5 ms·
Interestingly, the very first statement is quite misleading. The statement: > On average, a humble wind turbine uses less land area per megawatt-hour than almo
by Scea91 3y ago
Interestingly, the very first statement is quite misleading. The statement:
> On average, a humble wind turbine uses less land area per megawatt-hour than almost any other power source.
The article itself refers to this citation [1]. It says, unsurprisingly, that the most land efficient power source is nuclear. The statement is of course technically true because it says "almost any power source".
With wind, however, even that is tricky because you can either count just the area directly below the turbine body, which is still higher than nuclear and unreasonably optimistic because you severely limit a far bigger area. If you count also the spacing (too pessimistic on the other hand because part of the land might be used for farming) then wind farms range across the whole scale of land efficiency.
I think its fair to say that land use of wind farms is "complicated", but saying its almost the best in this regard sounds like manipulation.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
- londons_explore 3y agoWind turbines can be built big enough that the blades, at the lowest point, are higher than almost all other land uses, except perhaps forestry. To be honest, the access roads are probably the biggest real impediment to using the land around a wind turbine. Can't exactly farm millions of acres of corn with robotic combine harvesters with a criss-cross of access roads to the base of every turbine.
- kingkawn 3y agoWhy not? Seems easy to teach the robots to not harvest on the road
- londons_explore 3y agoOdd shapes and constantly starting/stopping the plougher/seeder/harvester mean you get less ROI on your equipment. Farming is super tight margins - if your machines waste 20% of the time starting and stopping every time they pass over a road, your farms profits are wiped out. This is true whether the machines are robot driven or not, and it's the reason most commercial farms have huuuuuge fields rather than lots of small ones.
- mulmen 3y agoWhy would the access roads create a complex shape? Fields already have access roads. Either the farm is flat and the turbine access roads can be on a minimally invasive grid or the turbines are on a hill and the fields are already a complex shape.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adrusi 3y agoThe cost of the land to the grower is lower on account of the presence of the turbines.
- wongarsu 3y agoI have trouble imagining that the cost of interrupting your seeder or lifting your plough every quarter mile is really higher than the profit generated by the wind turbines.
- jeffbee 3y agoAnd yet. https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0700265,-95.6508704,3a,60y,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s6IucRHNH7NWMqQwVQewdzg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0700265,-95.6508704,3a,60y,9...
- dtgriscom 3y agoBeautiful image: thanks.
- tomatotomato37 3y agoThat's a turbine in the middle of active farmfield, off a dirt road, servicing a town a bit under a mile away that is barely 10 city blocks wide at its widest point. In the middle of Iowa. My point just because you can build the turbines to clear everything, there are areas in this nation where there's just no point to doing that; and it's more economical to just make them shorter and put the money towards something more useful
- jeffbee 3y agoOK, I think I agree but I was responding to london. The idea that wind turbines and large-scale corn cultivation are incompatible is contrary to an abundance of counterexamples.
- wongarsu 3y agoYou want your wind turbines as high as possible anyways. Higher up there are stronger and more consistent winds.
- mista2nith 3y agoMidwestern farmers very much disagree with that “impossibility”
- m4rtink 3y agoI'm not sure robotic combine harvesters are a real concern (yet ?) - modern "manned" harvesters are already crazy effective and fast & I've seen them navigate some pretty crazy field geometries at times, so I'm sure they can handle a straight road.
- klyrs 3y ago> Can't exactly farm millions of acres of corn with robotic combine harvesters with a criss-cross of access roads to the base of every turbine. You certainly can; single-objective suboptimality is not the same as impossibility. But perhaps this would be an excellent use-case for heavy-lift dirigibles.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- zensavona 3y agoSounds like the article used just the right wording then. “…less land area per megawatt-hour than almost any other power source.” As I read it this implies there is one (or some very small percentage) power source which uses less land per megawatt-hour, which is exactly the case.
- psd1 3y agoTidal energy.
- saulrh 3y agoAn offshore wind farm by definition uses no land area :V
- itishappy 3y agoAircraft carriers suddenly looking competitive...
- OtherShrezzing 3y agoI'm wondering if the OWID data takes the 3,400km^2 of exclusion zone from Fukushima and Chernobyl (more like 5,000km^2, see below) into account when calculating the average size of a nuclear plant? I think if we're saying the space beneath the blades can count towards aggregate wind-power land use, an argument can be made to include nuclear wasteland in the aggregate nuclear-power land use.
- soperj 3y agoChernobyl's exclusion zone is 4143km^2, and Fukushima's is 807km^2.
- s0rce 3y agoShouldn't you include in the average nuclear sites that didn't explode?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mulmen 3y agoWhy? Nuclear plants can and do melt down.
- aerzen 3y agoThere are nuclear plants that have been decommissioned and have not exploded. So using just this data, there is a probability that a given nuclear plant will melt down in its lifecycle. And that probability is greater than 0, but far less than 1.
- mulmen 3y agoYes but wind turbines can’t melt down in that way. Even in a worst case scenario the literal blast radius is smaller. This has to factor in to the possible locations.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
- worik 3y ago> It says, unsurprisingly, that the most land efficient power source is nuclear Not true if you factor in waste storage and the time to store it Long after all the nuclear energy has been used making your toast, and long after many cycles of climate change, you will still be storing hi level nuclear waste, and monitoring it. But who cares about tomorrow? Party on, and let future generations pay!
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoHow does this calculation work? Take simple chemical pollution, for example with lead - as far as I can tell, it stays around forever and we,ve poisoned vast landscapes with it during mining coal copper for example. Or take simple industrial waste , say wind turbine blades, they go to landfill, sure they aren’t hurting anyone but there are a lot of them- does it count?
- natmaka 3y agoOther causes of pollution (related to lead, coal, copper...) aren't excuses for nuclear pollution. AFAIK more and more (many even most, nowadays, as it is legally mandatory in many European nations) are recycled.
- frankthepickle 3y agolooking at the article, you're really splitting hairs - wind and nuclear are 0.3 and 0.4km2, many of the others are 20+ if you were to ask someone based on that if wind was one of the techs that use least land, it's an obvious yes. I think you're being more disingenuous than the article..