Where do they plan to put them...NW? They give out about Bavaria and south but most estimates I've seen only support northern sites as being actually worthwhile. The biggest wind related fallacy apart from farting in public is putting windmills where theres not enough bluster. Could be wasteful and a little late from the German greens imo given recent events.
The south has almost a third of the viable area for wind power generation. The only reason why the expansion there is slow are ideological opposition and NIMBYism.
If anything the link makes it look like everything is equally viable.
Even if a plot is not perfect, consistent wind (well above the ground) can be tapped by tall wind turbines and still be net positive. Ground wind speed is very different from up where they operate
Seems .. referring to the assertion that maybe something is the case
Quiet .. theres insufficient wind here (aerial not at ground level or behind lederhosen) in southern Germany.. maybe we shouldn't invest millions into it
Data .. lack of wind in southern Germany on website dedicated to tracking wind in Europe
Neither are landscapes filled with houses or roads. Or filled with farms, for that matter, or with tree plantations. Germany isn't exactly full of virgin forests. There isn't a single square mile outside of a few inaccessible mountains that isn't completely redesigned to support the human population. All the supposedly unspoiled landscapes nimbyism cries for are really just green (or not quite so green) factories designed to supply human needs. Adding turbines to the mix is hardly more than a tiny tweak.
Considering the size and durability of the foundations and bases (huge amount of reinforced concrete), these will remain peppered in the landscape for centuries.
Of course there's also access and wiring.
Wind farms are large scale, long term, industrial sites. There are not forests or fields...
Covering a country in wind farms (which is literally what's needed to get decent reliable-ish production) is all downsides with a single upside: electricity is renewable with no emissions. Very far from being ideal or even a first choice.
Even if the entire German populace woke up tomorrow in full support of nuclear power, that would not change the immediate issue. We need a lot more electrical energy very soon to phase out combustion as a power source across all sectors (from residential heating to mobility). Waiting for 10+ years for nuclear reactors to be constructed is not a viable solution.
As an example for that "10+ years" timescale, you can look at our direct neighbor France: They are now starting the planning phase on new nuclear reactors that are supposed to go on-line in 2035-2037, so 13-15 years from now. And that's in a country that's a) pretty much all-in on nuclear and b) already experiencing power shortages (that are only offset by the ability to import power from other countries such as Germany).
There was surely a time where constructing nuclear reactors went quicker in Germany, around the 1960s-1970s, but that's because we had an experienced industry at the time. Once you stop building specific things like this for some time, you lose the specialists required to do so.
France is a net exporter of electricity. In fact, it is the largest exporter of electricity in Europe. [1]
At the moment nuclear is the only source that guarantees vast amounts of electricity on demand. I think it's unrealistic to think that wind and solar (at least in Northern Europe) will be enough to meet demand of industrial nations, not least when all vehicles are EV.
By exiting nuclear Germany has both put itself in a corner and committed to continued high emissions (despite their claim that they are going 'green') because they have to keep relying on coal and gas. Ideological dogma is never good.
Nuclear isn't a guarantee at all. Typically, only half of the French reactors are operating. There are a lot of problems:
* a plethora of safety problems, often created due to a lack of maintenance and lax oversight - most famously more than a dozen reactors are offline for years because of corrosion in neglected backup cooling systems
* large reactors require huge amount of cooling water. They usually take water from rivers and release the warmed water right back to it, but rivers often run low in the summer, or are already so warm that rising the temperature any more would kill the river.
* nuclear reactors are hard to regulate below a threshold of about 40% of their peak, which requires base load demand to be reserved just for them if they are to be run.
The last one is almost funny, because the base load problem of nuclear reactors is often somehow portrayed as a benefit. Power production must match power consumption though, so an inflexible power source is a burden. Without the ability to export power to its neighbours, France's reactors would have even less uptime than they have now.
Does a nuclear reactor not run day and night, wind or no wind, in the same way as any other 'traditional' power plant? yes it does. If you build a nuclear plant you know how much you'll get out. You don't with wind farms hence massive margins compared to what turbines are rated for.
With wind you are totally reliant on the weather, which is also why offshore wind tends to work better as apparently wind patterns are more constant and predictable.
Your three bullet points are all strawman arguments.
