the future.
There is nothing wrong with wanting cleaner air, the problem is lumping plant food in with particulates causing misdirection of resources.
That’s not correct, Jan. If we would cause more warming with wind than we would reasonably offset, that’s a clear indicator that nuclear would be smarter from a reliability, cost, and environmental standpoint.
"If only nuclear was real"? Are you serious? Nuclear was the safest and most cost-effective source of energy in the US way back in the 60s and 70s, before extreme overregulation drove the cost way up by an order of magnitude. Many of those plants are still in operation. Also, cost-effective nuclear power plants are currently being designed and built all around the world outside of the US.
I don’t know what universe you’re living in, but in mine the IEA will tell you it’s the most expensive source of energy (not even counting the extraction/processing of uranium fuel) and not a single SMR has been completed—much less incurred a track record of successful continuous operation—in any western country. China and Russia can build them because the state owns them. What’s their uptime record? No sé. How about parts? No sé. Then go with a gen 3 like what? Vogle.
Your post shows that you either didn't read my post or it sailed completely over your head. How do you explain that nuclear power was far cheaper decades ago when it was first introduced in the US? And those plants have operated for decades with an impeccable safety record. No response?
The reason nuclear is so expensive now is because it is ridiculously overregulated here in the US, plain and simple. Spend few minutes to educate yourself. Look up LNT and ALARA. Volumes have been written on these subjects, showing that the regulations are absurdly over-cautious. We spend as much to save one life from nuclear power as we spend to save thousands from other sources of energy.
Not news except perhaps to Harvard. Now that the American Seminary* of Harvard has pronounced wind in error, may we proceed to survive with their blessing?
Why if Cotton Mather could admit Salem Witch hunts were an error- after his opponents were dead and their land seized- so can Harvard. Nothing could be more American than to accuse one’s opponents, kill one’s enemies, seize their property, profit then denounce the entire matter as excessive.
The next thing you know Fauci will return to scold the CDC and Pharma for the COVID panic.
*Harvard School of Divinity 1636. Increase Mather founded Yale school of Divinity in 1692 having come into unexpected wealth after that unfortunate Salem Business.
I think the point of that article is to highlight the potential downsides of extreme wind farm growth not to say wind is bad. Also the biggest thing that has happened in the decades since they wrote that is solar has won way more of the new growth share so a 100% wind scenario is not happening.
There are a number of more recent global studies, including research undertaken in Texas, demonstrating not only the warming effect of wind turbines, but also that wind installations dry out the soil. For example, Yingzuo Qin, et al. “Impacts of 319 Wind Farms on Surface Temperature and Vegetation in the United States.” Environmental Research Letters, 17(2), 2022. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac49ba Summary: Finds industrial wind installations raise local surface temperatures by 0.20.4°C due to air mixing, with vegetation indices dropping near turbines, suggesting drier soils and air. Impacts on wildlife are inferred through habitat alteration, though not directly quantified. Jia Ze, Yang Xiuchun, Chen Ang, et al. (2024). “Localized Eco-climatic Impacts of Onshore Wind Farms: A Review.” Journal of Resources and Ecology, 15(1): 151–160. https://www.jorae.cn/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=55852 Summary: Reviews eco-climatic impacts of onshore wind farms, noting localized increases in air temperature (up to 0.5°C near turbines) due to turbulence, enhanced soil dryness from altered evapotranspiration, and disrupted air currents affecting microclimates. Wildlife impacts include habitat fragmentation for mammals and birds, with insects showing variable responses (e.g., reduced abundance near turbines due to noise). Gang Wang, Guoqing Lia, Zhe Liu. “Wind Farms Dry Surface Soil in Temporal and Spatial Variation.” Science of the Total Environment, 857(Part 1), 2023. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215016123000055/pdfft?md5=2b3b4 44debe446e14796df21befe2b0b&pid=1-s2.0-S2215016123000055-main.pdf Summary: Demonstrates that wind farms accelerate soil drying (up to 15% reduction in moisture) by increasing evapotranspiration via turbine-induced air currents. Spatial analysis shows drier soils within 500m of turbines, impacting vegetation and potentially small mammals reliant on moist habitats. “The operation of wind turbines will cause obvious drying of the soil; soil moisture within wind farms is decreased most significantly; wind farms aggravate the soil drying in grassland areas, therefore exacerbating drought may affect grassland ecology.”
