I'm confused. I thought wind turbines are relatively cheap to operate. You have an initial investment to build them and then some amount of maintainance, but certainly on land that's not very expensive.
With subsidies, it can make sense to replace wind turbines early and collect new subsidies for a new one.
However, I don't understand why you would take existing ones down is the subsidie stops? That suggests that they operating at a loss even when the wind turbines is already written off.
Maintaining 20 year old hardware that's exposed to the forces of nature quickly costs more than building something new in the same place. In particular when the 20 year old hardware has been from the beginning of a time of extensive R&D, so that new parts for these old models might be hard and expensive to get because all the cost-efficient producers are already on to the new stuff.
Try maintaining a 10 year old server (10 years instead of 20 to account for significantly more physical wear out in the open) without replacing the mainboard, CPU, RAM and disks with newer models. Same issue: industrial production moved on. The main difference is that nobody cares if you replace a 1U server with a newer 1U server.
Ah, it seems that most many wind turbines have a design lifetime of 20 years.
I guess that living in a country with many wind mills that are hundreds of years old, made me assume that a wind turbine would also have a technical life of more than two decades.
Depends on what you want the wind mill to do for you: slow and steady pumping water up a dike exerts somewhat less force on all the materials than trying to maximize electric output you get out of each rotation.
Also, there's no several 100% efficiency increase in upgrading a wind mill, so the parts are probably still compatible...
If you feel a whole wind mill like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Gekroonde_Poelenburg
shake when it is in operation, then that is very far from a slow and steady operation. In fact, most wind turbines feel far more 'slow and steady'. This one is not very old, only 150 years.
I assumed that with a 20 year old wind turbine, the money you make from the electricity it produces would be more than maintainance costs. Even if better turbines exist, if you can't build a new one in the same place, it might make sense to keep it running.
Of course, if the maintainance costs are indeed high enough that you don't make any money, then it make sense to take it down.
We're talking about 20 year old wind turbines. That's the stone age of wind turbine development.
But many of these would even be able to produce electricity that could be sold, but the bureaucracy of doing so is complicated. There was some discussion about creating solutions for those and make it easier for them to sell their electricity, but it didn't happen.
But in any case: It would be better to replace those old turbines with modern ones, though this is often not allowed...
Transmission or no transmission is a huge difference in maintenance cost. And land locations south of Hannover are poor conditions for wind turbines generally, with few exceptions. In those cases, earnings can be scarce and things can get uneconomical.
With subsidies, it can make sense to replace wind turbines early and collect new subsidies for a new one.
However, I don't understand why you would take existing ones down is the subsidie stops? That suggests that they operating at a loss even when the wind turbines is already written off.