7 ms·
Wind power slashed 4.6B euros off electricity bills in Spain last year
- robertakarobin 10mo agoMeanwhile the administration of the US says that wind farms are "losers": https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/09/trump-assails-windmills-and-wind-energy-as-junk-theyre-losers/88108694007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/09/trump-...
- timeon 10mo agoWith virtually unlimited donations they are paid to say it.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoCompared to solar, they are kind of noisy though. If you are used to not hearing the constant traffic "rumble" that exists almost everywhere, they add quite a lot of "rumble" themselves.
- robertakarobin 10mo agoAre they? I haven't noticed the sound myself, although I don't live next to windmills and just travel in areas with wind power from time to time... I also grew up next to train tracks and now live next to an interstate near an airport so may have a high tolerance for background noise!
- wood_spirit 10mo agoThere is one turbine near where I live in Scandinavia that is very noisy. It is a low thumping sound that penetrates houses and is horrid. Those living within a km perhaps more won a court case to remove it but the owner has appealed and appealed and during the years or appeals the thing keeps turning and keeps being noisy so people can’t sleep. My understanding is the simulation and calculations of the noise that were part of the planning process were flawed and did not accurately model the terrain. Meanwhile, not 5 km away, there are a bunch of turbines with people living around them and no problem. So the exact slopes etc of the terrain is very important.
- jacquesm 10mo agoThat sounds very much like either tower thump or a broken bearing, I think the neighbors would have a better case if they pushed the safety angle because a turbine in a bad state of maintenance is dangerous. Then they'll be forced to fix it and it will be quiet again. You can ask them if it always was that noisy, if it wasn't then that's an extra arrow in their quiver. I'm very much pro renewables but safety is a major concern and operators that do not work safely and/or ignore valid complaints are a net negative for renewables.
- wood_spirit 10mo agoIn this case it is the terrain. The sound is funnelled somehow. In the planning process the owner has to commission a study that reports if the terrain shape is ok and compute the noise on nearby houses etc. Apparently you can get what you pay for. In the appeal a more independent study pulled the original study apart.
- Manfred 10mo agoWhich is why you put them in the sea or in places with sparse population.
- SoftTalker 10mo agoWhich greatly increases the cost of setting them up.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoWhich is awesome for us who move to places with sparse population to get a silent environment :) I'd much rather they put them in areas that are already ruined with traffic rumble, at least the difference would be minimal instead of "silence" vs "rumble".
- tensor 10mo agoTrump also said solar is bad.
- Tade0 10mo agoOne time I drove up to the very base of a ~2MW wind turbine. Couldn't hear anything besides the road several hundred metres away.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoYes, I don't think people think how noisy traffic and roads really are :) The interesting thing would be to hear it when you don't have that constant background rumble, you know like what I wrote about in my comment you replied to.
- Tade0 10mo agoThing is, I couldn't hear anything at all from the turbine and the only noise I could pick up was the road. At approx 256m attenuation is 21dB. Road noise reaches 85dB, which means I was hearing it at 64dB at most. I should have heard something, anything from the turbine, yet I didn't.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoYeah, I guess modern turbines are better than the one they put next to us. We used to have complete silence (no roads nearby), but after installing it the silence was gone. Not sure what else to tell you, I'm sure we wouldn't have noticed it if we already were used to road rumble, but we weren't, guess that's why it was so noticeable. The environment and how long time your ears been in it, matters a lot for how loud or not we perceive noise, I can imagine most modern ears basically tune out the traffic rumble you hear almost everywhere.
- edent 10mo agoThat isn't true. We have several turbines near us. One just across the street. Even on days without traffic noise, we can't hear them.
- jacquesm 10mo agoWhat's the closest you've lived to a windfarm? I've lived within 500 meters of a pretty large one and the highway more than a kilometer away from where I lived was far more noisy than the turbines.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoI was gonna say about 500 meters from one big wind turbine, and it was pretty noisy. But now when I look it up, seems it was installed in the 90s sometime, maybe it was just really old or badly maintained. And I agree with that highway traffic is way noisier, no doubt. That's why I mentioned in places where you don't have that "traffic rumble" before there is a wind turbine. I guess the difference is more noticeable then, compared to if you always had that traffic rumble anyways.
- jacquesm 10mo agoThe designs made in the 90's were relatively inefficient which is one reason why they're noisy. But at the same time: it's impressive that a turbine from those days is still up and running today and that says something about the engineering that went into that thing. Lots of lessons have been learned and a modern turbine is so quiet you can stand right underneath it and barely hear it, which I find absolutely incredible. A 75 meter diameter rotor intuitively should make a lot of noise, but they really don't. The main driver is the precision with which the filament is laid on the blade was well as how close the back edge of the blade approaches zero. That's the biggest source of noise and you'll always have some either because you don't quite get there or because you do and the back edge starts to flutter. It is one of those very annoying engineering trade-offs where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Work out the tip speed on one of those big machine and you'll be even more impressed.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoI remember quite vividly, first the weeks of construction, and then that our silence was just gone. Used to be you sat in the garden and heard nothing but birds and wind, no traffic, no nothing. After it appeared, there was always this rumble (like you hear when living close to a road/highway/traffic), but also a swooshing sound as they rotated. I think the main reason the difference was so stark, was because that place never had traffic around it, so it went literally from nothing to something, and if there would have been other noises before, it surely wouldn't have been so noticeable.
