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A country can commit to 300 years of wind energy, temporarily harming a bit of nature. Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nat

A country can commit to 300 years of wind energy, temporarily harming a bit of nature. Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again. We have no issues with stealing a couple of square miles of nature in order to pave it for our cities or to use it for farming. Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal: production of the turbines, used area and generated noise, minimal pollution of the area, the troubles of recycling them. That's mostly it. You don't have this with oil, nor with current-age nuclear. Also, we've already accepted the noise of cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes. So I really don't get what they are protesting about, specially in Germany.

ajb 1y ago
It's a self fulfilling prophecy - they listen to propaganda saying that the value of houses near wind farms drops, that itself causes the price to drop.
- immibis 1y ago
  Price of houses dropping is a good thing, anyway, makes it easier to get one.
raffael_de 1y ago
> Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again. Deconstructing a wind turbine is far from simple and cheap.
- immibis 1y ago
  What happens if you chop it down like a tree, assuming there's nothing underneath?
belorn 1y ago
The opposition to the construction of wind farms are mostly silly except in a very specific situation. We should not construct those in nature reservation. If a place is worth designating as a nature reserve then we have decided that such place is worth protecting even if the area could be later freed (common reason is keeping certain species from going extinct, which makes the threat nontemporarily). Ocean based wind farms has a tendency to want to be built in the shallows, which happens to correlate where we tend to designate as nature reservations. Wind power is however not comparable to fossil fuels or nuclear power. Denmark is a prime example of a country that did commit fully to wind power in a very strong and consistent way, and do produce more total energy through wind that they consume. That energy however is not produced when people want to consume it, so as a practical matter, they import around 50% of their energy that they do consume, energy which is not wind since when the wind blow they export the excess energy. They could produce 500% or even 1000% more wind energy, and they would still need to import a large portion of their consumption from non-wind power. Producing that much excess power would mostly just effect exports and not in a good way for the producers since overproduction mostly just lead to lower prices. 50% consumption seems to be around the maximum of what you can do with wind (for now), and when the wind do not blow you still need 100% of the capacity from other sources in order to fill in the gap. Overproduction of nuclear or thermal energy does not have this issue, but rather carries completely different problems.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  One thing to keep in mind with the Danish figure is that they to be correct import 37.6% but have enough thermal capacity to run the entire country at peak demand without renewables or imports. What they do is essentially being the energy trading market for Northern Europe. Buying the cheapest available from UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Norway. As storage gets built out they will be able to arbitrage this positions and their better, likely allowing them to start phasing out thermal capacity as long as the stability of the grid is ensured through empirical evidence. Attempting to fit nuclear power with its extremely high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX in our zero marginal cost renewable and near zero marginal cost storage future is a near impossible task.
naruhodo 1y ago
Landed gentry complaining that their country estate is not as picturesque as it once was.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
  Maybe some, when its within sight. Otherwise it tends to make good money, which is always much welcome.
Moldoteck 1y ago
Isn't the idea of npp decommissioning to leave the area as it was before npp? Environmental impact of different techs was described in UNECE report I think
- ACCount37 1y ago
  Uneconomical. The best way to dispose of things like the weakly radioactive reactor hulls is often to simply leave them when they are. They aren't particularly dangerous, and they don't leach contaminants. So you just bury them so no one can access them too easily. But it does require leaving the sealed reactor buildings in place - even if you can reuse the rest of the land and the exclusion area.
  - Moldoteck 1y ago
    I think it's still done as full dismantling (but maybe not all countries?). French superphenix will be basically erased. Something similar is happening to german plants like Isar 2 Some countries may have postponed decommissioning because it's cheaper to wait a bit Some countries allow recycling of some stuff, even concrete, like Italy
CalRobert 1y ago
Germany is famously abhorrent of change. "We've always done it this way" isn't used ironically.
- PicassoCTs 1y ago
  That denial of change, results in a build up of "change-debt", which then unloads in uncontrolled, dangerous events in leaps and bounds. All that autistic attempt to control reality to run on a rail, results on reality lashing ut to the systems opposed to it.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    We’re talking about a place that can make you wait five months just to change a job.
- xg15 1y ago
  True, but there is also its own brand of politicization of wind power going on, driven mostly by conservatives and the Bavarian CSU. Not many whales around here unfortunately, but I'm amazed what kind of extinction-level dangers they apparently pose for birds, forests and generally wildlife. And then there is the lasting psychological damage caused by the sounds and moving shadows of the rotor blades...
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  Unless the change is shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants[1]. The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand. [1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out/nuclear-phase-out_content.html https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out...
  - pydry 1y ago
    It's wild how much shit Germany got for turning off gas, coal and nuclear power plants (which comprised about ~8% of their power) while Poland running on ~80-90% coal for decades without changing anything was nbd. It's almost as if the outrage was astroturfed into existence by the nuclear lobby using similar tactics to the oil lobby.
nicoburns 1y ago
> Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal You probably don't even need to remove the turbines if you don't want to? I imagine nature would take over just fine with them left there.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  Giant metal towers make a dead tall tree look harmless by comparison. If that topples - and eventually it will - it will kill everybody in its path. So, we're probably not going to just leave on-shore wind turbines to rot. Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.
  - tpm 1y ago
    There is mostly nobody in the path of the tower, and once you remove the blades and the turbine (there is a lot of valuable metal there) the physical load will be so low the tower itself can stand there for a very, very long time. But of course it does not have to.
mfld 1y ago
I assume most protests are driven by a Not In My Backyard attitude.
- woooooo 1y ago
  It's worse than that, its culture war driven in a lot of cases. Doesn't matter if it's anywhere close to their back yard.
- mcv 1y ago
  Yeah, but those people still have roads, large buildings and factories in their backyard.
  - badpun 1y ago
    You can't have civilization without roads, so people naturally accept them. Large buildings and factories are not common in the countryside, and people do protest when you try building them in their backyards. No different than wind farms.

