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Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

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Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#181

Post by genocidicbunny »

TheGRS wrote: post #140
genocidicbunny wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does my not living in a city require that I change my sense of aesthetics? Is my sense of what is and isn't attractive required to be defined by where I live?

I think the whole point is that in cases of aesthetics, we built a bunch of eyesores for utilities and industries in the past anyway. Also I'm sure the next guy is going to say "does my land-ownership not mean anything? Why could my neighbor build an oil field in the past but I can't put up a big wind farm?" It's not black and white like that and trade-offs get made all the time.

> It's not black and white like that and trade-offs get made all the time.

Exactly.

My point wasn't that we should sacrifice everything for the sake of aesthetics, as many replies to my comment seem to have taken. It's that for some people, aesthetics will matter, and you cannot just dismiss that without running into pushback -- pushback which will be even stronger if you're making people feel ignored. That also directly translates to things being more expensive.

Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#182

Post by genocidicbunny »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #165
genocidicbunny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument entirely though. As your yourself said, some aesthetic concerns are dismissed because of utility, but not all of them can be. It's not a fiction that a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land than an equivalent gas or coal plant. So perhaps some of the concerns aren't quite so "status quo extremism" (lovely phrasing though, I'm going to be stealin…

Wind farms also cause noise. You don't want to live too close to a working turbine. I will also agree that they are quite ugly. But that is all fine and we can just build them elsewhere where this isn't an issue.

You can't always 'build them somewhere else' -- wind farm locations aren't arbitrary. Solar is a little less constrained in this way, but still has some location requirements (you wouldn't put a solar plant on a hillside that is shaded half the day.)

There's also losses from transmission of the generated energy. The further you generate from where you use, the more loss you have to account for.

Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#183

Post by genocidicbunny »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #160
genocidicbunny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument entirely though. As your yourself said, some aesthetic concerns are dismissed because of utility, but not all of them can be. It's not a fiction that a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land than an equivalent gas or coal plant. So perhaps some of the concerns aren't quite so "status quo extremism" (lovely phrasing though, I'm going to be stealin…

>It's not a fiction that a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land This argument still baffles me - when we are talking about the US, things requiring a bit more space is laughable. There's SO MUCH UNUSED SPACE that no one cares about, there's offshore space and dual use space no one gives a damn about how is this even an argument. If it'd be orders of magnitude yea that'd be a problem but a few percent?…

> This argument still baffles me - when we are talking about the US, things requiring a bit more space is laughable.

There tend to be fairly good reasons for why so much land is seemingly unused. You also can't just build a wind or solar plant anywhere, there's areas where either the construction is not feasible, far too expensive, or is too remote. Or just not usable for that type of power generation. You also need access to the labour to build and maintain the facility, and that's going to be harder if you're too far from a population center.

Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#184

Post by genocidicbunny »

glenstein wrote: post #109
genocidicbunny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument entirely though. As your yourself said, some aesthetic concerns are dismissed because of utility, but not all of them can be. It's not a fiction that a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land than an equivalent gas or coal plant. So perhaps some of the concerns aren't quite so "status quo extremism" (lovely phrasing though, I'm going to be stealin…

>a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land than an equivalent gas or coal plant The land use talking point is so old that I remember hearing it in high school nearly 20 years ago. And the answer now is the same as the answer then, which is that this is not an apples to apples comparison. Windmills actually don't physically occupy something like 99% of the space over which they are distributed, and they a…

> I do think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument, because like so many other things in this thread, it's this dangling concern with an open unquantified implication for how significant it's supposed to be.

And this is where the fault in your argument lies.

You present a perfectly reasonable, logical argument, that is more or less all correct. What your argument fails to account for is the human element -- humans aren't perfectly reasonable, logical beings. They're soft, squishy and have opinions that they hold despite being logically nonsensical.

By dismissing the aesthetic argument, you're dismissing a lot of the human element. Let's put it this way -- you're not getting permits to build a wind or solar farm if the people you have to get the permit from don't want you to build that wind or solar farm because they think it's ugly. You're not likely to convince them otherwise unless you actually address the aesthetics.

Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#185

Post by ck425 »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #165
genocidicbunny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument entirely though. As your yourself said, some aesthetic concerns are dismissed because of utility, but not all of them can be. It's not a fiction that a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land than an equivalent gas or coal plant. So perhaps some of the concerns aren't quite so "status quo extremism" (lovely phrasing though, I'm going to be stealin…

Wind farms also cause noise. You don't want to live too close to a working turbine. I will also agree that they are quite ugly. But that is all fine and we can just build them elsewhere where this isn't an issue.

Eh? Wind farms cause noise?? A massive windfarm was built on the hills behind the house I grew up on and I never heard any noise, even when visiting the extremely popular walking route that goes through them.

Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#186

Post by ck425 »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #92
gibolt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmission lines absolutely do make noise. Plenty of smaller scale power line elements can also hum. For anyone complaining about offshore wind (which is way the hell off in the distance) it may be worth considering that the alternative is those houses and beaches on the shore cease to exist in the future if we don't build the turbines.

> Transmission lines absolutely do make noise. Plenty of smaller scale power line elements can also hum. Maybe higher power ones can, but I’ve never had residential lines hum. And as for long distance transmission lines - even their noise is nothing compared to what a spinning blade on a wind turbine generates. You can find videos of the noise on YouTube. > For anyone complaining about offshore wind (which is way the…

Having lived near both simultaneously I can tell you power lines definitely do makes noise while I'm genuinely having to google to confirm which wind turbines make noise because I never noticed.

Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#188

Post by t0bia_s »

Meanwhile in Germany they cut 200km² of old forrest to build wind farms, locals are angry.

Ministry of environment said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and to the preservation of nature. This is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.” You cannot make this up.

https://www.bild.de/regional/frankfurt/politik-inland/kaum-n...

Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#189

Post by deepbluev7 »

t0bia_s wrote: post #188

Meanwhile in Germany they cut 200km² of old forrest to build wind farms, locals are angry. Ministry of environment said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and to the preservation of nature. This is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.” You cannot make this up. https://www.bild.de/regional/frankfurt/politik-inland/kaum-n...

Please read carefully if you already share a BILD article. While they claim, that the forest is 200km² big and that it will be completely cut down, there is no actual basis to that. The official documents for that wind park talk about cutting down 29Ha, which would be 0.29km². And not all of that is permanent, some is temporary for access and construction. The permanently cut down area would be about 13.1Ha. None of that is in the actual old growth of the forest. So we are talking about 0.15% or so of the whole area of the forest! You can find more info about this here: https://rp-kassel.hessen.de/sites/rp-kassel.hessen.de/files/...

Now, if you tell me that no tree should be cut down for wind energy, then may I point out that from 2018 to 2021 we lost about 250000Ha of forest to climate change and drought (https://www.scinexx.de/news/biowissen/karte-zeigt-waldverlus...). That is 10 times the size of the forest you were so concerned about. Some sources even talk about 500000Ha if you include 2021 (https://www.geo.de/natur/oekologie/alarmierend--5-prozent-de...). We do need to transition to be carbon neutral to have any chance of stopping that. Cutting down less than a percent of trees for energy production while we have already lost several times that to climate change is not great, but it is much better than continuing to burn fossil fuels to kill the rest of the forests as well. There are no viable alternatives to become carbon neutral in the time frame we have left to my knowledge, so I would agree with the quote.

So please don't ever, ever quote BILD for facts. They have an intentional agenda to mislead people and they either conveniently twist the truth or just make up stuff. Unless you are able to distinguish that, it is best to not read it at all.

Re: Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows

#190

Post by t0bia_s »

deepbluev7 wrote: post #189
t0bia_s wrote: post #188

Meanwhile in Germany they cut 200km² of old forrest to build wind farms, locals are angry. Ministry of environment said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and to the preservation of nature. This is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.” You cannot make this up. https://www.bild.de/regional/frankfurt/politik-inland/kaum-n...

Please read carefully if you already share a BILD article. While they claim, that the forest is 200km² big and that it will be completely cut down, there is no actual basis to that. The official documents for that wind park talk about cutting down 29Ha, which would be 0.29km². And not all of that is permanent, some is temporary for access and construction. The permanently cut down area would be about 13.1Ha. None of…

According to this study, global burned area showed a downward trend in the twentieth century.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...

You should save with "facts" and be more open for debate.

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