I remember seeing the windmills for the first time in person when I was in my teens, on a flight from Boston to Copanhagen. I saw another "field" of them as my boat left port in Denmark.
They were incredible to look at, just mesmerizing. They were beautiful, gorgeous in more than just their form. That something so bold and elegant could create meaningful amounts of power blew my mind. I remembered reading about lakes and ponds in New Hampshire that had no persistent human contact but tested positive for mercury from coal plants. Looking at these windmills was like staring into a vision of the future. Looking at them, I had never felt so optimistic about technology before.
When I got home I went on the internet to read about wind power and see if there were any initiatives in my home state or Massachusetts. The negativity I found in the papers was its own mind-boggle.
They do complain about views and noise in Europe too. But with a functioning government their concerns are overruled by the majority who doesn't have a view of the coast.
I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day.
As far as power generation I'm amazed the ground windmill approach is as popular as it is. It's not efficient. It has serious limitations. Seems like a craze. But then the incredibly inefficient coal plants were a craze too. Electric lights and vacuum cleaners, how did we live without them! We can make coal plants far more efficient. A 10% efficiency increase would be bigger than the renewable industry in the US. We can also make wind kites which make a lot more sense. Lets see if we bother.
"I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day."
Is looking at them significantly worse than looking at the car traffic on a major street in the rush hour? As far as the sound is concerned, I doubt that the effects are anything more than purely psychological. There are established hygienic limits for a reason.
Be careful to dismiss things as 'purely psychological'. Psychological disturbances affect people as much as physical disturbances, and in the end a psychological disturbance is a physical disturbance in the brain.
Listening to them is problematic if they are too close to where you live. They're pretty loud, and it's a rhythmic low frequency drone sound. There are distance limits, but in places like Denmark where there is not a lot of room left to build them away from residences, there have been efforts to reduce these limits.
If I had to hear that pulsing all day, every day, during my sleep, for the rest of my life...I could see it being a problem.
"They're pretty loud, and it's a rhythmic low frequency drone sound."
I've seen some studies that indicated that the infra-sound levels from city traffic are significantly stronger than the noise coming from wind turbines conforming to established noise regulations. Do people have problems with the wind turbine noise? Some perhaps do, but why isn't the even stronger car noise a reason for a radical change in car noise hygienic limits within cities? It would be a hypocrisy to tackle one due to public pressure and ignore the other.
EDIT: Oh, and I also vaguely recall that the low-frequency sound caused by the wind interacting with buildings around you is also supposed to be stronger than the same frequency sound coming from distant wind turbines. (The stronger the wind, the stronger the noise from both sources, so it's always comparable.) It makes sense, if you think about it. The law of inverse squares and all that jazz.
"If I had to hear that pulsing all day, every day, during my sleep, for the rest of my life...I could see it being a problem."
I live next to a major city exit road. Before that, I lived in a house that had a freight railway station across the street. I've never noticed any problems.
There are some in depth documentaries and reports on it. I think the main issue is windmill hating people live in extremely quiet places and when you add any noise to them it's more distracting than already living in a louder area. Plus they occasionally make loud noises.
That said, the question of why those people are living in the middle of nowhere doesn't come up at all. I think that's the more important issue. If you want to reduce the environmental footprint, reducing the size of sprawl and suburban/rural population size would save a lot of energy.
"I live next to a major city exit road. Before that, I lived in a house that had a freight railway station across the street. I've never noticed any problems."
For you, no problems. For others, there might be.
And if you do have a problem for example falling asleep when there is sound, the sound from the turbines is nasty as with such low sound you can't block it with earplugs.
I'm not saying you should care, just a fyi that some people do have to care about this for their own sanity.
I can tell you the sound is NOT purely psychological. I used to around 1-2km away from one. When the wind came from "the right" direction, it sounded like a thunderstorm.
I can't even imagine what it is like living even closer to one.