- tzs 10mo agoFrom that article: > “Just about all the windmills are made in China,” Trump said. “They make them and sell them to suckers like Europe and suckers like the United States before." > “All you have to do is say to China: 'How many windmill areas do you have in China?' So far they're not able to find any," he said. "They use coal and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much, but they don't have windmills." It then goes on to cite data from the US Department of Energy showing how wrong Trump is.
- dzonga 10mo ago[flagged]
- epistasis 10mo ago[flagged]
- nothrowaways 10mo agoFAFO, sadly
- znpy 10mo ago> The US has become a nation that values persuasion over reality. It values the propaganda over truth. These things don’t happen overnight. That thing has been boiling for at least a decade. As a non American, that’s evident…
- UltraSane 10mo agoIt really started with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
- piva00 10mo ago> The EU couldn't pull it together because they have only sticks, whereas the US could use carrots to cause massive investment. Perhaps that's also part of the downfall: the US unlearnt the necessity to use sticks to stamp down the ugly side of capitalism.
- the_cat_kittles 10mo agoall i can say as a citizen of this country is that it will continue to do whatever it wants until there are consequences. everyone needs to recognize that.
- jacquesm 10mo agoThere are already plenty of consequences, even if you don't see them.
- the_cat_kittles 10mo agoi mean for the people doing it
- jvdvegt 10mo agoWithout paywall: https://archive.is/lV7Ng https://archive.is/lV7Ng
- gretch 10mo agoAn interesting thing I learned from reading the article is that Spain is the 4th largest exporter of turbines behind only China, Germany, and Denmark. Reading the other comments, it's really a shame we can't have a discussion about something happening in the world before it immediately becomes about the US, on topics that are barely relevant.
- another_twist 10mo agoI am interested. Tell me more. Any books / articles you'd recommend ? Given that Spain made such progress, there has to be atleast an FT article.
- hiccuphippo 10mo agoDon Quixote.
- mschuster91 10mo agoSearch for Siemens Gamesa. Siemens fused their wind power branch with them a few years prior to the pandemic and finalized the full takeover in 2022.
- doctoboggan 10mo agoSpain is also big in the utility scale solar and storage industry with the Power Electronics company providing inverters or other components to many of the worlds largest plants.
- toomuchtodo 10mo agoCATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing factories in Europe in Spain. China battery maker CATL to train Spanish workers for battery plant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061492 - November 2025
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]
- mono442 10mo agoDid those savings actually trickle to end costumer bills? I often read how renewables are making electricity cheaper but I only pay more and more despite the share of them increasing here in electricity generation.
- hvb2 10mo agoOne reason cost might be going up is because the grid needs upgrades. A house might have a typical peak power demand of 1kWH. Now? It might peak at 10. I'm making up these numbers by the way. Everywhere that I know of, you pay for the grid through your bill.
- zaik 10mo agoI'm in Austria and I pay separate bills for the grid and the electricity.
- belorn 10mo agoThe more variability there is in the grid, the more the grid need to invest in balancing, reserve energy and transmission. Each of those are expensive to build out and maintain. They are usually paid through taxes and grid fees, and here in Sweden you will generally pay more for those than for the energy that you consume. Any saving on the production side will only effect part of the bill, and the total bill can go up even as the average wholesale price goes down.
- hvb2 10mo agoI was more thinking of increasing throughput on existing power lines. That's a lot of work/money that'll need to be spent if we want to switch cars and heating to electric.
- ff_ 10mo agosecond paragraph of the article starts with: > The sector contributed 0.25% to GDP and enabled savings on consumers' electricity bills of more than 4.6 billion euros in 2024, with an average reduction in the wholesale price of close to 20 euros per MWh.
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoRelated today: UK secures record supply of offshore wind projects https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614777
- secondcoming 10mo agoUK energy consumers cry
- miduil 10mo ago[flagged]
- UltraSane 10mo agoWhat was the value of all food that had to be thrown away?
- locallost 10mo agoI don't know what this has to do with anything, when the blackout doesn't have a known cause yet.
- miduil 10mo agoWell, the cause is known - it's many causes that have accumulated. Of course, maybe more research will bring some more definitive conclusions - but overall the core mechanisms seem to be well understood, at least to the extend on what will be needed to avoid similar scenarios in the future. I don't understand why your reply is so aggressive though. What is upsetting you by others talking about the blackout? Especially understanding the economic impacts better, seems to be a reasonable thing to do? Overall, there seems to have been very little effect on the economical growth of both countries - even though it has been a regular business day. Some slide-deck that covers the situation well: https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-Iberian-Blackout.pdf https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-Iber...
