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I am hating these kind of messages more and more. Especially when you see what this does to the landscape. The whole country will get industrialized with solar

I am hating these kind of messages more and more. Especially when you see what this does to the landscape. The whole country will get industrialized with solar panels and windmills. I can't imagine people will see this as something good in 50 years. I understand climate change should be tackled but I rather have apple invest in fusion reactors or thorium reactors. Here in the netherlands news just recently came out that Amazon is buying half of the energy from a future dutch offshore windpark to greenify their operation elsewhere in the world. This is not a positive thing.

StreamBright 6y ago
Energy density is a b*tch.
nindalf 6y ago
Land is not always at a premium. It is in the Netherlands (508 people/km2), but not elsewhere. If most of the Moroccan countryside (83 people/km2) was filled with solar panels, I don't think it would affect many people. It would work out pretty well for Morocco to become a major energy supplier in a world moving away from oil. And you can keep your pristine countryside and high standards of living thanks to cheap, clean energy from Morocco.
antiterra 6y ago
Here in the US, the land coverage needed to poser the country is a fraction of the land used for coal/gas/oil production, even without accounting for rooftop coverage on existing buildings.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Is that ownership or utilization or per kWh. On oil rig has a pretty small physical footprint
  - antiterra 6y ago
    It's land surface area. Some is leased/owned land that may be unutilized, but coal mining surface area on its own approaches the necessary amount of land needed. Oil rigs may have a small physical footprint by themselves, but they generally have pads cleared off for them and then fields can have multiple pads and access paths. See: https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1500x750_crop_center-center/MidwaySunsetOilFieldCalifornia_MarkRalstonAFPGettyImages_2000.jpg https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1500x750_crop_center-cent... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/the-permian-oil-boom-is-showing-signs-of-overheating https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/the-permi...
nemo 6y ago
Driving through west Texas, there's a few oil fields, a lot of farms, and a lot of wind farms. Aesthetically I don't exactly like the windmills, but I don't mind them. Texas has a lot of very ecologically stressed areas with mass scale habitat loss thanks to big ag farming, oil, and other human development, but the areas where the windmills are are either a wash where it's mixed wind farm/crop farm areas or they're habitat that's affected by the windmills but still has a lot of habitat. While there are bird strikes, the ecological impact of the windills is by far the least serious compared to coal/gas/oil. Also I live in Austin, and while some windmills froze early because the power company didn't pay for weatherizing, they were the fastest to fix and managed to excel over nuclear, gas, and coal at production. All of them failed because private power companies didn't want to pay to weatherize, but in areas where wind is really reliable it's a rare thing - a reliable, clean energy source like hydro can be. It's for those reasons that I really am pro-windmill. We really need mixed sources of reliable clean energy sources if we care about future generations of humans, wind is a great one.

StreamBright 6y ago

Energy density is a b*tch.

nindalf 6y ago

Land is not always at a premium. It is in the Netherlands (508 people/km2), but not elsewhere. If most of the Moroccan countryside (83 people/km2) was filled with solar panels, I don't think it would affect many people. It would work out pretty well for Morocco to become a major energy supplier in a world moving away from oil. And you can keep your pristine countryside and high standards of living thanks to cheap, clean energy from Morocco.

antiterra 6y ago

Here in the US, the land coverage needed to poser the country is a fraction of the land used for coal/gas/oil production, even without accounting for rooftop coverage on existing buildings.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
Is that ownership or utilization or per kWh. On oil rig has a pretty small physical footprint
- antiterra 6y ago
  It's land surface area. Some is leased/owned land that may be unutilized, but coal mining surface area on its own approaches the necessary amount of land needed. Oil rigs may have a small physical footprint by themselves, but they generally have pads cleared off for them and then fields can have multiple pads and access paths. See: https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1500x750_crop_center-center/MidwaySunsetOilFieldCalifornia_MarkRalstonAFPGettyImages_2000.jpg https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1500x750_crop_center-cent... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/the-permian-oil-boom-is-showing-signs-of-overheating https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/the-permi...

nemo 6y ago

Driving through west Texas, there's a few oil fields, a lot of farms, and a lot of wind farms. Aesthetically I don't exactly like the windmills, but I don't mind them. Texas has a lot of very ecologically stressed areas with mass scale habitat loss thanks to big ag farming, oil, and other human development, but the areas where the windmills are are either a wash where it's mixed wind farm/crop farm areas or they're habitat that's affected by the windmills but still has a lot of habitat. While there are bird strikes, the ecological impact of the windills is by far the least serious compared to coal/gas/oil. Also I live in Austin, and while some windmills froze early because the power company didn't pay for weatherizing, they were the fastest to fix and managed to excel over nuclear, gas, and coal at production. All of them failed because private power companies didn't want to pay to weatherize, but in areas where wind is really reliable it's a rare thing - a reliable, clean energy source like hydro can be. It's for those reasons that I really am pro-windmill. We really need mixed sources of reliable clean energy sources if we care about future generations of humans, wind is a great one.