Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). Wind turbines are not environmentally friendly. It’s all about profit, and the government is in on it too. That, in a nutshell, is the content of the documentary recently broadcast on ZDF-Frontal; a sensation for the mainstream media! Is the wind shifting away from climate mania?
For years, we have been fed the green mantra at every opportunity, both appropriate and inappropriate, that wind turbines are environmentally friendly and an essential part of the so-called energy transition to cheap, renewable energy. And that disposing of wind turbines is no problem at all; it’s all totally easy. Critics who have long claimed the opposite have been dismissed by the mainstream media, including ZDF, as conspiracy theorists and climate deniers. And now comes this incredible ZDF Frontal documentary.
The title of the documentary is: ‘What to do with windmill scrap when wind turbines are dismantled?’ You can find the link to the ZDF documentary, which is definitely worth watching, here. To start with, the presenter asks two questions:
“I’ll say two sentences and you can think about which one is wrong.
First: The promotion of wind power is inherently beneficial to nature.
Second: Wind power operators are fundamentally environmentally friendly people.
Then the presenter himself gives the answer: ‘Well, both are wrong.’
And that’s from ZDF right at the beginning. It then goes on to discuss how older wind turbines are dealt with in Germany – older ones, mind you, not ones that are no longer functional. This approach is presented as an example of several undesirable developments. On the one hand, there is the government’s subsidy policy, which focuses solely on increasing electricity production and ignores the consequences and environmental costs of disposing of the turbines.
It becomes clear that:
- a) in the field of so-called ‘renewable’ energies – as in any other economic sector – the focus is generally on increasing profits rather than reducing the environmentally harmful ‘footprint’, and
- b) politicians sometimes show little willingness to remedy obvious and self-created abuses.
Yes, that’s what the ZDF Frontal presenter really says. And then he really gets started, criticising wind turbines as ‘not environmentally friendly’. It’s all about profit, and the government is in on it too. As the programme continues, it confirms what critics have been warning about for ages: wind turbines are made of highly toxic materials that are extremely difficult to dispose of. And ZDF also admits that wind turbines are being dismantled because they are no longer subsidised.
In fact, the supposed energy transition is also based on a whole series of other deceptions. The most recent example is the ‘renewable energy communities’, which are supposed to enable locally generated electricity to be consumed locally – complete nonsense, just like the claim that energy is renewable, wind turbines protect the environment or provide cheap electricity. The problem of disposal, especially of the rotor blades, is nonchalantly ignored.
Thankfully, ZDF has now taken up the issue and is asking one of the many questions about wind turbines that proponents and operators are avoiding: “In order to be light and stable at the same time, they are made of different materials glued together, which are difficult to separate from each other. “Frontal” asks: Where to put the wind turbine scrap that cannot be recycled?”
The problem that this raises, at least implicitly, is the contamination caused by the abrasion of these toxic adhesives and composite materials from the front and rear sides of the rotor blades. If the wind turbine is located on agricultural land, this land should no longer be used for food production after a certain period of time in order to avoid health risks when consuming the products. Hunters are now advised not to consume the liver of wild boars killed in regions with wind turbines due to contamination.
Discarded rotor blades are stored in huge landfills, regardless of the damage this may cause. The 50 to 80 metre long blades, which weigh several tonnes, are not easy to transport and are therefore often sawn up on site. The rotor blades are made of synthetic resins reinforced with glass or carbon fibres. The abrasion that is inevitable on the front and rear edges of the rotor blades is scattered over a wide area and contaminates the soil. The microparticles released are about as harmful as asbestos and contain PFAS, a range of dangerous chemicals, including bisphenol A, and various metals.
The harmful substances have been detected not only in the livers of wild boars, but also in mussels near offshore wind farms.
Added to this is the problem of disposal. In a video by Schwarzwald-TV about the mega wind turbine ‘Holzschlägermatte’ near Freiburg, local residents report that the huge rotor blades were simply sawn up on site and left lying around. This caused the highly toxic sawdust to spread throughout the area.
The replacement was made for financial reasons. The old turbines were no longer profitable because the subsidies were discontinued. Many people earn money from wind turbines; it was and still is a money-making machine. Taxpayers foot the bill. This was precisely the criticism levelled by the ZDF report, which was broadcast at the beginning of September but was largely or completely ignored by other media outlets this time around. It was the Austrian alternative website for science and politics (tkp) that ensured that the ZDF Frontal report could not be quickly forgotten.
