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Have you ever spent any time in or close to a large wind farm? Honestly, it’s relaxing if you haven’t been told to be mad about them existing- they’re quiet, sustainable, and once they’re built the cost of each new unit of energy they deliver doesn’t come with the unit cost and environmental cost of acquiring and burning yet more fuel-- so in that sense, the marginal cost of each new bit of power from them really does approach zero.
Of course, this (that the resulting energy is so cheap) is why the coal/oil/gas folks are mad- they know they won’t be able to compete once a grid with sufficient edge-caching/power storage is built out
I think they’re beautiful. A sign of social and technological progress, hope for the future, human well-being and ingenuity.
specifically this. also, if youre close, theyre a good marker for direction.
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Wind turbines aint ugly, you can simply fix the picture by just moving your mom out of frame
windmill is mocking the steam generator
A few miles west of here are two wind generation fields, bout 60 miles in the other direction is a petroleum processor. The windmills are infinitely less of an eyesore.
See, stuff like this is why we need photographers and photo journalists. They’re not just documenting things, they’re making a point. They’re making art.
Oversaturated
Man, I miss summer.
Don’t worry, it will come back.
Source: trust me bro
Fuck you and your
sour grapestulips, Dutchman!Signed,
A jealous Estonian
okay but also, those are nuclear cooling towers in the foreground, right? that’s another renewable energy source. like, id be fine with the stuff coming out of the cooling towers bc it’s water. don’t care if it ruins the skyline.
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Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
Also, cooling towers are not seen exclusively with nuclear power plants. Many chemical refineries need lots of process heat and need to get rid of that as well. Evaporating water to steam is a great way to disperse excess heat.
Any kind of heat power plant also needs some way to expel excess steam, so oil and gas plants have them as well, just usually different designs.
solar isn’t renewable bc eventually the sun will explode
And if you have to always evaporate a lot of water to cool your power station you will have a problem in a drought, you will either have to turn off the power station or use a lot of water for it when you already don’t have enough.
It’s another advantage of wind turbines and solar panels since they don’t need to be cooled like that.
Has anyone ever tried using the heat from those chemical refineries to supplement a power grid? We convert fossil fuels into electricity by boiling water to turn turbines, so pretty much anything that creates adequate heat could be a potential energy source, right?
A HRSG (heat recovery steam generator) type boiler uses waste heat from a gas turbine to generate steam that can in turn spin a steam turbine, so, kinda. You’d just need to tightly control the temperatures and flow of heating medium (flue gasses or process heat I guess) which I’d imagine is the problem. We pronounce HRSG’s as “herzig” at my combined cycle plant. They massively improve efficiency by basically spinning two turbines for the price of one. Problem is they still rely on natural gas or diesel to operate that initial gas turbine. Coke oven boilers are also a thing but I’ve never personally worked directly with them, just learned about them. They use biproduct waste heat from making coke (component of steel) to operate boilers/make process steam/spin turbines. Im sure there are other systems too but there could always be more/better. Those are just the ones I thought of quick.
Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
The uranium is gonna continue to undergo fission, whether we mine it or not, whether we enrich/refine it or not. At that point it’s like collecting energy from our surroundings, really functionally no different than harvesting geothermal, wind, solar, hydro, etc.
Different rates of decay vs the natural state.
Radioactive decay is not the same as fission. It’s not entirely unrelated, but definitely a different process.
Exactly, nuclear is no less renewable than solar. Where does everyone think solar energy comes from? Nuclear.
We might as well capture the uranium decay, as you said, it will release the energy whether we collect it or not.
That’s such a disingenuous presentation of the facts. Of course there is no such thing as truly renewable energy, but there is a difference in kind between a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable) and energy produced from a limited fuel supply on earth (non renewable).
Solar (and its byproduct energies wind, hydro, biomass), tidal, geothermal are not in the same category as fission of rare heavy metals.
I say all this as someone pro-nuclear who agrees that we should use it while it is still fissionable.
We are talking about dozens of millennia of uranium supply on Earth. Other fuel types and nuclear technologies look to extend that into billions of years. For all functional purposes, it’s infinite. Just as solar energy is functionally infinite.
a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable)
As I said: Nuclear is Renewable, in the exact same way everyone uses the term.
Fusion and fission are two different processes.
I think the point he’s trying to make is that the sun technically has a finite lifetime, albeit in that case one that’s long enough to be functionally irrelevant from the perspective of human time scales.
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More wind turbines, less oil rigs on the horizon please.
And think of the birbs! Would someone please think of the bribs! They get confused by the propeller blades, and start migrating under water, where they get stuck in deep sea vents, causing blockages for ocean currents and costing the shipping industry billions. Damn you, liberals!
I enjoy seeing wind turbines along a landscape. Feel this this is some boomer shit
Maybe check the image again. Got a feeling you got WHOOSH’d here.
