Ah. Now we get down to the nitty-gritty for those eyesores that have been sometimes turning and occasionally burning for nearly twenty years. And nowhere is that going to happen in more of a 'one fell swoop' movement than the United Kingdom.
The first to get a very expensive new facelift is also going to be one of the oldest, and one of the biggest onshore wind farms in the U.K. - the Whitelee Windfarm (Spanish owned) about 20 miles outside of Glasgow, Scotland.
Iberdrola-owned (IBE.MC), opens new tab Scottish Power is investing £1.5 billion ($2.01 billion) to upgrade old turbines at the Whitelee Windfarm in Scotland, a move that will almost double capacity at Britain's largest onshore windfarm, it said on Wednesday.Britain plans to rapidly increase its renewable power capacity to help meet climate targets, boost energy security and reduce the country’s reliance on imported fossil fuels.
..."We will repower it in sections over that period of time, and that means we still get the best out of the existing site as we start building the new site," Scottish Power CEO Keith Anderson said in an interview.Anderson said the project would start around 2030 and be complete by around 2035.
The site, which covers 32 square miles and first opened in 2009, will be 'flattened,' as the BBC calls it. They're going to take out all of the original 215 turbines and replace them with fewer, but taller new ones.
The 124 replacement turbines are going to be absolute monsters, standing 361 feet higher (!) than the turbines at the site now.
One of Europe's biggest onshore wind farms is to be flattened and rebuilt with fewer, taller turbines, its owner has announced.
Whitelee Windfarm has been producing electricity for about 20 years on a stretch of moorland near Eaglesham, south of Glasgow, but is reaching the end of its life.
Scottish Power Renewables says the existing 215 turbines will be replaced in three phases with around 124, each of which will be about 110m (361ft) taller.
The £1.5 billion "repowering" project will take 10 years to complete and will double the electricity output from 539 megawatts to 1 gigawatt, which is enough to power about 650,000 homes.
This is mind-blowing, hideous stuff.
So 215 old turbines are coming out of Whitelee. There are far more that will be 'flattened' in the coming years, according to the article.
Time's up.
...More than half of Great Britain's current wind farm capacity is expected to reach the end of its life in the next decade, according to analysts Regen.
That means more will be considered for repowering, creating a pipeline of construction work.
And near the very end of the piece was this little snippet:
...But Whitelee will be the biggest to have all its turbines replaced and the company says 99% will be recycled.
Oh, really? What precisely do they mean by that? If they're talking just the turbines, well, yes, that's true. Most of a turbine can be recycled.
But the turbine blades can't be recycled, and if they are implying it's all one and the same (because lots of people are already asking), this is going to turn into a massive environmental mess with no fix.
Actually, it's going to turn into precisely what everyone who has railed and protested against the waste, lies, and squandered opportunities in the wind industry for a decade has warned about.
What does the company do with 645 old blades from one installation?
Who gets them? Where do they go with so many more to come?
The problem and numbers are so daunting and about to move into a critical mass phase, with no clear recycling solution yet, that even a wind energy blade-waste whitepaper written to kick around what might work (they have nothing remotely at scale yet) has to rely on whining that wind turbine blade waste would only be a tiny fraction of what hoomans throw into landfills every day, WAAH!
...Over the next couple of decades this waste stream will most likely be generated from increasing retirements/re-powers of existing wind assets as wind turbine technology advances. According to the European Technology & Innovation Platform on Wind Energy, the wind industry is the fifth largest producer of composite waste in Europe; however, this is expected to increase and will likely be the number one source of waste composites in Europe by 2050.5 In the U.S., the estimated cumulative blade waste in 2050 is approximately 2.2 million tons. This value represents approximately 1% of remaining landfill capacity by volume, or 0.2% by mass.6 In comparison, 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste is generated every year on average and 146.1 million tons is landfilled. Of the 146.1 million tons landfilled solid waste, food was the largest component at about 24%, plastics accounted for over 18%, paper and paperboard made up about 12%, rubber, leather and textiles comprised over 11%. Glass, metals, wood, miscellaneous inorganic waste, and yard trimmings accounted for less than 10% each.7
The EoL options presented in this paper are relative to waste management hierarchy by order of preference: Reduce (e.g., blade life extension), Reuse (e.g., second-hand market for repurposed whole or partial intact blades), Recycle including downcycling (e.g., broken down into the raw materials), Recovery (e.g., conversion of non-recyclable waste materials into usable energy), and Disposal (e.g., landfilling). For current blades in operation, EoL options for all levels in the hierarchy exist, but not all are currently financially viable or scalable as discussed in more detail below.