Wind Turbines at utility scale both in their individual size and the wind “farm” geography are enormous and expensive failures. Having been the “owners” manager on two utility scale wind projects in the Midwest and Northwest this writer can report they are expensive to build, operate and maintain, and without the massive government subsidies are so unprofitable that no bank would finance them, as they would not make it past the first credit committee meeting. Their performa would be binned in a matter of minutes. So we come to the measuring the warming of the ambient air temperatures at the surface to 1000 feet and find they are disturbed and warmer than normal, when the blades are turning. Anyone ask the local bird population what they think? Well if the loss of habitat, bird strikes and loss of bird population is any indicator, the birds don’t think much of a 400 foot tower with a single wide120 ton trailer on top that has 380 foot blades spinning with a speed at the tip breaking the sound barrier. That’s all before we get to shadow flicker and noise.
Then the real shake down. Grid reliability which is always negatively affected. Who needs an additional 300 mega watts of power at 0200 when everyone is sleeping? Exactly, no one. We could go on going but why spoil the beauty of their failure with facts.
It has been a glorious 30 year grift. Some got rich, most just paid for the mess in the guise of higher home rate payer bills. It’s not over yet! While decommissioning of these projects is baked into the financing model you can be sure the money isn’t there and the rate payer will pay again for the privilege of removing the mess they paid to build. One need only watch the Governor of Massachusetts flip a giant sized switch on the wall in February in gleeful excitement that only a two year old or mid wit politician can muster when “she” turned on the power with Hydro Quebec. Poor dear, no one told her about the Force Majure paragraph in the Power Purchase Agreement. Turns out it gets cold in Quebec in the winter months, well colder than usual. So they keep the electricity for their own customers. The deal for 20% of Massachusetts electrical load goes “poof” in the night. Best turn on those old coal boilers…whoops! You can make any of it up. More bad will follow the do gooders, they are all like bad weather at sea, with us always.
I attend a fair number of hearings on the applications of these wind developers, and the decommissioning costs , as you point out, are an interesting issue. Down at the county commissioner's level, if a person brings up the bogus decommissioning costs in the application, the county commissioners are very likely going to stop your comments and say "that's the business of the Industrial Siting Council (the ISC)". Highly siloed responsibility among half a dozen government entities is easy for developers to exploit.
Xcel energy did a big study of decommissioning costs across a spectrum of their generating assets -- coal to solar, and found that true decommissioning costs for wind plants could reach half-million per turbine. Meanwhile in applications the average cost is said to be under 100,000. In fact, in one application that I read the developer promised to take the turbines down piece by piece, but in the small print in their spreadsheet of costs they allocated less than $60,000 per turbine and stated they planned to use explosive demolition. You are correct that ratepayers or taxpayers will eventually get whacked.
Acoustics? We don't have a lot of folks who live near wind plants out here in Wyoming, but there is a plant that expects to build soon within a development of ranchettes. The noise calculations were done using ISO-9613-2. I tried my best, in 45 minutes of testimony, to explain to the ISC that ISO-9613-2 does not apply to wind turbines, and all one has to do to see this fact is to read the standard. It was to no avail.
Then, the regions impacted by flicker are minimized in the applications by claiming that shadows from the blades are no longer seen when the Sun is several degrees above the horizon. This might be true in hazy/humid air like the EBBs territory. However, in the exceptionally clear air in the West, the image of Sun is visible below the horizon, which extends both the range and duration of flicker. When I tell people that they can see the Sun below the horizon they think I've lost my mind.
Very interesting details. Wondering if you can share insight on the questions below:
a) Did the wind turbine performance match the initial forecasts?
b) How did the operating cost align with the initial economic forecast?
c) Is there a major maintenance task (i.e., a gearbox overhaul, etc.) that would drive retirement of the turbine if it occurred toward the end of the turbines life due to economics? (similar to a scenario where a gas turbine needed a major overhaul within a year or two of retirement)
Sorry for delayed response to great questions.
1. Yes and No, the WTG can meet the standards, but the wind is fickle. Most banks required at least two meteorological towers that captured at least a years worth of wind data, and there was always a lot of empirical data say from. Local airports. But in the end, projects didn’t really generate as promised. The wind blew just not when and where it was supposed to.
2. No
3. Gearbox failure 400 feet in the air is a major maintenance problem. You need a 400 ton crane to make a change out if the gearbox fails. A 400 ton crane arrives on 52 tractor trailers and low boys. Then has to crawl to the down WTG. Most private equity firms and developed have Major maintenance in the budgets, but they skimp and defer minor and major maintenance all the time. Then are shocked when something big breaks.
Both siemens and GE have a wall of liabilities coming at them, billions.
