It wasn't. I don't need the specifics of this particular wind farm to know - none of them are even returning more energy than it took to build them. I investigated this years ago. 15 year lifespan is standard, and if you look at their documentation, there's a figure called "energy factor" - it means it will return more energy tgab it cost to build if the factor is greater than one. They're barely greater than one in the utopian documents from before they were built. Then we found out that the wind doesn't blow as often as anticipated. Aaaand that energy factor doesn't account for the cost of maintenance and disposal. Nope. Not worth it, and none of them ever have been.
Discussion
same applies to photovoltaic crystals
it's almost like the energy you get back IS the energy you put in, you see what i mean?
it only makes sense to build these things where it's cheaper to send the device than to ship the fuel and the generator and maintenance parts required to keep it for the time that amount of fuel would entail
it's a LOT of saving for this purpose
but not for general purpose energy generation, it makes absolutely no sense at all, it's literally fanatical psychotic cult shit
Solar is great for off grid, or if you can get a great deal because the government is subsidizing it, but its actually so bad that it only looks good in fiat terms because both the producers and the consumers are getting subsidies. And this is still the case, despite what the fake news says - the only solar panels that are cheap are made in China, and they are subsidized.
Those towers, though, are different. I haven't looked into them, but I'd bet they're energy positive.
nope
read up a bit on metallurgy to learn why not
if it's rigid enough to take the strain, it takes a lot more tempering, which is several cycles of heat to red, then rapidly cool
the crystals take weeks to grow at very high temperatures, so your efficiency at containing that heat is the major issue of efficiency, and i'm sure they use multi-meter-thick layers of glass fibre around the furnaces to keep them from wasting even more energy to keep the cystals liquid as they grow
it's an enormous amount of energy for both processes, and then, to focus on the towers, the amount of strain they are going to take in their working lifetime, at ideal conditions, will at best see them lose structural integrity substantially before they have pushed enough kinetic energy into the generator coils
but if they get an excess of push, the strain is increased and their lifespan and time to failure is increased
the more elastic you make metal, the more prone it is to fracturing, and it's exactly the same principle with glass, why lab glass is more resistant to temperature change is the boron and alumina added to it causes the glass to heat up more uniformly, and lowers its melting point, so it's easier to work
but this kind of glass is more brittle, and it is prone to fracturing catastrophically at a lower level of mechanical stress, but the trade off is it can absorb a lot more thermal stress without fracturing
you can't use glass like this for optic fibre, for example, because it is liable to break so they have to use a different kind of glass mix that is more flexible, which is the high silica, sodium/potassium based glass types, for the best optical permeability
anyway, that's the point... engineering the materials to take the strain, whether it's heat and radiation for the PV panels or the mechanical stress of the windmills, the cost of engineering it to take that strain for its lifetime is an energy input that is greater than the force that was applied to it
meaning, it always yields less energy back
and once it gets to some point near that, it will have fractures and cracks and mechanical failures, and will end up in the trash, because to recycle that shit is more expensive than making it out of fresh iron ore and coal