While the view may be a rather weak argument, wind power doesn't make much sense. Nuclear power is just a better way to produce energy. It's cheap, stable and just as environmentally friendly. It's too bad that politics prevent it's usage, adoption and development in so many countries. There's very little research on thorium power, too, which would solve most of the remaing negative points about nuclear power.
In case you didn't realize it, you're arguing that wind power doesn't "make much sense" on an article describing an entire nation implementing almost 25% of its total electric power demand via wind, and planning to raise that to 50% within a decade. I'm just reminding you in case you didn't realize that.
The only problem described in the article is having too much energy (crikey Moses, what a nightmare, we have to fix the grid). If a wind turbine falls over, the impact is a little less than if a tsunami envelops a nuclear plant, isn't it? Not to mention dealing with waste for hundreds or thousands of years? (I'm not anti-nuclear, just not delusional about its downfalls, and let's face it, there are many. Thorium has waste too.)
>In case you didn't realize it, you're arguing that wind power doesn't "make much sense" on an article describing an entire nation implementing almost 25% of its total electric power demand via wind, and planning to raise that to 50% within a decade.
So your argument is that if a country uses wind power, then that's evidence that it's better than other forms of energy production? That's a non-sequiter. There are many countries that produce 25% or more of the electricity using coal, nuclear, hydro etc. I'm not arguing that wind power cannot be used at a large scale. I'm arguing that other forms or energy production are better.
>The only problem described in the article
I didn't claim that the article provides the arguments that I hold for my opinions.
I didn't make an argument in that paragraph. I pointed out that a nation of people is making 25% of their power from wind, and plans to increase that to 50% before the decade is out, and you came here to argue that it doesn't make sense. It's surely making sense for them, so what can we learn from that?
I should know better than to get involved in threads like these since they're just mud-sling contests. Between you and penny500, I'm about out of HN patience for the day.
>It's surely making sense for them, so what can we learn from that?
Just because a country does something, it doesn't mean it's the smartest thing to day (you can deduce that logically by realizing that different countries adopt different policies).
It could be the smartest thing for that country to do; it would be foolish, for example, for Afghanistan to get freshwater by desalinating seawater, but would make a bit more sense for nations with a coastline.
"an article describing an entire nation implementing almost 25% of its total power demand via wind"
25% of its electric power demand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Denmark#Overview seems to put that at less than 5% of total energy (production minus export is 230 TWh in 2010; electricity production 35 TWh) corrections welcome; couldn't find a better source without effort)
He didn't write that wind power doesn't make sense for the United States. He wrote that it doesn't make sense, period. You just put words in his comment, then used the words you invented to dispute me instead. I loathe when people do that. You might argue that contextually, given the comment he was responding to, I should have inferred some kind of Americentric context but he goes on to write "nuclear power is better," so there you have it.
You might see that as pedantry, but since I'm an American I'm acutely aware of how Americans like to say "that would never work" when what they actually mean "that would never work for Americans." The United States is enormous and the #1 consumer of electric energy, yes, and we need to plan accordingly. That doesn't mean ideas are bad in the general, it just means things won't work for us due to our size, as you astutely observe. Google could never scale PostgreSQL to handle their index; does that make PostgreSQL silly? You're automatically writing off all future development that you could never possibly know when you dismiss a technology because it doesn't work in one case.
I like to use every opportunity I get to point that out, so my fellow Americans will stop doing it and making us look like self-absorbed, spoiled people internationally, an assumption reinforced by our general diplomatic and military behavior on the world stage.
Calm down. No one put words into his mouth. You, however, did put words into my mouth, which I find quite astonishing.
Those windmills currently cover 1 million people. The world has 7 billion people and growing quickly. You really think windmills are feasible for Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, Russia, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, Argentina, Turkey, Colombia, Ukraine, or South Korea? (I can list several more if you want.)
I am quite calm, and I never wrote that anybody did.
> You, however, did put words into my mouth, which I find quite astonishing.
I think you need to look up what "putting words in someone's mouth" means, because I did nothing of the sort.
> Those windmills currently cover 1 million people. The world has 7 billion people and growing quickly. You really think windmills are feasible for Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, Argentina, or South Korea?
