Modern Energy and Your Turbine Footprint

August 9, 2023

Can you spare a few thousand square feet of land for a windmill?

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Well, maybe not you, but surely a farmer can, right?  Or a rancher?  Or a developer.  What’s a few thousand square feet to a land baron?

Some people with lots of land can spare that much, especially if the government will pay them a few grand for it.  Maybe not you or me, but… the other guy.  Let him do it.

America is a big country.  Huge.  It doesn’t really sound like a few thousand square feet of land for a windmill would have a big impact on land usage in America.

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But now let’s think about where they put windmills. They aren’t all on farmland… but the majority are.

They usually can’t be on rock, because you have to be able to dig deep to sink those footings, to anchor a giant structure like this.  They can’t be in the middle of a forest, because you need a path to and from the windmill, for maintenance trucks and wiring.  That’s a lot of tree coverage to clear, if it’s not already open. (see Olivia Murray’s fascinating report on Scotland’s efforts in this direction, here). 

So, for the most part, we’re talking about farmland.  And there are plenty of farmers who are happy to sacrifice a few acres – maybe more than a few – for a regular check from the government, or from the power company, or both.  Let other farmers grow food for the world.  These farmers will take the “turbine cash,” and have that much less planting and harvesting to worry about every season.

And so it is that the 75,000-plus windmills in America today are primarily displacing tens of thousands of square feet of farmland, each – yes, reportedly, usually at least several acres each. Permanently.

We talk a lot about how inefficient windmills are, but do we really consider every step, every cost?

Each one costs a mint to manufacture, usually in China.  So they employ Chinese slave labor and pour money (usually heavily subsidized by the U.S. government) into the coffers of the politburo at Beijing.

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Then each one costs another mint to transport across the ocean by ship, then across the U.S. by truck and rail, using up sometimes scarce transportation space, to be assembled and installed, in an area of land accessible by a road (If there is no road, then such a road needs to be built, too). 

And then the power generated by the windmill has to be transferred into the electric grid, by power lines that weren’t there before (it was usually a farm before, after all), so that means the installation of new power lines from the road to that windmill.  To every windmill. 

Then there’s maintenance: all the crews who show up every month or two, to add another 60 gallons or so of lubricating oil, and mechanics who visit occasionally to fix whatever’s broken and restart them, again and again. Don’t forget the regular cleanup duty, as bits and pieces of the dozens or hundreds of birds, big and small – who’ve flown for the last time right into these industrial slicers, just because they made the foolish mistake of believing that the sky was theirs – have to be collected from the surrounding land to be disposed of. 

Finally, in the end, when each gargantuan turbine finally reaches the end of its life, crews have to disassemble these oil-and-blood-drenched concrete-and-steel hulks and transport them for burial in massive landfills (There’s no current way to efficiently recycle these things).  Both the transportation to the landfill and the deposit therein will cost a tidy sum; you can’t get away with retiring one of these things with just a gold-plated watch and a department luncheon.

The minority of reporters and pundits who actually think about such things have talked for years about how each and every windmill costs so much to build, transport, and install, that – once you disregard the generous government subsidies – it can never objectively produce as much energy or financial value as was expended in its creation.

And we talk about the direct damage they do, in all the above side effects – the cost of all these subsidies, the pollution of surrounding ground by oil and bird carcasses, the overwhelming of landfills when they’re retired, etc.

But perhaps we don’t talk enough about how much total farmland is being displaced in pursuit of the questionable goal of making Greta Thunberg stop yelling at us.

The obvious footprint is the hundreds of square feet that the structure itself takes up.  But there’s so much more land to be committed nearby: an unplanted footprint wide enough for the massive blades to turn, a concrete sidewalk around it, often a parking lot for maintenance trucks and their portable cranes, room for nearby support outbuildings, a long access road connecting the windmill to the highway. 

In total, each wind turbine requires between five and twenty acres of land, occasionally even more, depending on location.  Since they usually build these wind farms in groups of dozens of even hundreds of windmills, they can dominate the land usage in an area that was formerly dedicated entirely to farming.

You can’t plant and harvest over a windmill, or over its sidewalk or its parking lot, or over the access roads that now take over the area.

What the installation of each windmill is really doing, frankly, is permanently taking millions of acres of American farmland out of service.  Even after you retire a windmill, the subsidy money won’t magically reappear, to dig up the foundation, rip up the concrete surrounding it, and tear up all these little access driveways.  These cracking, useless driveways-to-nowhere will cover the footprint of a once working farm, rendering much of it unfarmable, forever.

Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of windmills that the Left wants the country to import and install, maybe millions even, in order to facilitate their insane dream of replacing efficient energy sources with this utterly destructive 14^th century technology.

The fact is undeniable.  Even at a conservative estimate of ten acres per windmill, once there are hundreds of thousands of windmills, America will have permanently repurposed millions of acres away from agriculture.

An inevitable byproduct of the transformation of our economy from oil, gas, coal and nuclear to windpower is a massive, permanent reduction in the production of American crops – the food on which not just America but the world depends.

The modern Left has chosen to feed their deranged fear of carbon dioxide over society’s moral obligation to provide food for its people.

This isn’t a mere policy dispute, a disagreement between equally understandable theories. This is an evil choice. An evil prioritization. An evil policy.

The Left, which now has an iron grip on our government, chooses eventual starvation, in the service of their warped goals of enriching Chinese slavemasters and serving an apocalyptic fear of the harmless gas that the entire animal kingdom has been uneventfully exhaling since the dawn of time.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.

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