US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects

Show me anywhere that is recycling wind tubing blades.

Or solar panels.

Steel is infinitely recyclable and valuable enough as scrap to largely be recycled at a high rate.

Solar panels are so cheap new because there’s bigger all of anything worth recovering in them.

The secondhand market is littered with stacks of panels that don’t move.

The glass isn’t worth anything as scrap, we literally throw it in the recycling bin and it costs councils and governments to recover it and manage the waste streams, largely done as a vanity project.

Aluminium is so light and there is so little of it wrapped around a solar panel it’s not worth the labour and machine capability to recover it.

Blade recycling is only becoming mainstream now as 15 year old farms start to change out blades in bulk:

eg: (2026)

  Australia is home to 31 wind farms with turbines over 15 years old. Over the next decade, countless blades will require replacement.

~ https://www.acciona.com.au/turbine-made

Which explains the current low numbers of companies taking GFRP (primary component of wind turbine blades) down to particle size for reuse.

See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213... (2024) and companies such as Acciona.

Yes, I am quite certain that the contract was quite explicit about the terms of cancellation. That’s certainly relevant, but we still had the opportunity to refuse to return the money even though it would certainly have ended up in a lawsuit. Would that have been better? No, I do not think that it would have been. In fact, it would have been unethical, possibly even fraud. Articles that phrase this as additional money being paid rather than money being returned are deliberately misleading.

Yes, returning the money is a consequence of terminating the lease. That’s precisely what I said!

> "Electricity prices have also increased by something like 150 to 200 percent more than inflation over the past 20 years but mostly the past 6 years (so this decade) because state and federal governments seem to want ... "

There's a few factors.

The main one from what I hear / read from those I know down that way was private industry getting their hands on the energy grid ... from what I have heard read it's a royal shit show at times and pricing just kept on leaping upwards with what looks like fly by night to the public retailers that aim to just maximise the amount people are willing to pay. Pricing is my locale is spared electricity customers somewhat, from dealing with the same profit based clowns [1] down southern end of Australia getting any sort of market share here.

Almost getting the top spot for higher jump in costs, is the increase of infrastructure spending on the network. Some of that has to do with population growth and increase of grid demand due to urban sprawl and higher energy demands from the average customer. But the jump you see down in your state has been that much of the network down that way has not seen much investment in its upkeep and the rise of weather events affecting the various electricity grids that were not specifically designed for high winds in mind. The southern states high winds especially during dry periods is linked to wild fire events, so there's additional pressure to perform. This costs money and private companies are once again going to recoup that cost harder than what a govt governed entity would do, but then again in my locale being without power for half a day to days while a transmission line is repaired that failed isn't that uncommon.

>" And we have the worlds largest know uranium deposit and yet we have a ban on nuclear power reactors."

The public indirectly voted three or so decades ago, it from that assumed a mandate against uranium ... the dolts tried again last election, again no dice. Done and dusted, public no want. Some people will persist it's a good idea, thorium is with its safe waste is, uranium is not. The uranium nuclear path involves not millions but billions for studies, the companies like Deloitte are waiting in the wings. Soil studies, site locations, blah blah paid think tanks - lots of tax payer money. Going forward then there's design - Australia will pay again billions to some international company that's part of the old uranium crowd ... building I'd guess once more another international company will get the cream though yes some local employment will be touted and finally a waste facility and where to put it. If and when it got that far it might finally occur that uranium waste makes for good dirty bombs and the security around moving the waste each year will cost millions along with storage security, which isn't going to be some small depot with a six foot fence around it and a couple of security guards ... people that would want to make dirty bombs are not going to be waiting for it to fall into their laps. Of course at the end, it such a plant ever got up and running, the power is now centralised around one or more nuclear power plants and rather than resilience, this future grid had introduced large points of failure.

[1] cheapfwits Co with typically no phone support

Edit on last sentence for clarity.