If power consumption had any sort of meaningful relationship with population, I might consider your argument remotely plausible. You're basing your entire argument on the flawed assumption that power consumption scales linearly with population. It doesn't, and you have reading to do[1].
Just as one example, the United States is the world's #1 electric energy consumer, beating both the whole European Union and China, but China has more than quadruple our population. As another example, India's population is quadruple ours, as well, yet about one-quarter our electric energy demand[2].
This is completely economically illiterate. China is a developing country. As a result, it uses less electricity than its developed counterparts. As China grows, it will be using much more electricity. Just look at their energy consumption trend since the late 70s. That applies to India, Russia, Indonesia, and any other developing country in growth mode.
Oh, and guess what. China passed the USA in energy consumption in 2010.
> As a result, they use less electricity than its developed counterparts.
It's almost like that's valuable information when we're discussing an electricity generation technology. You wrote this without qualification in terms of what you meant:
"Those windmills currently cover 1 million people. The world has 7 billion people and growing quickly."
I replied to exactly that, and you're calling me economically illiterate for pointing out the economic illiteracy in your original comment? You cannot be that stupid. There is absolutely no way. You have to be a troll.
> China passed the USA in energy consumption in 2010.
Total energy consumption, notably oil due to the sudden increase in automobiles in China since the 1990s once private citizens became able to own automobiles. China currently builds more automobiles than all of Europe, because demand is absolutely through the roof. So it would make sense that China passed the United States in total energy consumption rather quickly. We're discussing electric energy, remember?
You cannot be that stupid. There is absolutely no way. You have to be a troll.
I think it is more likely that you simply misunderstood the point he was trying to make, which is that the growth curve[1] matters.
We're discussing electric energy, remember?
You're right to point out the demand for automobiles in China, but that has a great deal to do with rapid urbanization and economic growth, which has had a similar effect on electricity consumption.
There's no reply button for me underneath your threads initially until some time passes. I guess that's how HN works for some. I'll respond to your latest comment here.
> If you say things like "we have a lot of people, so wind power won't work for us,"
Don't you just hate it when people put words into your mouth? Yeah, point me specifically to where I said or implied that.
tiredofcareer, thanks for calling me stupid. This conversation has surely turned professional. It's quite funny when you espouse economically illiterate statements, then question the intelligence of others.
Electricity consumption depends on GDP. Just google those phrases, and you'll find a plethora of sources to confirm the relationship. I listed a graph for you [1]. Because China is growing at 7%, its electrical consumption will only continue to increase. Yes, if two countries of have similar GDPs, the one with the higher population will consume more electricity.
The US would require roughly the same amount of windmills per capita as Denmark. (There's a chance that the average Dane uses less energy than the average American, but I can't be bothered to look that up...)
The cost per capita in the US would be about the same as in Denmark. Probably less, due to economy of scale.
"As advances in turbine technology allow areas of moderate wind resource to be developed, more than a tenfold increase in the wind energy potential is possible. These areas, which cover large sections of the Great Plains and are widely distributed throughout many other sections of the country, have the potential of producing more than three times the nation's current electric consumption."
If 5 million Danes can afford to build X windmills, I don't see how 60-ish times 5 million US citizens can't afford to build 60-ish times X windmills.
Population density would be an argument (on average, higher population density means less wind power per capita), but there, New York probably has more land area nearby than Denmark.
Yes, but Danes are quite prepared to pay 25% VAT and up to 62% income tax so that among many other things, The (evil statist) State can afford to buy hugely expensive turbines from Siemens just to avoid giving money to Arabs. And those loaded Norwegians.
Americans, apparrently, while in huge numbers, in thrall to Rand/Objectivism and the Kochs, are not.
It doesn't make much sense to just compare the two countries by raw population numbers. Denmark has a population density of 130/km2 (or 336.7/sq mi), which is obviously vastly less than NYC, but almost 4 times that of the US. If Denmark was a country with enormous amounts of windmills and small pockets of actual humans, this wouldn't be much of a feat. But for a relatively densely populated country, it seems worth noting.