Due to crap failing.
I didn't see the hydrocarbon investment to make and maintain the turbines accounted for. Concrete is not green. Each turbine requires many gallons of oil for the gearbox. Some studies suggest 20-30 years is overly optimistic for a lifecycle, and disposal is still an issue. Also, back up peaker plants are required for when the wind doesn't blow. That also has a hydrocarbon coat.
Earth's surface is warmed by absorbed solar and infrared, and simultaneously cooled by radiant emission and bulk heat transfer (Latent and sensible heat) from the surface. Because wind turbines absorb about one half the kinetic energy in their intercepted flow, they reduce wind speed near ground, which reduces the bulk transfer portion of cooling. It isn't so much that they redistribribute heat, but that they hinder one of the surface cooling mechanisms, leading to another to pickup the slack, but at a slightly higher temerature.
There are ex-colleagues of mine who will swear that a temperature rise of two degrees Fahrenheit will extinguish raptors and this is why we must build wind turbines. But building wind turbines will raise the temperature by a fair fraction of those two allegedly deadly degrees plus provide new hazards for large birds to navigate. I grow pretty weary of debating anything with these folks.
I personally have found it so sad that emissions / climate change has completely taken over the environmental movement that began with people wanting to protect ecosystems, wild places, and stop water and air pollution. The clean air act and the clean water act really did help reduce pollution for a while (although growth and deregulation has undone a lot of that), the ESA has helped a few species, but ecosystem destruction has continued apace. Solar and wind are energy systems that contribute to that destruction.
But now when you say "I care about the environment" people automatically assume you mean "climate change".
No, I (and a few, but not many others) still care about the *total* environment, about wildlife, about habitat, and about pollution. Emissions is one piece of that, but compared to habitat loss and broad spectrum pollution from things like plastics, PFAS, and other synthetic chemicals, catastrophic wildlife loss, and so on, emissions is a fairly small piece of the predicament.
Building so-called "renewable" energy systems, systems that require mining and refining materials (destroying vast amounts of habitat), manufacturing, installation (again, destroying vast amounts of habitat), and then of course their short lifespans before it must all be done again, is not "caring about the environment."
My theory for why climate change / emissions took over the environmental movement is that it was the one thing that industry could claim a "solution" for. They created propaganda that convinced people these energy systems are "clean" because they can claim they are "emissions free" during one tiny part of their lifetime. It's a giant scam. And enviros fell for it!!!!! That's what's SO infuriating. And now here we are, where enviros are clamoring for MORE INDUSTRY (solar, wind, cars, etc.) instead of actually protecting ecosystems.
It's just so sad.
Wind and solar are often described as messianic technologies but only by the people who forget that we used those technologies 800 years ago because there weren’t any alternatives.
Per Google AI:
“As of early 2026, U.S. solar and wind power are rapidly approaching parity in installed capacity, with solar growing faster while wind still generates more total electricity annually. In 2025, combined wind and solar accounted for 19% of U.S. utility-scale generation, with solar adding the majority of new capacity for 22 consecutive months.”
This kind of surface-level info. really gets Bill McKibben juiced up. His Substack is still number one in subscriptions in its category. Of course he never mentions the many shortfalls of solar & wind as stabile grid-level power sources.
It's just mind boggling that all this effort is being spent on wind when the same money could have been used on a proven, dispatchable, and emission free generation source like nuclear. A "solution" looking for a problem.
Informative article on an aspect of wind turbines I've not seen before. I think everyone would benefit from the unbiased, transparent assessment of all types of generation resources including wind turbines. Instead there's been "angelic" assessments that present a very one-sided perspective and substantially rely on government subsidies.
Some observations from analyzing a few wind project Power Purchase Agreements (PPA):
- Optimistic performance projects - no performance degradation over 20/25 years including the absence budgeting for leading edge blade replacement.
- Heavy reliance on Production Tax Credits (PTC) - PTC's make up a substantial portion of initial revenue. In addition, some projects seem to count on a repowering to extend the PTC's once the initial construction PTC's end in year 10.
- Assume the wind turbine manufacturer's full estimated turbine life - the economic analyses assume that the turbine's are economically to operate for 30-years without an increase in O&M expenses. Given that the current turbines have not been tested and or operated that long, it may be prudent to use a slightly shorter life for economic analysis purposes.
It would be very informative to assess the actual generation and economic performance of the wind turbines installed over the last 10 to 15 years. My guess, based upon my limited analysis, is that they are on average under-performing.
