A week ago Reuters added to the drumbeat of failure news hitting the industry of multinational corporations producing large wind turbines for “wind farms” which are supposed to be the new global electric power leader. Reuters’ Sept. 28 article, “Wind Power Drifts Off Course,” reports that “design flaws and supply-chain delays” for these huge white elephants of electric capacity have “put dozens of projects at risk.” The European Union consequently cannot meet its 2030 objectives for power sources to replace the fossil fuel and nuclear powered electricity it is giving up—objectives which are 420 GW of wind power including 103 GW of offshore wind.
Moreover, the wind turbine industry has had to revise the operating lifetimes of the big turbines down to as low as 10 years (in the case of Siemens Gamesa turbines) upon seeing how quickly their subsystems break.
Reuters reports that “So far this year, projects off Britain, the Netherlands and Norway have been delayed or shelved due to rising costs and supply chain restraints, while Britain’s renewable energy auction this month failed to attract any bids from offshore wind developers, also because of high industry costs.”
At the same time, though not dealt with in this article, the same large wind turbine firms have found they can’t complete their projects on the U.S. Northeast coast, without demanding more time and much more subsidy money from the Biden Administration and the agencies they have contracted with.