The joke works because people do use the argument. And to play the devil’s advocate: Wind energy takes up a lot more space than conventional energy. So for every coal power plant that destroys one landscape, replacing it with wind energy will “destroy” many more.
That said, I like the view of wind wheels. I don’t think they destroy the landscape. But we shouldn’t silence all criticism. While we need to get to 100% renewable, we also need to reduce what 100% means. Too often, renewable energy is used as an excuse to use even more energy.
And I especially like seeing the counter argument to that, those cases where small farmers can stay in business by leasing out a tiny parcel of their land and continuing to use the rest. I don’t know how common that may be in reality but the synergy gives me the chills.
Next bring me a story about a sheep farm on a solar farm and I’m in heaven
So the image in the post communicates sarcasm for sure, but the post text itself doesn’t communicate sarcasm to me. Could just be dense.
Either way, the underlying concern is that boomers are old and don’t like change. Younger people enjoy seeing wind turbines, so this whole issue is getting smaller and smaller year over year.
It’s at a nuclear power plant.
The argument that they mess up landscapes was always made in bad faith. Grasping at straws.
When I bought my house one of the things that I was warned about was that they were going to make the nearby wind farm larger. Some of the locals got up in arms about them building a new wind farm until they pointed out that they are just enlarging the current wind farm.
None of the residents could tell me where the current wind farm was, because you literally cannot see it, it’s behind a hill. If they hadn’t told anyone they were enlarging it I don’t think anyone would have noticed. Even if you go around the hill so you can actually see it, it just blends into the background. I do wonder why they don’t just paint them blue though.
Im guessing they want them to stand out for safety for pilots
Yesterday I had to go on a long drive. During that drive, I passed a yard in which someone had placed an obviously homemade billboard with the words “wind turbines destroy family, environment and quality of life.”
I was flatly stunned to see it. I’ve heard that stuff about them killing birds but I’ve never heard they were otherwise contentious. In fact, everyone I know personally loves to go look at them given the opportunity.
They probably “destroy family” because the children of the idiot boomers that put the sign up no longer speak to them over politics
“Wind turbines are the minions of Baelzebuub, they rot your teeth and steal your children at night. BOooOoOooO!”
Isn’t even the bird thing wildly overstated?
The problem is its actual history.
Windmills did kill way too many birds
- when they first built at Altamont pass, a natural constriction on a major migratory bird route
- when they used open lattice towers, which present tons of tempting roosting spots
- seems like at least one more major factor.
But this was in like the 1970s and they paid attention. Since then, wind turbines kill effectively zero birds, but it’s a huge problem when there’s an actual grain of truth that conservatives can grab onto and never let go
Edit: apparently still in production despite the poor site, but it looks like they cut bird fatalities in half and are looking at newer turbine designs to be safer. I guess the real lesson is don’t build in a mountain pass constricting a major Migratory bird route
That wind turbines kill birds is entirely sensationalized and overstated, absolutely.
Birds die from way more sources, like feral cats and flying into glass windows. Looks like someone else posted the source.
Things have gotten better since we noticed that birds recognize the turbine blades more easily if 1 of 3 of the blade are painted a non-white color.
Don’t think we’ve really done anything with cats and windows to mitigate those issues
Speaking in German numbers:
Wind Energy kills arround 100.000 Birds a year. Lovely furrballs arround 20.000.000 (likely more) Glass plates like windshields, Windows etc. Arround 100.000.000 So yeah pretty minor.
I don’t honestly know.
I don’t see how they could kill birds anymore than trees do. Birds have pretty good eyesight in many cases better than humans I can’t reasonably see why wind turbines would be any more of a threat than any other structure natural or organic.
The blades move a lot faster than trees or branches do, especially at the tips. I would guess that is mostly a miscalculation on the birds part, as in “oh this is open air, I’ll fly right through” and the blade comes and hits them
What you witnessed was a zombie homestead. Trump could easily convince his zombie cultists that the earth is flat.
Well they’re not zombies, since they actively hate the concept of brains.
But it’s not like zombies seek out brains to use them.
Look these people are nimby assholes but this isn’t what people bitch about. They bitch and it getting put in their backyards in nicer locations.
No, they really do complain about them being put anywhere within their line of sight, miles from their homes. I’ve personally met and talked to people complaining about it.
Yes. In nice areas. What’s so complicated? Are you really trying to nitpick over the use of back yards? I hate to break it to you but using backyard to describe an area beyond your property line is pretty common English.
The fact that you claim they they only complain when they are in their back yards. Stop moving the goal post.
Oh, so you are being nitpicky over common English. Understood.
Miles away, and barely visible, sometimes completely out of sight, isn’t in anyone’s “backyard”, no matter how generous you are with language.