So turbines do not actually increase global warming, they may just have a warming effect locally and just while the blades are generating. This could be seen as positive. It gets pretty cold in the mid-west on winter nights; a degree or two of warming might help lower domestic heating bills. And grass and cereals growth start in spring is temperature dependent, agricultural production may increase with earlier growth start. That's if you believe all this. I don't.
What happens when enough "local" areas become a large area that impacts global wind and weather systems? Also, according to climate researchers, warmer nights (which they say is caused by climate change) are making forest fires worse: https://phys.org/news/2026-04-wildfires-night-climate-prime-hours.html
I wasn’t aware of the Harvard study on how turbine blades affect the local temperatures. Thanks for highlighting it. California's plan to mitigate global warming includes lots of batteries. (1)
Have you seen any studies looking into the warming effect of all the BESS facilities that have been Contracted and/or in Development over the last few years?
1)1 Document(s) filed in Resource Planning and Reliability, 21-ESR-01, Joint Agency Reliability Planning Assessment - SB 846 Fourth Quarterly Report 2025
• https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/CNRA/bulletins/41680a3
•
• Figure 1: Cumulative New Nameplate Megawatts of New Resources, 2020 to 2028
• 21,000 MW New Resources Contracted and In Development
"The BESS facilities that have been Contracted and/or in Development over the last few years" are "a pee hole in the snow" relative to the BESS capacity which would be required to reliably firm a renewable plus storage grid.
https://www.therightinsight.org/current-storage-deficit/
The ~90% round trip efficiency of grid scale BESS suggests the ~10% of the energy sent to storage is dissipated as heat. Heat dissipation increases dramatically when they catch fire.
Last year’s inferno at the Moss Landing BESS facility led to a lot co2 being released during the sausage making efforts to update/improve building codes around the state/country.
https://bell-kearns.com/newsletter/bess-practices-managing-fire-risks-in-california-battery-energy-storage-systems/
https://graham.umich.edu/media/files/BESS-guide.pdf
Moss Landing was not a oneoff. It remains a cautionary tale that is being largely ignored.
Table 1 in that document shows that nearly 80% of the new resource is batteries or paired battery/solar and measured by nameplate. Perhaps battery storage helps solar achieve slightly less curtailment, but batteries are not generating resources. Considering that their round-trip losses are around 20% they are a new load on the system.
...and pumped hydro has larger round-trip losses (25-30%) while Green Hydrogen round-trip losses would exceed 50%.
Replacing a 500 MW baseload fossil powerplant would require ~2,000 MW of solar and ~9,000 MWh of storage, or ~1,500 MW of wind and ~8,000 MWh of storage. Large nameplate capacity, large land area requirement, large CAPEX, large annual depreciation and large removal and disposal costs. Poor economic decision, writ large.
Let's put some numbers to this: 1,500MW of wind will be around 2.5 billion based on the projected costs of a new 600MW (nameplate) plant near me. 8,000MWhr of storage? $2.4 billion based on another recent proposal. The 500MW power plant? My estimates are getting a bit old, but a bit over a billion unless the PUC insists on CCuS...so let's just say $1.5 billion vs. $5 billion
The utility of course loves the more capital intensive option, because it can be built faster and they'll earn maybe 10% on the invested capital (around 7.5% on the addition to rate base in other words).
The 8,000 MWhr is probably greatly more as it is only 16 hours of 500MW output, but storage requirements are just informed WAGs anyway because it's all probabilistic.
I concur- short term the need to address curtailment and negative pricing- on the CA grid is being addressed by loading up on batteries.
Arpils curtailment level will require updating the monthly curtailment graph- https://www.caiso.com/documents/monthly-renewables-performance-report-march-2026.html
as the curtailment blew past the 125000 k MWh level
https://www.caiso.com/documents/daily-renewable-report-may-07-2026.html
TYPO ALERT- 1250 k MWh!
This analysis concedes that emissions cause warming, very much an opinion.
Doubling of co2, not going to happen, only leads to a small increase in temps, everything is made up positive feedbacks, imaginary. Never happened in the past when co2 was much higher, won’t happen in the future.
There is nothing wrong with wanting cleaner air, the problem is lumping plant food in with particulates causing misdirection of resources.
Dr. Santer spoke a few years back on the role that co2 plays in the climate system-
https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/uncategorized/fingerprinting-the-climate-system/
Speaker Series: Ben Santer "Fingerprinting the Climate System" Lecture
“It is important to note that the wind turbines do not produce new warming.”
And everything else in this absurdly long article that makes mountains from molehills is clickbait.
