It could be a little early to sell your Exxon stock…
At the moment, the average wind farm has 150 turbines. Each wind turbine requires 80 gallons of oil for lubrication, and this isn’t vegetable oil; this is a PAO synthetic oil based on crude… 12,000 gallons. Once a year, its oil must be replenished.
To power a city the size of New York, it is estimated that about 3,800 turbines would be required… For just one city, that’s 304,000 gallons of refined oil.
Now you must compute the total annual oil use from “clean” energy in every city across the country, large and small.
Not to add that the huge machinery required to construct these wind farms runs on gasoline. As well as the tools needed for setup, service, maintenance, and eventual removal.
Each turbine has a footprint of 1.5 acres, so a wind farm with 150 turbines would require 225 acres; to power a metropolis the size of NYC, 57,000 acres would be required; and who knows how much land would be required to power the entire United States. Because trees form a barrier and turbulence that interferes with the 20mph sustained wind velocity required for the turbine to work correctly, all of this area would have to be cleared (also keep in mind that not all states are suitable for such sustained winds). Cutting down all those trees is going to irritate a lot of tree-huggers who care about the environment.
A modern, high-quality, highly efficient wind turbine has a 20-year lifespan.
They can’t be reused, reconditioned, reduced, repurposed, or recycled on a budget, so guess what? They’re heading to specialized dumps.
What’s more, guess what else…? They’re already running out of space in these dedicated landfills for blades that have outlived their usefulness. Seriously! The blades range in length from 120 to over 200 feet, and each turbine has three of them. And this is despite the fact that wind energy currently serves only 7% of the country. Imagine if the remaining 93 percent of the country was connected to the wind grid… in 20 years, you’d have all those useless blades with nowhere to put them… Then another 20 years, and another 20 years, and so on.
I almost forgot to mention the 500,000 birds killed each year by wind turbine blade collisions, the most of which are endangered hawks, falcons, owls, geese, ducks, and eagles.
Smaller birds appear to be more agile, able to dart and dodge out of the way of the spinning blades, but larger flying birds appear to be less fortunate.
What is the minimum amount of oil required for a wind turbine?
For lubrication, each wind turbine requires 80 gallons of oil, which is not vegetable oil but a PAO synthetic oil based on crude 12,000 gallons. That oil must be replaced once a year.
A wind turbine can replace how many barrels of oil?
Offshore wind turbines may produce green energy, but they consume far more oil than their proponents disclose.
According to calculations released by Forbes on Wednesday, just laying the foundation for a single offshore turbine can require 18,857 barrels of marine petroleum during construction. Offshore wind farms frequently feature over 100 turbines, implying that only to power the ships involved in construction, about 2 million barrels of gasoline are required.
The Long Island-New York City Offshore Wind Collaborative will cost $1 billion to build and generate 200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power between 40,000 and 64,000 houses depending on the amount of wind that blows during the year.
According to calculations by the Daily Caller News Foundation, the wind farm’s power will cost about $25,000 each property it serves.
The first offshore wind farm in the United States will cost $17,600 per home it will power near Block Island, Rhode Island.
Is it true that wind turbines contain oil?
“An oil spill could contaminate the soil and water in the vicinity. Many of the oils and greases used in wind turbine technology are mineral oils, which pollute the environment if they spill. The cleanup process is significantly more challenging if the spill occurs at sea, according to Maria Olanders.
Lubricants are needed in a variety of places in a wind turbine, including bearings, couplings, and gears, as well as hydraulic systems. There are practical, low-impact options for many of these areas, such as biodegradable hydraulic oils with a wide temperature range that assure reliable performance.
“It degrades and does not harm water or soil if it leaks. According to Maria Olanders, this type of oil has been utilized in the forestry business for a long time.
Another consideration is that synthetic gear oils have longer replacement intervals, lowering the chance of leaks when the oil is changed.
The bolts on the foundations that support the wind turbine tower must be lubricated and protected against rust in addition to the wind turbine itself. It is, of course, critical to utilize green lubricants in this situation as well.
A barrel contains how many gallons of crude oil?
A normal barrel of crude oil in the United States comprises 42 gallons of crude oil, which yields approximately 44 gallons of petroleum products. Refinery gains result in an additional 6% of product, resulting in an additional 2 gallons of petroleum products. Refineries in the United States create about 19 gallons of gasoline and 10 gallons of diesel fuel from a barrel of crude oil, as seen in the graph below. The remaining one-third is made up of items like jet fuel and heating oil.
Is it true that solar panels utilize oil?