Though if you actually need land proportionate in size, and with the geography of Denmark - so flat that the highest point is no more than 171m - to service 300 million people, you might be out of luck (I don't know how much of a role this plays).
Nuclear as commercially implemented today is uninsurable. Even without insurance, a nuclear power plant is an extremely complex, capital intensive machine. The technology may be perfectly sound, with scientists able to control it perfectly, but the problem to me is the top heavy organisational structure. The management water head.
I do agree more research is needed towards passive security compact scale fission using thorium. After investing a lot of money into harvesting wind, that is.
Yeh, this is the thing I always find a bit suspicious about nuclear power. If noone is prepared to price the risk (and can also realistically pay out on a claim) then how can you ever come up with a $/KW price for comparison?
"Just as environmentally friendly"? Since when did Wind power require long term storage of waste?
Nuclear power depends on public trust (which is reflected in politics). That trust was just about built up again after Chernobyl when Fukushima happened. Now we'll probably have to wait another 20-30 years (except in China and India, which as both actively pursuing nuclear energy).
>"Just as environmentally friendly"? Since when did Wind power require long term storage of waste?
Never claimed it did. However, the single property/factor of "does it require long term storage of waste" does not determine environmental friendliness, although it's certainly a factor. There are a multitude of factors that people base different weights on. Carbon emissions is a good starting point, and nuclear is even with wind on that one.
So, if wind energy doesn't create waste, doesn't require mining and enrichment and doesn't have a chance of causing a major environmental disaster, how can you claim nuclear energy is "just as environmentally friendly"?
What fantasy world do you live in where the components (both structural and electrical) of a wind turbine require no mining?
Either way though this whole discussion is just ridiculous. Nuclear isn't competing with wind, it's competing with fossil-fueled thermal generation. All of the wind energy that Denmark is producing per this article is less than 1/6th of a single Canadian nuclear power plant (Bruce N.G.S.).
Of course the construction material requires mining. My point was that there is no way you can plausibly claim that nuclear and wind power are equally environmentally friendly. I'm really tired of all the pro-nuclear people here that can't wait to trash any renewable energy as utopian and irrelevant while downplaying the downsides of nuclear power.
A team of journalists just discovered the barrels of nuclear waste that the UK threw in the ocean. 17,000 tons of nuclear waste just near the British island Alderney.
"It is just as environmentally friendly." Yeah, sure.
>"It is just as environmentally friendly." Yeah, sure.
Bad policies implemented in a single country doesn't determine environmental friendliess of a energy production technology as a whole. Obviously a nuclear power plant is not environmentally friendly if the waste is not taken care of.
No, but you can't promote an energy source on the basis of some idealized dream where every ounce of waste is properly taken care of, when the reality is different. If the UK has handled waste in this way, do you think other countries have handled, or will handle it any better?
I'm not arguing that it is fine to drop stuff in the oceans, but that first one doesn't sound that dangerous:
"Die britischen Fässer enthalten nach Angaben der IAEA 58 Billionen Becquerel, die belgischen 2,4 Billionen Becquerel Alpha-, Beta und Gammastrahlung. Der EU-Grenzwert für Trinkwasser liegt bei 10 Becquerel pro Liter."
So, there's about 6 * 10^10 Becquerel radiation there, while the EU allows 10 per liter. If so, mixing this with 6 * 10^9 liters of water would dilute it enough to be within EU limits. That's 6 * 10^6 cubic meter. If the stuff got dropped over an area of a square kilometer in a depth of 6 meter, you would already get there.
So, I expect at worst, localized contamination of sea water.
Also, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs291/en/: "The WHO guidelines for drinking water quality recommend repeated measurements to be implemented if radon in public drinking water supplies exceeds 100 Bq/l.". That puts that 10 Bq/l EU norm into perspective.
Nuclear Power in its current state of developement isn't really ready, because of the huge complications it can generate when not kept in a perfect order. Even so-called "This nuclear can never go wrong because of its design", have proven not perfect, usually due to human errors. I don't mean to come of as an anti-nuclear, I just look at the various incidents that have occured, although usually minor, it only takes one big, to screw things up.