That’s not correct, Jan. If we would cause more warming with wind than we would reasonably offset, that’s a clear indicator that nuclear would be smarter from a reliability, cost, and environmental standpoint.
If only nuclear was real and not some figment of a CAD/CAM program operated by a billionaire. I don’t know about you but I’ll wait for fusion, thanks.
"If only nuclear was real"? Are you serious? Nuclear was the safest and most cost-effective source of energy in the US way back in the 60s and 70s, before extreme overregulation drove the cost way up by an order of magnitude. Many of those plants are still in operation. Also, cost-effective nuclear power plants are currently being designed and built all around the world outside of the US.
I don’t know what universe you’re living in, but in mine the IEA will tell you it’s the most expensive source of energy (not even counting the extraction/processing of uranium fuel) and not a single SMR has been completed—much less incurred a track record of successful continuous operation—in any western country. China and Russia can build them because the state owns them. What’s their uptime record? No sé. How about parts? No sé. Then go with a gen 3 like what? Vogle.
Pardon my delay I was too just LMFAO.
Your post shows that you either didn't read my post or it sailed completely over your head. How do you explain that nuclear power was far cheaper decades ago when it was first introduced in the US? And those plants have operated for decades with an impeccable safety record. No response?
The reason nuclear is so expensive now is because it is ridiculously overregulated here in the US, plain and simple. Spend few minutes to educate yourself. Look up LNT and ALARA. Volumes have been written on these subjects, showing that the regulations are absurdly over-cautious. We spend as much to save one life from nuclear power as we spend to save thousands from other sources of energy.
“Decades ago” was pre-fracking. Duh?
Has it caused measurable warming to-date?
Not news except perhaps to Harvard. Now that the American Seminary* of Harvard has pronounced wind in error, may we proceed to survive with their blessing?
Why if Cotton Mather could admit Salem Witch hunts were an error- after his opponents were dead and their land seized- so can Harvard. Nothing could be more American than to accuse one’s opponents, kill one’s enemies, seize their property, profit then denounce the entire matter as excessive.
The next thing you know Fauci will return to scold the CDC and Pharma for the COVID panic.
Only in America.
*Harvard School of Divinity 1636. Increase Mather founded Yale school of Divinity in 1692 having come into unexpected wealth after that unfortunate Salem Business.
I think the point of that article is to highlight the potential downsides of extreme wind farm growth not to say wind is bad. Also the biggest thing that has happened in the decades since they wrote that is solar has won way more of the new growth share so a 100% wind scenario is not happening.
There are a number of more recent global studies, including research undertaken in Texas, demonstrating not only the warming effect of wind turbines, but also that wind installations dry out the soil. For example, Yingzuo Qin, et al. “Impacts of 319 Wind Farms on Surface Temperature and Vegetation in the United States.” Environmental Research Letters, 17(2), 2022. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac49ba Summary: Finds industrial wind installations raise local surface temperatures by 0.20.4°C due to air mixing, with vegetation indices dropping near turbines, suggesting drier soils and air. Impacts on wildlife are inferred through habitat alteration, though not directly quantified. Jia Ze, Yang Xiuchun, Chen Ang, et al. (2024). “Localized Eco-climatic Impacts of Onshore Wind Farms: A Review.” Journal of Resources and Ecology, 15(1): 151–160. https://www.jorae.cn/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=55852 Summary: Reviews eco-climatic impacts of onshore wind farms, noting localized increases in air temperature (up to 0.5°C near turbines) due to turbulence, enhanced soil dryness from altered evapotranspiration, and disrupted air currents affecting microclimates. Wildlife impacts include habitat fragmentation for mammals and birds, with insects showing variable responses (e.g., reduced abundance near turbines due to noise). Gang Wang, Guoqing Lia, Zhe Liu. “Wind Farms Dry Surface Soil in Temporal and Spatial Variation.” Science of the Total Environment, 857(Part 1), 2023. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215016123000055/pdfft?md5=2b3b4 44debe446e14796df21befe2b0b&pid=1-s2.0-S2215016123000055-main.pdf Summary: Demonstrates that wind farms accelerate soil drying (up to 15% reduction in moisture) by increasing evapotranspiration via turbine-induced air currents. Spatial analysis shows drier soils within 500m of turbines, impacting vegetation and potentially small mammals reliant on moist habitats. “The operation of wind turbines will cause obvious drying of the soil; soil moisture within wind farms is decreased most significantly; wind farms aggravate the soil drying in grassland areas, therefore exacerbating drought may affect grassland ecology.”