ajb 1y ago

It's a self fulfilling prophecy - they listen to propaganda saying that the value of houses near wind farms drops, that itself causes the price to drop.

immibis 1y ago
Price of houses dropping is a good thing, anyway, makes it easier to get one.

raffael_de 1y ago

> Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again. Deconstructing a wind turbine is far from simple and cheap.

immibis 1y ago
What happens if you chop it down like a tree, assuming there's nothing underneath?

belorn 1y ago

The opposition to the construction of wind farms are mostly silly except in a very specific situation. We should not construct those in nature reservation. If a place is worth designating as a nature reserve then we have decided that such place is worth protecting even if the area could be later freed (common reason is keeping certain species from going extinct, which makes the threat nontemporarily). Ocean based wind farms has a tendency to want to be built in the shallows, which happens to correlate where we tend to designate as nature reservations. Wind power is however not comparable to fossil fuels or nuclear power. Denmark is a prime example of a country that did commit fully to wind power in a very strong and consistent way, and do produce more total energy through wind that they consume. That energy however is not produced when people want to consume it, so as a practical matter, they import around 50% of their energy that they do consume, energy which is not wind since when the wind blow they export the excess energy. They could produce 500% or even 1000% more wind energy, and they would still need to import a large portion of their consumption from non-wind power. Producing that much excess power would mostly just effect exports and not in a good way for the producers since overproduction mostly just lead to lower prices. 50% consumption seems to be around the maximum of what you can do with wind (for now), and when the wind do not blow you still need 100% of the capacity from other sources in order to fill in the gap. Overproduction of nuclear or thermal energy does not have this issue, but rather carries completely different problems.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago
One thing to keep in mind with the Danish figure is that they to be correct import 37.6% but have enough thermal capacity to run the entire country at peak demand without renewables or imports. What they do is essentially being the energy trading market for Northern Europe. Buying the cheapest available from UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Norway. As storage gets built out they will be able to arbitrage this positions and their better, likely allowing them to start phasing out thermal capacity as long as the stability of the grid is ensured through empirical evidence. Attempting to fit nuclear power with its extremely high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX in our zero marginal cost renewable and near zero marginal cost storage future is a near impossible task.

naruhodo 1y ago

Landed gentry complaining that their country estate is not as picturesque as it once was.

LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
Maybe some, when its within sight. Otherwise it tends to make good money, which is always much welcome.

Moldoteck 1y ago

Isn't the idea of npp decommissioning to leave the area as it was before npp? Environmental impact of different techs was described in UNECE report I think

ACCount37 1y ago
Uneconomical. The best way to dispose of things like the weakly radioactive reactor hulls is often to simply leave them when they are. They aren't particularly dangerous, and they don't leach contaminants. So you just bury them so no one can access them too easily. But it does require leaving the sealed reactor buildings in place - even if you can reuse the rest of the land and the exclusion area.
- Moldoteck 1y ago
  I think it's still done as full dismantling (but maybe not all countries?). French superphenix will be basically erased. Something similar is happening to german plants like Isar 2 Some countries may have postponed decommissioning because it's cheaper to wait a bit Some countries allow recycling of some stuff, even concrete, like Italy

CalRobert 1y ago

Germany is famously abhorrent of change. "We've always done it this way" isn't used ironically.

PicassoCTs 1y ago
That denial of change, results in a build up of "change-debt", which then unloads in uncontrolled, dangerous events in leaps and bounds. All that autistic attempt to control reality to run on a rail, results on reality lashing ut to the systems opposed to it.
- CalRobert 1y ago
  We’re talking about a place that can make you wait five months just to change a job.
xg15 1y ago
True, but there is also its own brand of politicization of wind power going on, driven mostly by conservatives and the Bavarian CSU. Not many whales around here unfortunately, but I'm amazed what kind of extinction-level dangers they apparently pose for birds, forests and generally wildlife. And then there is the lasting psychological damage caused by the sounds and moving shadows of the rotor blades...
AlexandrB 1y ago
Unless the change is shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants[1]. The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand. [1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out/nuclear-phase-out_content.html https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out...
- pydry 1y ago
  It's wild how much shit Germany got for turning off gas, coal and nuclear power plants (which comprised about ~8% of their power) while Poland running on ~80-90% coal for decades without changing anything was nbd. It's almost as if the outrage was astroturfed into existence by the nuclear lobby using similar tactics to the oil lobby.

nicoburns 1y ago

> Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal You probably don't even need to remove the turbines if you don't want to? I imagine nature would take over just fine with them left there.

tialaramex 1y ago
Giant metal towers make a dead tall tree look harmless by comparison. If that topples - and eventually it will - it will kill everybody in its path. So, we're probably not going to just leave on-shore wind turbines to rot. Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.
- tpm 1y ago
  There is mostly nobody in the path of the tower, and once you remove the blades and the turbine (there is a lot of valuable metal there) the physical load will be so low the tower itself can stand there for a very, very long time. But of course it does not have to.

mfld 1y ago

I assume most protests are driven by a Not In My Backyard attitude.

woooooo 1y ago
It's worse than that, its culture war driven in a lot of cases. Doesn't matter if it's anywhere close to their back yard.
mcv 1y ago
Yeah, but those people still have roads, large buildings and factories in their backyard.
- badpun 1y ago
  You can't have civilization without roads, so people naturally accept them. Large buildings and factories are not common in the countryside, and people do protest when you try building them in their backyards. No different than wind farms.