Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t David D. – A happy interlude in our ongoing coverage of a world gone mad.
Madison Wind Farm implodes its wind turbines
by: Clare Normoyle
Posted: Sep 17, 2025 / 08:37 AM EDT
Updated: Sep 17, 2025 / 10:49 PM EDTMADISON COUNTY, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — Seven wind turbines came down, as the Madison Wind Farm said goodbye after years of support.
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“At the time of Madison’s construction in 2000, the wind farm was anticipated to have an operational lifespan of 20 to 25 years,” the company’s website stated. “As of 2025, the project has come to the end of that lifespan and is no longer considered economically viable, primarily due to the current turbines being out of production, making repairs and obtaining replacement parts increasingly difficult and costly.”
Read more: https://www.localsyr.com/news/local-news/madison-wind-farm-plans-to-implode-their-wind-turbines/
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Sadly the plan is to replace the Madison Wind Farm with extensions to the Rolling Upland Wind Farm, but we can hope. At least some people will receive respite from having these mechanical monstrosities on their doorstep, however temporary.
Note WUWT does not condone violence, trespass or unlawful destruction of property.
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Considering intermittency, gas backup, etc, the turbines were economically unviable when they were first built.
Landfill anyone?
A land-based 3 MW wind turbine contains about 9 tons of copper worth about $80,000. All the metal in the tower, the nacelle and electrical cabling will be salvaged.
The blades are made from fiber glass and epoxy resin with an inner core of balsa wood sheets and are not easily recycled. I propose that blades could be cut up with a chain saw to suitable lengths, formed into bundles, which are then dropped into active volcano using a heavy lift helicopter such as the Russian Sky Crane. The fiberglass would melt and mix with lava. The resin and balsa would be burned up.
Unfortunately, transportation charges to an active volcano such as Mt. Etna would be too great.
Cutting up fibreglass with a chainsaw, or any saw for that matter, is not a good idea, it releases lots of very small glass particles into the air. Not good for the lungs.
Back to the drawing boards. We should ask Elon Musk to sponsor a million dollar X prize for method for recycling the blades.
“Not good for the lungs.”
And certainly not good for any animal grazing on that land.
But the self-styled environmentalists don’t care about the massive damage done to life and the environment by these monstrosities, in production, installation, during operation, and in dismantling and disposal.
Use a laser.
A truly heart-warming sight to see these nine useless windmills get blown up.
Thousands more need to be blown up, so they stop killing birds, bats, eagles, and whales, dolphins, lobsters, and stop being eyesores, and bother people with health-damaging infrasound.
The windmill graveyard will enormous.
We should require the owners to recycle them at their cost.
Also, the concrete foundations should be removed, so they will not be reused.
They cannot be used for 5 to 10 MW windmills, due to not being adequate
Anybody know how big the concrete bases on these towers are what it takes to remove them? I have relatives in Texas who agreed to have turbines on their fields years ago.
well if spock would stop harshing kirk’s mellow, i think we got this
Does anyone have any reliable information on the financial success or otherwise of the installation? Ignoring subsidies, of course.
How could you ignore subsidies, the very reason for this “farm”?
I don’t know about the economics but it the wind farm did not live up to expectations.
The Madison Windpower Project Final Report found that the capacity factor 21% the first three years which was lower than the projected value of 23.3%. Performance degraded over the period of record and was only 12% in 2023. Over 18 years the facility produced 93.2 GWh less than projected.
Don’t they lose ~3% capacity each year of operation?
So, that would be up to 75% gone
So 75% gone of not much to begin with? Cui bono both before and during their operation?
Such a great video, thank you!!
Stills can be just as good as video-
Wind turbine blades collapse in grounds of insurance giant | Recharge
Madison Windpower LLC is ranked #33 out of 34 wind farms in New York in terms of total annual net electricity generation.
Madison Windpower LLC generated -102.0 MWh during the 3-month period between March 2025 to June 2025.
https://www.gridinfo.com/plant/madison-windpower-llc/55769
According to this website it never reached 21% capacity factor.
https://pragmaticenvironmentalistofnewyork.blog/2024/06/24/madison-county-wind-farm-theory-vs-results/comment-page-1/
Wyoming has a wind power tax that nets the State 40% and the County 60%. The rate is $1.0/MWhr. Thus, this Madison County facility would have netted the State of Wyoming, if located here, a whopping $40 U.S. for three months of operation. Nice!
O/T. We have been hosting Mr Trump at Windsor Castle. Curiously, this came to light. An American citizen being harassed by the UK thought police.
Guido Fawkes
On the plus side, I’ll bet that woman will appreciate her Consitutional rights better when she gets home from your evolving police state.
She’s savvy enough to be a member of the Free Speech Union. They have excellent legal minds working for them.
Had to look up Free Speech Union-is it having any effect on the madness? I hope so-freedom lost is damned hard to recover.
