Those turbines usually get replaced after 20 years when subsidies run out and it's no longer economical to operate them. The new regulations will lead to a net negative in wind installations in the upcoming years.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Also, there's no several 100% efficiency increase in upgrading a wind mill, so the parts are probably still compatible...
This one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Otter,_Amsterdam) is almost 400 years old. But I have not been in it.
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.
There also is a reason why single frequency noise is considered more of a disturbance than random white noise with the same sound pressure.
That's why I brought up airports: noise walls work for ground level noise emission, airports and wind turbines are higher than that.
> The same noise regulations should be applied to wind farms
Good news: A newer wind turbine is usually quieter than older models. Let's upgrade existing turbines to models of the same size that produce more energy and less noise, and are vendor supported. win-win-win!
Bad news: Distance regulations don't care.
These regulations are a political hit job.