The nuclear power I look forward to, and which i think is the real hero to come, is fusion power. The way it works, it simply cannot physically create disasters similar to fission, because it needs energy to create energy, and if the energy stopped, the output would stop. Additionally to that, it doesn't generate the nuclear waste products associated with fission power, and can thus without worry be installed in more problematic countries.
We have already had a big accident though. It was called Chernobyl and it did not even come close to being as dangerous as other forms of energy production spread out over time. Since then nuclear power has only become much safer, the problem with nuclear power is not a technological problem. The problems is merely a political problem brought about by the irrational mind of humans and our poor ability to reason about risk.
Really? Tell that to the tens of thousand of USSR 18-20 yo soldiers, that were called biorobots during the cleanup. 100% of them either died or ended with very serious cases of cancer and kids with malformation. IMHO one has to be literally mad to advocate for nuclear power.
The problem with nuclear power is trust. That trust was broken with Chernobyl, and broken again with Fukushima.
Pre-Fukushima, most pro nuclear people would argue that the chance of a nuclear accident in an first world country was close to zero. Even I used to argue that.
Now we can say that with new safeguards of more modern reactors that the same kind of accident can't happen again, and it might very well be true. But the voting people will be less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt. They will rather accept a known and quantified danger instead.
Yeah, they would rather accept the known and quantified danger that kills more people per year than if we had a Chernobyl meltdown every single year. That was my point, its not necessary for there to not be another Chernobyl for nuclear power to the best option and the fact is that it is extremely unlikely for that to ever happen again.
Supposedly modern and completely harmless reactors in sweden have had varying degress of incidents, where maybe some control systems malfunctioned or staff missed some stuff.
This is the kind of, sloppy mistakes that humans make, and aslong as humans is what keeps nuclear reactors from a disaster, I don't consider them safe, which is not to say that they aren't immensely helpful for the environment and energy production while they are in good condition. But the peoples lack of trust is warranted.
I don't get it. It's easy to guess that "well, the rich of course are going to manipulate the political process to protect their privileged position, even if it means those less well off and society at large will be the worse for it." Which is plausible at first, considering who fossil fuels hurt and whom wind farms "hurt."
But it's not like Europe doesn't have entrenched economic interests, and it's not like those entrenched interests wouldn't have captured the political process. What's so special about the USA that gives ridiculous outcomes?
There are a lot of differences, but I think two economic factors help it in Denmark (ok, I ended up writing mostly about the 1st):
1.
If you think of the country of Denmark itself as a large corporation of sorts, its goal in the international market is to go high-end. The workforce is too high-wage to compete on regular manufacturing, cheap worldwide food prices mean the traditionally important agriculture sector now contributes a mere 5% of GDP, and it doesn't have the oil of Norway. So it's the only choice really: to be a leader in high-skill services, R&D, and high-end manufacturing.
[This paragraph is an aside:] This view underpins lots of stuff that goes on in both the governmental and industrial sectors. As one example, there is a goal that within 20 years, 100% of Danes will earn a college degree, and 50% (!) will go on to get a masters degree, in order to position the country's workforce as highly educated, almost like a 6-million-strong consulting shop. They're willing to pay for it, too: there is no tuition, and students receive a modest living stipend. The similarities to a company are surprisingly deep, e.g. the unemployment program is even run a lot like an HR department, viewing un/underemployed people quite literally as potential "human resources" who can be used to plug labor shortages elsewhere, with the right matchmaking and training. On the services side, it's been reasonably successful, though honestly in part due to good fortune in making the transition: Carlsberg and Maersk are huge parts of the Danish economy, despite the fact that actually brewing beer and building/sailing ships are long-gone as mainstays of the economy. They managed to transition into having Danes as the managerial class of global companies when the manufacturing jobs moved elsewhere. It's not hard to imagine an alternate-history scenario where Copenhagen ends up as a poor post-industrial city full of derelict shipyards, instead of a rich post-industrial city full of loft conversions in former shipyards.