Some people believe that solar energy is the answer to the world’s energy problems. However, the manufacturing of the many components necessitates the use of fossil fuels, both for power and for the components themselves, some of which are petroleum-based.
BioSolar, a new startup, wants to put petroleum out of business, at least when it comes to solar photovoltaics, or solar cells made of crystalline silicon that convert sunlight into power. Traditional plastic polymers, often known as backsheets, are used to provide a safe backing for such solar cells. Those polymers are produced of petroleum, as you may have surmised.
The new product is “sustainable” and “doesn’t consume any petroleum,” according to electrical engineer David Lee, president and CEO of the California-based company. “The real benefit is that we can actually lower the backsheet cost when compared to traditional petroleum-based backsheet.” Lee claims that their backsheets will be 25% less expensive than traditional backsheets, which range from $0.70 to $1 per square foot.
Due to the recent rise in world oil prices, such backsheets are already increasing in price, at a time when the solar industry is attempting to reduce costs to make their technology more competitive with other sources of power generation, such as cheap, abundant, and extremely polluting coal.
BioSolar begins with old cotton rags and transforms them into a cellulose film, a natural fiber. The BioBacksheet is manufactured by combining this film with a form of nylon made from castor beans developed by Arkema, Inc. of Philadelphia. According to preliminary testing conducted by the company at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, this flexible plastic backsheet lasts as long as or longer than conventional backsheets and keeps out just as much moisture.
BioSolar claims not to use any genetically modified crops in its products, in addition to avoiding petroleum plastics, giving them even more green credibility. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, almost 90% of the cotton crop in the United States has been genetically modified, either to resist insects, herbicides, or both. Cotton farming still necessitates massive quantities of insecticides and fertilizers, both of which are generated in part from petroleum.
In any case, if the cotton and castor-based backsheet proves to be less expensive than the petroleum-based one, it may help divert a little more fossil sunlight from the new solar energy. “Our goal is to use this bio-based plastic to replace all of the petroleum plastic in solar cells,” Lee explains.
How much oil is required to manufacture a solar panel?
The answer is around a factor of 20 less than you believe. Sure, this might be beneficial to the global economy, but it would be detrimental to our wallets. Consider all the wonderful things you could do with an extra $360 billion per day.
Assume a high-efficiency conversion procedure for solar thermal plants (>50%) and a conversion efficiency of 42% for conventional natural gas power plants.
In that situation, it takes around 18kWhr from a barrel to create one kWh via PV (yes, considerably more than your normal estimate) and 30kWhr using CSP.
PV panels cover roughly 40 m2 and generate an average of 3kWh/m2 (with 2009 technology). Thus, 40 m2 x 3 = 120 Whr / 18kWhr = 7 panels are required to produce 1 kWh.
A 200-liter barrel holds 4728 liters (124.74 gallons) of liquid; if filled with oil, the barrel holds around 35 pounds or 15 quarts (little more than half a gallon) (this varies depending on distillation endpoints).
This indicates that 17,208,000 barrels of oil per day would be required to produce the same amount of energy as the current global power production (about 87 TWh/day) generated by solar panels.
Because the present global daily production is just 85 million barrels, it would take nearly three years of global oil production to produce enough solar panels to create the amount of electricity we currently use!
make unplanned maintenance a thing of the past.
Bergqvist said his company looks at grouping together different types of maintenance that avoid spread out leases of cranes or other equipment. If it’s possible to identify 10 units that will probably have some kind of failure, operators can schedule a proactive replacement of those units at the same time.
Monitoring the equipment is also an important part of preventing expensive and unnecessary repairs, he said. UpWind Solutions offers condition-based monitoring solutions for operators that include taking samples of oil, measuring the vibrations in the gearbox and using software that continually evaluated performance of units based on oil temperature, rotation speed and other information.
The combined results allow the company to create “an intelligent, predictive analysis identifying the outliers and what will probably break down, he said.
“If you’re able to take care of problems before they become a major problem, then you’re going to extend the life of the unit, Bergqvist added.
Is there any oil in synthetic oil?
Synthetic oil is a man-made lubricant made up of chemical substances that have been synthesized artificially. Chemically modified materials, such as petroleum components, are used to make synthetic oils, however the basis material is nearly always distilled crude oil. Any extra ingredients, as well as the actual synthesis method for making synthetic oil, differ from one producer to the next and are kept as a trade secret.
How many wind turbines are there in the United States?
The US Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) has more than 70,800 turbines as of January 2022. Since 1980, more than 1,500 wind generating projects in at least 44 states have been built with these turbines (plus Puerto Rico and Guam).