[rsynnott]

You... you realise that that's a work of fiction, right? And even given that it is a work of fiction, the character in question has every reason to lie about this!

Something like this is a bit of a recurrent myth on the far-right, though. Possible origins: https://fullfact.org/online/wind-turbines-energy/

In real life, wind turbines pay back the energy cost of construction in 6 months to a couple years, depending on scale, placement, etc etc.

This is not a new tactic, incidentally; back in the day, people used to, bizarrely, make much the same claim about _nuclear_ plants, too! It's, I suppose, not a _bad_ tactic; it's the sort of thing that sounds clever if one happens to be rather stupid, even though if you do the numbers it should be obvious that it cannot possibly be the case.