And they are forced to admit that 'financially viable' is a rare and elusive duck when it comes to recycling turbine blades. Not at all a real-world option at scale.
So what have the unicorn fart folks wrought and lost in their pursuit of these fever dreams of theirs?
The world has spent $7 trillion on wind and solar. That global fleet produces an average of around 630 GW.
— Electroverse (@Electroversenet) July 28, 2026
The same $7 trillion could have built roughly 1,400 modern nuclear reactors, producing around 1,400 GW on average -- so more than twice the power.
Wind and solar generally… pic.twitter.com/iypJdkeuCS
The same $7 trillion could have built roughly 1,400 modern nuclear reactors, producing around 1,400 GW on average -- so more than twice the power.
Wind and solar generally last around 20 years (a lot less by some estimates), whereas nuclear plants can operate for 80 years or more.
Over 80 years, wind and solar must be built four times -- a cost of $28 trillion to maintain 630 gigawatts.
The same $28 trillion spent on nuclear would deliver roughly 5,600 gigawatts -- nearly nine times the power.
Also, nuclear produces this regardless of the weather, whereas wind and solar require 24-7 backup (usually gas, not included in these calculations).
There's a reason the world is returning to reliable, dispatchable nuclear and fossil fuel power generation. Hopefully not too late.
Britain's grid engineers are sounding the alarm.
— Electroverse (@Electroversenet) July 27, 2026
NESO insiders, the people responsible for keeping the lights on, say operators have "lost control of the system" and that a major blackout is now an "engineering certainty."
One whistleblower said, "We're flying blind with the… pic.twitter.com/N1LYG7IaLf
..."We're flying blind with the plane on fire."
Engineers claim repeated safety breaches have been concealed and that NESO is rerunning its models to declare the incident secure after the fact.
The problem is structural.
Britain has replaced large controllable power stations with thousands of weather-dependent wind, solar and battery installations, many of which the control room cannot properly see or control.
Engineers must now balance the grid in real time using incomplete information.
They say they have been asking Ofgem to intervene for two years, but nothing happened... "So we have told the world," say the whistleblowers.
Quote: "We don't have control of the system. We have tried our best. It's now over to the public and the regulator. Please help."
Some firms are seeing the green dreams die away.
Wind developer GE Vernova has seen surging profits for its gas turbines while the wind has dropped off.
GE Vernova (GEV.N), opens new tab missed Wall Street estimates for second-quarter adjusted core profit on Wednesday as losses in its Wind business widened, overshadowing strong growth in its Power and Electrification units.
...The Wind unit was hurt by weak onshore demand and higher offshore project costs, even as the company benefited from surging demand for gas turbines and grid equipment as utilities expand capacity to meet electricity needs from AI data centers and electrification.
...Wind orders fell about 40% from a year earlier, while segment EBITDA losses widened to $275 million from $165 million.
The company expects third-quarter Wind revenue to decline by low double digits year-on-year before improving in the second half.
Others are unloading their renewable liabilities as fast as they can.
BP is in talks to sell its British solar business to a Kuwait-backed investor as it retreats from net zero. The energy giant is reportedly in advanced discussions to offload its Lightsource solar division, which has developed more than 300 solar farms in the UK. It comes as BP… pic.twitter.com/L94G38pBlD
— Net Zero Watch (@NetZeroWatch) July 28, 2026
None of this helps the consumer trapped in an unending, ruinous threesome with the utility and dictatorial mendacious government that forced these devastating circumstances on them.
Jevuun is wrong about everything, all the time. We spend about £12.5bn/yr on renewables subsidies. About twice as much as we spend on gas for electricity. Then there's the extra backup, grid balancing and expansion costs on top. Those costs set to triple over the next few years. https://t.co/5EAf1ffqEd pic.twitter.com/VJnDfSJ31m
— David Turver (@7Kiwi) July 27, 2026
Everyone already knows who's going to be paying for those wonderful, shiny, tall new turbine towers at Whitelee.
And paying.
And paying.
And paying.
If there's enough electricity for lights to see the bill with when it comes.
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