- locallost 10mo agoI also don't know what's aggressive about questioning speaking matter-of-factly about the cause of the event when it's not clear what the cause was. The end of your document says at fault was "just about everyone", starting from gas plants that did not do their job. I have no idea then why you're trying to throw shade on something good that was accomplished by bending the truth. I did not read the article and the 4.6B figure might be BS, but if it is, pinning something as the definitive cause of the blackout, when this is not really known, is not the way to correct it.
- parasense 10mo ago[flagged]
- seanalltogether 10mo agoFlywheel battery storage is still considered pretty niche. I wonder if blackout prevention will start to bolster it's usage. Imagine if every large scale solar or wind farm were required maintain some amount of rotational storage
- dalyons 10mo agoWhy? Batteries and grid shaping inverters are cheaper and better in every way
- Rygian 10mo agoThe Iberian outage had nothing to do with inertia. The root cause was insufficient dispatch of reactive power due to non compliance of some power providers, and ultimately traceable to outdated procedures for the dispatch of reactive power.
- outside1234 10mo agoPG&E bills in California are also going down this year as well.
- briandw 10mo agoSarcasm? Ca electricity costs 33.60 per kWh vs the US average of 17.98. Personally Ive seen my bill double in the last 10 years.
- thedrbrian 10mo agobut if they go down by 1 cent per kwh then technically the price did go down.
- martinpw 10mo agoBoth are true. Costs have gone up a lot over the past few years and are also going down this year.
- adrr 10mo agoPower generation is going down, power delivery is going up. Power delivery is way more expensive than the actual electricity.
- doktor2u 10mo ago[flagged]
- bamboozled 10mo agoSource ? Disclaimer: Dutch guy
- jacquesm 10mo agoThey do not. This is a completely unfounded assertion, all of the studies that have been done indicate that a few km downstream of a windfarm the effects on overall windspeed are negligible.
- mrcode007 10mo agoSolar prevents sun from hitting the ground causing death of the plants preventing photosynthesis and suffocating life on earth. Did I get it right?
- jacquesm 10mo agoThere are multiple comments in this thread suggesting that the outage in Spain was caused by wind power. This has also been suggested by various politicians and others in front of a microphone or a camera without any basis in fact whatsoever. There is a (by now remote) chance that indeed wind power (or renewables in general) were the primary cause but the evidence points in an entirely different direction, the lack of control authority and undampened oscillations getting out of control. In such a situation various safety protocols dictate that sections of the grid disconnect and go into island mode or switch off altogether. This to prevent damage to the grid and to all of the grid connected devices. As these outages go, I think it was handled extremely well, the main question remaining is what the root cause was and what should be done to avoid a repetition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
- cbmuser 10mo agoFrance was not affected and guarded the rest of Europe because the have reliable, dispatchable power. It’s not really surprising that an electricity grid becomes fragile if you remove large rotating masses which can act as power reserves which can react to power variations immediately.
- jacquesm 10mo agoRotating mass is a suspect in this case, not necessarily the primary one but the lack of control authority in the presence of frequency fluctuations is the exact opposite of what you are suggesting. It means that something with a fairly large amount of source/sink capability caused a local stability issue. Almost all modern grid connected windmills are - and this may surprise you - connected to the grid using inverters because that gives them a much better chance at following the grid fluctuations than the older direct connected types did (which did have the potential to cause issues and which resulted in much higher start-up speeds than the present crop). These inverter based interconnects give response times that rotating mass based systems can only dream of, resulting in much smaller errors in phase and thus voltage tracking. The European grid is stupendously reliable, far more reliable than any other power grid worldwide to the point that most houses and business do not have backup power plans (datacenters, hospitals, telcos and some others excepted). France is doing ok but do not pretend that without France this outage would have spread further. The Iberian peninsula has one of the weaker and heavier loaded grids in Western Europe, in spite of the above, they should have probably invested more into their infrastructure but Spain has a lot of other issues it needs to deal with which cost it a fortune every year in terms of crop losses, fires and floodings. Both Spain and Portugal (and to a lesser degree Italy and Greece) are in the line of fire when it comes to climate change damage.
- lentil_soup 10mo agoIt's fascinating to see the live electricity sources with Electricity Maps. Here is Spain: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/ https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/ Throughout the day you can clearly see how the wind and sun power starts kicking in, when it's raining hydro raises, etc.
- booi 10mo agoThat's interesting because here in California, $4.6B is slashed off productivity because of wind. - still angry at pg&e
- ihaveajob 10mo agoCan you elaborate? Was that sarcasm?
- Sabinus 10mo agoThe surinenglish.com site denies access if you don't give consent for personalised advertising cookies on the GDPR consent screen.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- gregbot 10mo agoI was curious to see how this number was derived and unfortunately the 20.41 euro/MWh “reducing effect” figure has absolutely no explanation as to how it was calculated. Given that AEE is a wind industry lobbying organization I suspect this number is picked in a way that is maximally favorable to wind. I really wish they would tell us how this number was arrived at so I could make up my own mind as to how reasonable it is.
- pevansgreenwood 10mo ago[dead]
- throw_m239339 10mo agoIt slashed a lot of birds too...