Wind energy has been a lynchpin of the R&D and high-end manufacturing part of the strategy for a while now, from both the public and private sides. Denmark's location makes wind a reasonably good choice among the various things you might want to pursue in the energy sector (I wouldn't recommend a solar-based strategy here). And so it's become not only big domestically, but a major export business. Denmark-based Vestas has long been the #1 worldwide wind-turbine manufacturer, one of the few global "#1s" in a country of 6 million. You can aso see it in the "branding strategy" of both the government (http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/wind-energy/) and the industrial sector (http://www.windpower.org/en/). And it spills into other things, e.g. "smart grids" to manage the variable load of wind energy are now a big R&D initiative at the university I'm at, with hopes that Denmark will become a leader in smart-grid tech too.
So what I'm getting at is: domestic wind farms are rather multi-purpose. They do serve a primary function of actually generating energy. But they also serve a secondary function of building up the wind-export sector, and another secondary function of building up a certain image that Denmark wants to project, of a 21st-century R&D and high-end manufacturing hub, and of generally being "ahead".
2.
Many of the wind farms are organized as consumer cooperatives, so have broad-based ownership, which produces built-in supporters. For example, the farm offshore of the island of Amager (just east of Copenhagen) is co-owned 50% by the municipality, and 50% by a cooperative with 10,000 members.
Visit somewhere in California where a pristine mountain side with trees and red rock was just 10 years ago, and not it is nothing but wall of spinning white blades of bird killers.
Wind is like water. You can't just slow it down with your turbines and expect no environmental impact. Putting them on the windward side of a mountain reduces the rain fall on the opposite side. Birds die in the blades. It isn't all rainbows and butterflies.
"Previous studies had suggested that cats kill about 500 million birds a year. Marra's group came up with something very different. "We estimate that cats kill somewhere between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds a year," Marra says. "For mammals, it's upward of about 15 billion."
"Marra says based on those new figures, cat-caused mortality far exceeds deaths from other sources, like collisions with cars or wind turbines.
As these things go, it's one of the more unobtrusive options. Compare it to, for example, an open cast coal mine. (It's even probably cheaper to knock down the turbines than it is to fill the pit back in.)
But as far as the new ones: I recently moved offices in Copenhagen, to a 5th-story office looking east towards the Øresund. I think the offshore wind farm there adds substantially to the view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middelgrunden). It's especially nice on overcast, windy, gray days, when you can see the white turbines rotating in the fog. But it's nice on sunny days too, at least in my opinion. Here's a snapshot from my window: http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/598966_1010047304...
And if you get closer, e.g. at Amager Beach, it's even nicer (again imo). It's like a modernist kinetic sculpture or something, an aesthetically pleasing series of 20 massive but sleekly styled turbines in a row.
isn't it funny that the first windmills are reminiscent of oil wells, and current solar projects (in the US) are large solar arrays, blending again with the existing large-scale infrastructure? maybe this similarity is lofty associated, but i find it interesting.
However, in Denmark you can make an interesting experiment in several places. You can place yourself so that you are in 100-500m from a windmill AND have a road with traffic between you and the windmill.
What kind of noise, vibrations and view do you think are significant in that situation?
You love technology. But not everybody does. Some people like to live in the city, some people like to live in the country. Some people like to keep technology from enveloping their entire lives.
Is one viewpoint inherently more right than the other?
They were incredible to look at, just mesmerizing. They were beautiful, gorgeous in more than just their form. That something so bold and elegant could create meaningful amounts of power blew my mind. I remembered reading about lakes and ponds in New Hampshire that had no persistent human contact but tested positive for mercury from coal plants. Looking at these windmills was like staring into a vision of the future. Looking at them, I had never felt so optimistic about technology before.
When I got home I went on the internet to read about wind power and see if there were any initiatives in my home state or Massachusetts. The negativity I found in the papers was its own mind-boggle.
Do you know what they complained about? The view.