[NachtRitter]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Why, yes, I do. Such as some actual evidence, not just a few articles repeating claims without any substantiation. How about a list of 14,000 abandoned wind turbines, with locations?

So apparently this is the original story that stated the "14,000 abandoned wind turbines" falderal: Archived-Articles: Wind Energy's Ghosts. Here, Andrew Walden, who was apparently irked by the "37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm" states:

In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.

No reference, no source, nothing. Which is strange, considering the rest of the article has a lot of references to several other articles, including quite a few referencing Paul Gipe's material. As best as I can tell, he simply made up the number based on nothing (or he moved a decimal point?), and bringing up the unsubstantiated number in this thread was nothing but a red herring.

While I could not find any information about the actual number of "abandoned" wind turbines in the world (which seems to be the scope of Andrew Walden's quote) or in the U.S. (which seem to be the scope of the links t vago provided), this article seems to have a sensible approach to an estimate of "inactive" (not the same as "abandoned") wind turbines: More wind energy myths debunked: Madigan claims put to the test : Renew Economy. The relevant part of the article:

So what is the real number? Nobody really knows precisely at any given time, but the worst case scenario was in California at the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm. It was built in the 1970s with the worst of speculation and the most poorly designed subsidies. At one point about 100 of the 5000 wind turbines or 2% were inactive. This was the highest ratio on Earth. Most of those have been replaced with larger wind turbines in a process called repowering, which is typically done where a good wind asset exists and old wind generators are not making as much profit as they could be. Let’s take the worst ratio on Earth and halve it to get a conservative – that is to say overestimated – number of possible wind turbines that might be permanently inactive and multiply it by the 200,000 wind turbines in operation today. That would give us roughly 2,000 wind turbines. These wind turbines are usually much older and smaller, so might represent 0.25% as a conservatively overestimated percentage of possible power generation.

Even if we used the worst case of 2% inactive wind turbines throughout the world, for both the oldest wind farms and the newest, it would still be only 4,000 inactive... less than a third of what is being claimed by all "Mr. Anonymous" on Craigslist and the bloggers that reference other bloggers that have no idea where the 14,000 number came from....