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> as a single wind turbine, which is already one of the worst ratio of power output per quantity of resource and land use. This is just false. Every wind turbi
by throwaway189262 5y ago
> as a single wind turbine, which is already one of the worst ratio of power output per quantity of resource and land use.
This is just false. Every wind turbine I've ever seen uses 50 square feet on a farm or cattle ranch.
Not once have I seen a wind farm where the land underneath isn't still used for it's previous purpose.
And at least in US we have enough farmland to power entire US with wind.
And that's not counting rapidly growing offshore wind power. Which uses no land at all
- tarsinge 5y agoResources are also construction material, that’s where wind get its bad ratio.
- throwaway189262 5y agoConstruction material is a meaningless metric. If you compare coal or gas plants you need to consider the materials they consume and infrastructure needed for fuel transport. This is a big number, many times the material used for the plant itself. The only meaningful comparison is material used vs solar. Once these things are built they use near zero resources. For everything else you have to keep mining shitloads of material forever. How much coal do we have to mine for coal plants? How many gas wells and pipelines for gas plants? What about transport? How much does it take to mine and process all the uranium into fissile isotopes for nuclear? With wind and solar you plop the thing in a field and get years, maybe decades of energy with no input. I'm convinced that all these land use and building materials costs studies are just FUD funded by the fossil fuel industry.
- lai-yin 5y agoSorry but you don't get to discount wind turbines' ecological damage just because no more mining is involved post-construction.
- throwaway189262 5y agoIt does far less damage than any other source of power. Unlike solar, it uses no space. Unlike fossil fuel and nuclear, it uses no continuous inputs. Coal and gas plants use many times their weight in materials for a lifetime of operation. Nuclear probably does too because the massive waste involve in uranium refining. What do you suggest as a greener power source than wind?
- wizzwizz4 5y ago> Unlike wind, it uses no space. Unlike solar?
- throwaway189262 5y agoLol yeah
- yunohn 5y agoPlease link to a source/calculation where a wind turbine uses more resources than a coal plant to build. I mean, you can even do napkin math and see that there’s no way multiple buildings and vast mining infrastructure take less material than a turbine farm.
- rakoo 5y agoIf you want to take a coal plant, you have to compare it with something that's comparable. A coal plant is a 1000MW machinery. A wind turbine is in the order of 10MW. Also, turbines have a very low capacity factor so you have to double them to guarantee their output and combine them with storage. So it's 1 coal plant vs 200 turbines at the very least.
- throwaway189262 5y agoBut coal plants use an absurd amount of coal and everything they don't burn ends up as ash. And have you been close to a big coal plant? They're massive. A coal plant probably used more land than 200 turbines and unlike turbines the land is unusable. Coal plants use many times their mass in coal during their lifetime. If you're looking at total materials needed over the lifetime of the plant, I wouldn't be surprised if coal was 100X higher than 200 turbines.
- kleiba 5y agoIn places with cold winters, it is often forbidden to approach wind turbines because of the risk of falling ice.
- throwaway189262 5y agoThe turbines are all in fields, useless scrubland, cattle ranches, and the ocean. Humans don't hang out in these places anyways
- kleiba 5y agoSo you think it doesn't matter if cattle gets hit by the same ice?
- lai-yin 5y agoLand AND resource use. Just because a single wind turbine takes up a small patch of land doesn't mean it's not extremely resource intensive. Case in point: https://twitter.com/extrachelle/status/986599367049179136?s=21 https://twitter.com/extrachelle/status/986599367049179136?s=...
- throwaway189262 5y agoSo? How much resources does it take to mine thousands of tons of coal a day, or billions of BTU of natural gas? With solar and wind, you put it up and you're done. No more inputs. It chills in the field. With coal and gas you're feeding shit tons of material into it every day. And you always need more, for the life of the plant. It's bonkers you think the amount of steel and concrete that go into a turbine are anywhere close to comparing to the raw materials other power sources consume. Turbines require steel and concrete. So does every other building above 5 floors
- michaelbuckbee 5y agoI was curious about total life cycle CO2 output and found an study in Nature. It looks like: - Hydropower + Bioenergy -> 100 gCO2eq kWh−1 - Traditional fossil fuels -> 78–110 gCO2eq kWh−1 - Nuclear, Wind and Solar -> 3.5–12 gCO2eq kWh−1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9
- throwaway189262 5y agoThis is actual supporting data from a reliable source and should be up top. So it appears fossil fuels take ten times more energy to run over a lifetime. Less than I expected but still bad
- waynecochran 5y agoThe problem with wind is storing the energy. I live in the Pacific NW and when you drive through the Columbia Gorge you see hundreds of these windmills. I have have visited the Wild Horse Wind facilities and they store energy using batteries -- terrible. The dams below can back up water, but wind blows whenever is may. The dams also provide safety from flood, a waterway, recreation, ... windmills just pollute the sky, kill song birds, and can not produce energy on demand nor store it effectively. Talk to engineers for Bonneville and they mock the windmills. If they are going to use wind why not pump water up from the Columbia River up to the top of the surrounding hills? Use the potential energy at least.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoYou misunderstand the impact of the dams on the ecosystem. Salmon are hanging by a thread in the Columbia, and only a very aggressive hatchery program has kept them from collapse. Essentially all buildable sites have already been built, and there's a growing awareness some existing damns need to come down. The Gorge is not some great untapped resource for pumped storage that people were too distracted by wind power to discover.
- waynecochran 5y agoSalmon are good -- I fish there. Salmon are even spawning well above the dams. I don't know where folks get that misinformation.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoI'm friends with an environmental economist that did the analysis while working for the state of Oregon. He also was involved in the reports that shut down Boardman. The information is accurate.
- throwaway189262 5y agoAre you actually complaining that wind is bad because it ruins the view? Windows, cars, and pet cats kill multitudes more birds than windmills Hydro plants do use wind to bank energy. Either by shutting down and banking water when the wind is blowing, or even running the pumps in reverse. I agree with you that energy storage is a big problem with wind. It is with solar too. But we can get near 50% wind and solar before it becomes a problem since much more energy is used during the day. Dams also have a finite lifetime, something nobody really talks about. They silt up over 50-100 years until they're completely full. This is a bigger problem in places like China with turbid water but happens everywhere eventually. The sun will shine and wind will blown till long after we're gone but dam sites will be gone eventually.