Wind and solar are the two leading renewable energy sources that climate alarmists love to point to as the means of producing emissions-free energy. However, a recent turbine disintegration episode exposes the fact that wind power is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Journalist and author Robert Bryce digs into the issue following the breaking of a wind turbine blade off the Massachusetts coast some 14 miles from Nantucket.

The news of the possible litigation, which the Nantucket Current published on Saturday, comes less than a week after tons of debris from the broken wind turbine blade that was part of the massive offshore project began washing ashore on the island. The pollution forced the town to temporarily close many of its beaches during the peak summer tourist season while the debris was removed. The beaches have since reopened.

The NGOs have been shameless in their collusion with foreign corporations, including oil companies like Equinor and Total, that are eagerly queueing up to collect billions in federal tax credits. But the turbine blade failure at Vineyard Wind is only part of a broader crisis facing Big Wind, both onshore and offshore. Before I talk about that crisis, and hurricanes, a bit of background is needed.

The Vineyard Wind project promises to produce some 800 megawatts of power via the installation of 62 wind turbine platforms on the Eastern Seaboard. And local residents are increasingly unhappy about this “green energy” boondoggle.

One of the reasons for the anger is obvious: the turbine blade began disintegrating on Saturday evening and sent some 17 cubic yards of debris into the ocean. But the owners of Vineyard Wind didn’t notify officials in Nantucket until Monday at about 5 pm. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which is part of the Interior Department, issued a stop work order at Vineyard Wind, “until further notice.”

But the bigger problem for wind power is physics.

In addition to the public relations disaster at Vineyard Wind, Big Wind is facing a crisis caused by simple physics. The turbines now being deployed onshore and offshore are failing far sooner than expected. Why? They have gotten too big. Yes, bigger wind turbines are more efficient than their smaller cousins. But the larger the turbine, the more its components get hit by the stresses that come with their size and weight. The GE Vernova Haliade-X wind turbine used at Vineyard Wind stands 260 meters high and sweeps an area of 38,000 square meters. That means the turbine captures wind energy over an area five times larger than a soccer pitch.

The massive size of these turbines makes the production and maintenance costs of these wind farms prohibitive but for billions in tax credits.

Among the most disgusting aspects of the offshore wind scam — including the fact that foreign companies are collecting billions of dollars in tax credits so they can industrialize our oceans and do harm to our fisheries, and the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale — is that the current disaster was easily foreseen. Just 16 months ago, during the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston, the CEO of NextEra Energy, John Ketchum, called offshore wind “a bad bet.”

The silver lining of the recent Vineyard Wind disaster is that it is serving to expose “green energy” for the boondoggle that it is.

Read the whole article here.