300 gallons PER TURBINE! That's a lot.
That's so little that it is completely lost in the statistical noise.
First, a natural gas turbine *also* requires hundreds to thousands of gallons of oil for lubrication every year. All turbines do. So with the exception of solar, no matter how you produce your power, you're going to use about that much oil.
An average onshore wind turbine produces 6 million kWh per year. (Offshore turbines produce more.) Petroleum-based generators use about 0.08 gallons per kWh. So if you used oil to actually produce the power, that generator would use 480,000 gallons of oil. By comparison, even if the fossil-fuel-based turbines somehow magically used a tenth as much oil, that would just mean the oil-based generator uses 479,730 extra gallons instead of 480,000.
In other words, the *tiny* amount of oil changes the greenness of wind farms relative to fossil fuels by about 0.06%, well within any reasonable margin of error.
It's noise.
For a fraction of the amount of concrete, you get a building that can hold a nuclear pressure vessel that lasts DECADES and uses so little fuel most plants still keep all their spent rods on-site.
A nuclear power plant uses 200,000 to 500,000 tons of concrete and produces a gigawatt of electricity. A utility-scale wind turbine might use 1,500 tons to produce 5 MW. So it's about the same amount of concrete per megawatt, to within a single-digit factor, depending on the duty cycle of the wind turbine.
And the foundation can usually be reused for the next turbine, so that concrete also lasts many, many decades, typically. They don't remove the entire structure when they replace the turbine.
Also, you didn't factor in all the extra concrete for building long-term offsite storage facilities for the nuclear fuel, or the concrete for the sarcophagus if things go sufficiently wrong. :-)
Your 20~30 year claim seems to be the first result and also in AI-generated answers. It goes against what I've heard from farmers and ranchers. There's a lot of advertisement/propaganda scrubbing going on there. The Lonesome Lands podcast is run by ranchers in Colorado and Iowa and they've covered the real cost of Wind Turbines before.
If blades are failing after a decade, then either A. something was wrong with them to begin with or B. the company that owns them stopped servicing them after a decade because of expiring tax credits. And that second one actually is plausible, but that's not a failure of the technology; it's a failure of U.S. energy policy. Why spend money repairing it when they can wait for it to completely fail and then replace it and then get the tax credit again?
I'm not for gas or oil turbines, nor am I for solar or wind. Nuclear is really the best option and it's sad all of the plant production was halted decades ago or is being phased out in places like Germany.
I would argue that nuclear power stinks on ice. The cost per kWh is considerably higher than wind, and it requires continuous staffing and oversight to prevent things from going horribly wrong, whereas wind farms are almost entirely passive other than minor routine maintenance until something breaks and has to be replaced. Nuclear also requires transporting dangerous materials by truck or rail to storage sites, requires building storage that can safely contain the spent material for millennia, etc.
Also, every 40 to 80 years, the nuclear plant's equipment has to be replaced, and all of the removed material is contaminated, which means long-term storage of the reactor, pipes, concrete containment vessel, etc. You can't even recycle the raw materials like you can with wind, because nobody wants radioactive metal or concrete. And even if your blades are made of a material that can't be recycled easily, you can still landfill it instead of basically burying the entire plant in a no man's land for tens of thousands of years. If you think the waste from wind farms is bad, it pales in comparison with the cost and storage requirements for shutting down a nuclear plant.
If we get fusion working at an industrial scale, then we'll talk, but fission just isn't worth the hassle when there are other, much cleaner solutions.
