Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 331 posts

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#291

Post by shitgoose »

afterburner wrote: post #112
coin wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compared to ripping the tops of mountains Or consider nuclear, which is much cleaner, safer and lower coast than all other energy sources

Lower cost? Utterly laughable. Nuclear costs are notoriously high, always crazy multiples over budget, and then the operating and decommissioning costs are hidden with budget and accounting tricks. But you won't notice because it's a 50 to 80 year process.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=9090#tabs_Sp...

scroll to the bottom image. Nuclear is the lowest cost along with hydro. If you want to argue against nuclear, you have to find another argument (which shouldn't be too hard).

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#292

Post by djrogers »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #56
noonespecial wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think wind turbines are absolutely beautiful They are. Like living sculptures. There's just something extremely dignified about them. Like finally growing up after the childishness of strip-mining. The adults are here.

I couldn't disagree more. They popped up as I was growing up - littering the coastline and countryside. They can be seen from great distances and serve to make the place seem an awful lot smaller. I for one can't wait until we develop a way to live without them - the only condolence is that they move us away from the coal and gas industries. I do hope that solar leaves them in its wake and we can be done with the mon…

This can vary greatly on the type of windmill... I live near the Altamont wind farm, and the oldest windmills are undeniably ugly, and so small that they required tons of them.

The next generation windmills were less ugly, but still too small. I always found them rather unobjectionable, but I could see one quibbling with that.

The current giants being put up though? They look great! They have these 90 foot blades that look like they were designed by an advanced alien race, their size makes them operate with a slow graceful sweep, and the relatively low density of them leaves the hillsides more visible as well.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#293

Post by mavhc »

hueving wrote: post #197
lorenzfx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living near coal mines, coal or nuclear power plants isn't great either.

Significantly fewer people need to live near them due to energy density.

But a noise when it's windy is 1000 times better than polluted air and water, coal produces more radiation than nuclear, the mercury in fish comes from coal.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#294

Post by djrogers »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #231

For comparison, coal employs about 77k people. About the same as the bowling and skiing employment numbers.

That 77k is only the mining/fuel side, if you include the power generation side of the coal industry the number is a little over double that at 160k

[1]https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/2017%20U...

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#295

Post by djrogers »

jnordwick wrote: post #69
frik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything has pro and cons. Windmills have just a few cons like don't block the air space (bad for a few birds (but less bad than water power plans for fish), helicopters, planes) and some noise (but that's true for every powerplant technologies except photovoltaic panels). The good thing windmills are very eco-friendly. Only water/hydro and photovoltaic/sun-energy falls in the very same category.

Dams are usually ecological disasters. The Hetch Hetchy Valley was dammed up and it destroyed a natural resource on par with Yosemite. People have been trying to remove it for years, but the San Francisco residents refuse to let it go since it supplies such a large amount of power to them.

Not to mention it supplies their water

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#296

Post by twoodfin »

oconnore wrote: post #278
jnordwick wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's just being disingenuous with that statement. He isn't hold those cheering the jobs numbers to the same standard.

If you magically increased the wind industry tomorrow by a factor of 31.2 to supply the entire US electricity demand of 4369TWh, you would have to employ 3.1 million people. That's only ~4 times the size of the US employment numbers for gas/coal (and luckily this was only a thought experiment to demonstrate that you are concern trolling, real industries don't grow without massive efficiency improvements along the way…

Requiring 4X the labor to produce the same amount of energy is a big deal! Even just a million more workers would translate into $50B or more in cost, or $500/year for the average household.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#297

Post by djrogers »

sedachv wrote: post #175
foofoo55 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find them an eyesore, audibly irritating[1], and the documented bird deaths are awful[2]. But, I'll take them over coal any day. [1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-many-birds-do-w...

> and the documented bird deaths are awful[2]. Stop quoting this bullshit "fact." It is a meme made up by conservative think tanks to discredit wind farms. As other posters have already pointed out, other human-related factors such as domestic cats, buildings and towers, and most importantly pollution and loss of habitat are far more significant dangers to birds. If you actually care about birds, take your cats to th…

'Conservative think tanks' like the Audobon Society?

It's not necessarily the raw numbers of birds killed, it's the type and the impact on their population. If your cat kills 1000 pigeons, the pigeon population won't notice. A handful of golden eagles every year or two though, and we get closer to losing another species.

[1]http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-...

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#298

Post by pikzen »

whyever wrote: post #286
coin wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compared to ripping the tops of mountains Or consider nuclear, which is much cleaner, safer and lower coast than all other energy sources

How is nuclear waste clean? How is a possible reactor meltdown safe or cheap?

Nuclear waste is cleaner than what coal emits in the atmosphere. Store it in an underground facility, figure out what to do with it later. It's not perfect, but it's better than what we have currently for high volume electricity generation. As for reactor meltdowns, well, to give one example, France has beeen one of the world's biggest users of nuclear power, and we haven't had any meltdown ever. So, uh, don't build your reactors near dangerous zones, and don't go with the cheapest contractor for a critical piece of infrastructure? Meltdowns don't happen unless you do something really, really stupid.

Nuclear power is still the better cost/production method we have for now. It's safe (yes, the stats include deaths while building which puts wind/ocean at a disadvantage, but overall it is just as safe as renewable energy), it's efficient.

Just don't pull a Chernobyl and actually follow security measures.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#299

Post by Jedd »

vacri wrote: post #273
Jedd wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an actual Australian I'm really happy that we don't build 'nuke plants' here. (I am assuming you mean nuclear fission power plants.) We have uranium, yes, but if happenstance is our only criteria we should also be building nuclear weapons and burning lots of coal. Sadly we're doing the latter with great alacrity. We also don't have a good place to store the waste. I don't think there's (m)any places on the planet…

> We also don't have a good place to store the waste. We've got tons of space to store the waste. The country is right in the middle of a tectonic plate, so little worry about earthquakes, and large swathes of the country are uninhabited by anyone, even mythical 'lost tribes'. Even if nowhere else, we could store waste in the giant area cordoned off for nuclear testing in the '50s. In my opinion, it's hard to find so…

> In my opinion, it's hard to find somewhere better suited for storing nuclear waste than 'somewhere in Australia'.

This makes sense only if your starting position is that creating nuclear waste makes sense.

> Stable, first-world government, a fair few places where we can put it where even leaks wouldn't be a problem, skilled populace, etc etc.

How long does nuclear (fission) waste need to be managed?

How long do you believe that AU has had a stable, first-world government?

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#300

Post by ThomPete »

TFortunato wrote: post #52
ThomPete wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windmill technology is fairly low tech. there are a few things around the wings but besides that it's not really a "tech" business IMO.

No offense, but besides the advanced materials and mechanical design required to keep these things from tearing themselves apart, there is a lot more in the control and optimization software for these that goes into adjusting for changing weather conditions and power demand. I think your suffering from the classic engineer's disease of thinking something is a whole lot more simple than it is when looking at it from t…

I grew up in Denmark the frontrunner on windmills. Vesta is the largest windmill manufactorer in the world. It's literally cultural heritage.

If there is anything which have been debated in Denmark it's the pros and cons of windmills, what the technology is, where the money are, what markets are interesting.

My point wasn't that you can't optimize just that it's not a field where that's a competitive advantage.

So it's the opposite in my case. I know the industry from the inside and know what matters in it and it's not technological advances.

But hey each to their own. I certainly wasn't implying he shouldn't get into the field just that there is a lot less going on than what it looks like on the surface.

Post reply on HN