Many years ago, one of my adventures took me to the island of Tasmania, off the south coast of Australia. A place where the west wind blows quite strongly, 24/7, year round, and I actually got to visit a wind farm right up at the northwest corner of the island. It was generating electricity as a business venture, built before we invented ‘green’. The windmills were as big as practical, which means a crane small enough to travel on the highway would be able to reach up and take down the working parts for replacement or overhaul as needed. Probably no more than say 100 feet above the ground, so the windmill wheel would be I suppose 150 feet diameter. There is lots of space, so you can just build as many windmills as you need for the market you have. A successful business for the local market.
When huge oil deposits were discovered under the North Sea and Arctic sea off the coast of Norway and even Newfoundland, they had to set up a pumping station out on the ocean over each well. Make a tiny island for the pumping station; if the water is too deep, make a floating island. Drill the well, now you need electricity to run the pumps that will pull the oil up. Again, wind blows 24/7, so a windmill is the obvious choice, but space is limited so it needs to be one really big windmill. That means it will be so tall it is not practical to maintain it (500 feet!), so design it to last without maintenance until you expect the well will run dry; when it dies you just blast out one of its footings and it topples over into the sea where it stays forever. No disposal cost. Almost makes sense, in the North Sea.
Some very windy canyons in the US looked like good locations to set up wind energy on a public utility scale. So they looked at the well-established Tasmania style, very practical there as units could be maintained to last forever and lots of space to set up as many as were needed. But they chose instead giant windmills like those developed for those artificial islands, subsidized as a greenie gesture, wildly impractical because they cannot be maintained, but hey they look so much more impressive and high tech. Not practical to replace (no subsidy), and expensive/difficult to dispose of the broken machine, so more and more of them just standing there, broken down monuments to stupidity.
Then along comes Ontario, we want to be green and have windmills too. Of course we do not have reliable wind so the whole idea is impractical, but hey, it looks so green. Then we take a further look, and even though Ontario has lots of rock hills where we could put lots of maintenance-possible Tasmanian size of windmills, we go for the big, no-maintenance ocean type units, doubly impractical because of not enough wind and can’t be maintained. To make it worse, we do not put them on those sterile rock hills, but on our best agricultural land – a whole acre of concrete foundation for each windmill. But hey we are so politically correct.
This kind of virtue-signalling impractical silliness pervades too much of our ‘environmental’ actions.
From trying to recycle plastic (which is just oil in another form) and it ends up floating in the ocean, instead of using it to replace oil to generate electricity!
From forbidding plastic wrap, so our food will be spoiled while we cry piteously that the planet cannot generate enough food for all of us!
From forbidding practical electric cars, golf-cart size on city streets; while demanding we use cars with huge, non-recyclable batteries for long highway journeys!
To shutting down our forest industry to save carbon going into the air. But by nature our forest regularly replaces itself by fire, putting its carbon content into the atmosphere; while a properly managed forest is replaced by harvesting it before it burns, saving that carbon going into the air. So this ‘green’ initiative has an effect exactly opposite to that intended!
At the same time as discouraging human-scale traditional agriculture which takes carbon out of the air to enrich the soil, in favour of industrial scale agriculture which runs down the carbon content of the soil, putting as much carbon into the air as whole fleets of cars! Along with using a whole plethora of chemicals not needed in human-scale agriculture!
Just visible effects of our allowing our leadership to be misguided by an over-educated, under-real-world-experienced, no-ethics minority waving green flags! (Or maybe our WEF patrician leadership know exactly what they are doing, and are just using the greenies to advance their own protect-the-rich agenda!)