It is essential now, more than ever. And they have won many cases…
https://freespeechunion.org/?v=7885444af42e
True-essential. Excellent on winning cases.
As someone once said, you can vote your way into socialism/communism, but you have to fight your way out of it.
Ironically, the officer’s name was Winston Smith. Just kidding.
God, I love this site-seriously, a daily joy.
Latest news is that Thames Valley Police have decided to take no further action. The threat of a lawsuit from the FSU was enough to change their minds.
Oddly enough, they claim to have “lost” the files.
Lost, eh? Indeed…the old “dog ate my homework excuse” repackaged.. now they can look you in the eye and say “prove it” or “we know nothing”, with apologies to Sgt. Schultz.
Obviously I’m not a legal expert but I’ve seen or heard of several of these where the police want you to ‘admit what you did or we’ll have to set up an interview‘…but at the same time ‘We’re not saying you broke the law’ or otherwise tell the person they aren’t under arrest….so if they aren’t under arrest, what’s up with needing to schedule an interview? It is my suspicion that the idea of the interview is to try to trip you up so you admit some kind of ‘intent’ e.g. ‘I hate <insert group here>’, thus making your speech a ‘hate crime’.
As with this woman, don’t say anything, admit to anything or agree to anything. I don’t know what the laws are in Britain but the police telling me they want to ‘schedule an interview’, other than for the purposes of me witnessing a crime gets responded with “go right ahead, I won’t be there”. They don’t have the right to lock you up or force you to speak with them…so just don’t.
Roger Caiazza posted on his blog about this expected decommissioning earlier this year. Look at the table of capacity factors. There was significant deterioration toward the end of useful life. And “useful” is too generous a term to begin with.
https://pragmaticenvironmentalistofnewyork.blog/2025/01/25/madison-county-wind-farm-retirement/
And here is an even better video, with some shots of the scattered parts on the ground.
What a mess.
One would think the cost to remove the blades would be less than the cost to clean up the debris from the blades smashing into the ground.
Someone should write a book, “The Windmills of Madison County.”
Bada-Boom!
I miss Wagner’s Gotterdammerung as background music.
Yet another demonstration of the high cost of “free and renewable energy.” The renewable part is mainly the capital that must be raised every 20 years or so, as opposed to 50-80 years for fossil or nuclear powered plants.
It is sad that the report added the ending comment. Climate change “deniers” are not typically vandals; it is the morons in Extinction Rebellion and their ilk who are anti-civilization. vandals.
It’s not just disposing of the turbines, what about the tons and tons of concrete in the ground? Is that going to be “abated” or just left there for some future owner to have to deal with?
the latter
Not heartwarming. That has scattered fiberglass all through a pasture for cattle and wildlife to ingest.
One wonders what the additional cost would have been to dismantle them with a crane. But there’s the rub. If the cost to decommission by simply reversing the assembly sequence is too high, then this scene will be repeated all across the U.S. landscape as the years go by.
The cost to decommission by disassembly is probably six times higher. I made public comment to that effect on Tuesday night. Xcel energy did a big study of decommissioning costs and, when done properly, this report estimated $200,000 to $500,000 per turbine. Repsol was promoting only $59,000 per turbine. The surety bond for future decommissioning is probably a large upfront cost so the applicants will try to minimize it.
What makes you think it won’t get into the food that babies eat? Can’t thrash grain without stirring up dust which is now going to contain cancer causing fiberglass particles.
Has the meaning of the word “implode” changed while I wasn’t looking? I didn’t see anything imploding.
The good news is, in spite of their demolition, the wind turbines are still outputting just as much power now as they were before. Zero is a number.
The wind farm as a whole imploded with all of the WTGs falling towards the middle when the explosions severed the towers from their bases. 🙂
They felled them towards roads for easier cleanup.
Easier cleanup does not seem to be the result.
“Has the meaning of the word “implode” changed while I wasn’t looking? I didn’t see anything imploding.”
Could be. Look at “optics” and “calculus”.
A beautiful sight and I bet the locals were cheering. We need to find out what the cost of dismantling and removal contract is and add that to the 25 year cost of the “free energy”. I’m guessing that the average person doesn’t understand what the 20% capacity factor really means, especially when you consider it’s not dependable.
As an engineer, I cannot view destruction as beautiful. However, in this instance, I believe I can make an exception.
It is interesting that some were dropped on the roads, blocking access to heavy equipment for the cleanup. Maybe not a big deal. Cutting up and loading out the debris will still be bit of a job. There also must be a lot of underground cable on site.
I view wind generation as mostly useless, but it seems odd that they could not adapt new equipment on top of the existing towers and bases. Not enough subsidy?
I think it was intentional. Very hard to get heavy equipment across farmland. Even tanks can get stuck in wet fields
Gives a proper perspective to the expression Net Zero. 🙂