Average Lifetime of Danish Wind Turbines, as of February 2018.

[hunter]

6. Infancy stage??? Really?

That's like calling the misbehavior of some 30 or 40 year old Republican a "youthful indiscretion."

The Wright brothers made their first flight on December 17, 1903.



The Douglas DC-3 flew 32 years later. It's considered the first airliner that could make money by carrying passengers alone.



The first heavy water nuclear nuclear reactor was fired up on May 15th, 1944.



Canada was running 600 MWe CANDU heavy water reactors less than 30 years later.

I'm very familiar with early 1980's wind and solar technology. Wind and solar are no longer infant technologies.

Even with perfect hardware wind energy requires a substantial commitment to fossil fuel energy for no other reason that the wind doesn't always blow. A megawatt of wind turbine capacity requires a megawatt of "backup," usually natural gas, and it's not really backup power at all since most of the overall power generated by the combined system is likely to come from fossil fuels.

Without substantial and environmentally unacceptable inputs of fossil fuel energy, a wind and solar powered economy would look nothing like the economy many affluent people now enjoy.

Wind power enthusiasts often become inadvertent promoters of the natural gas industry.