It's not typical though it is the case at the moment [1] (in French)
The argument is a little disingenuous in any case because temporarily stopping reactors for maintenance, especially planned maintenance (in this case delayed because of Covid), is not at all the same as the inherent uncertainty that sources dependent on the weather (e.g. wind) suffer from.
As said, with nuclear/gas/coal/etc you know what you'll get pretty much day in day out. With wind it's never guaranteed.
Compared to what? We've destroyed the vast majority of nature in the name of progress, setting the cut off point at renewable energy seems a bit weird, especially when the alternative to reducing our emissions is completely destroyed ecosystems and probably having to deal with extreme droughts every other year.
> Compared to what? We've destroyed the vast majority of nature in the name of progress,
What? Since when? Most of the land of the world is still occupied by nature, and with cities expanding and remote villages disappearing the trend is not going against nature as much as you think.
> especially when the alternative to reducing our emissions is completely destroyed ecosystems and probably having to deal with extreme droughts every other year.
all of this is based on modelling that is open to question.
- look up "infrasound" and "undercutting minimum distances", better use something else than Google for this.
- also check the requirements for the base materials: concrete, aluminium, fiber-reinforced plastic. Calculate the energy requirements for producing them.
- familiarize yourself with the space requirements (~ two acres of highly compacted soil, not including access roads)
- duration and disposal
- soil dehydration, other environment impact issues
- ... and as always of course, base load capability and storability
Hello from the Irish midlands! I live near several large wind turbines and think they're awesome. They also help us stop cutting peat for fuel, which is good because it's a unique habitat and one of the best carbon stores in the world.
More than 30 times as many birds are killed by automobiles. The number for pesticides is similar.
More than 50 times as many are killed by buildings.
More than 300 times as many are killed by cats.
The fact that birds are killed in other places is not an argument for making more bird-killing structures when it can be avoided. Especially when the kinds of birds they tend to kill are endangered birds of prey. That is unless the number of bird deaths it causes are negligible.
Yes, it is. We have lots of needs in an industrial society. Torpedoing one effort for marginal benefit when work elsewhere would benefit much more, is astonishingly damaging and wasteful.
No, it definitively isn't! If it was your intention to mention societal needs for wind power this entire time, then why didn't you?
If you don't mention the societal needs, and merely make unsupported claims that "windows kill birds," then you are being woefully disingenuous. Because windows do not kill eagles, but wind farms do! This is an important distinction which your blanket statement does not cover.
As for what's marginal, damaging or wasteful, then why is Germany supporting the construction of a woefully and inadequate technology when they have a much better alterative: Nuclear power?
The Green Party is a result of the Anti-nuclear movement in Germany. They need to do a 180 first, before nuclear in Germany can happen again. That probably happens in the next three months...
That's a red herring. The danger to birds has been shown to be almost negligible when compared to other concrete structures, cars, cats etc. Birds will get killed by a lot of things, it's not reasonable to draw the line at this point.
The Audubon Society notes that hundreds of thousands of birds are killed flying into windmills in the U.S. every year.
They predict that it will increase into the tens of millions, as more windmills are constructed.
Perhaps that number is "negligible" in a relative sense, but why kill birds at all? We should be working to increase the bird population, not adding more ways to kill them.
I'm not an expert, but just a bit of web searching has turned up some alarming studies and predictions. Maybe they're exaggerated; maybe they're one-sided. But it seems to me the problem shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand.
Birds eat ticks and other pests. 50 years ago, flocks of birds were much larger. Huge swarms of birds would descend on a pasture or a green grass yard and pretty much eat all the bugs. This is a beneficial thing.
As the Audubon Society notes, the number is dwarfed by the number of birds killed by house cats and building collisions. But there are even greater threats to birds, like increased use of pesticide and above all - climate change.
Stopping wind power expansion because of the birds that die in collisions is like not extinguishing a building on fire because of fears of the damage the water will do to the building.
That said, many laws include provisions to minimise the harm to birds and bats. Including the German one under discussion.
Cats (as in the pet kind) kill way more bird than windmills will ever manage to. In the US alone over 2 billion every year.
As others have pointed out bats are actually much more in danger of windmills then birds. And they got lots of other problems too (White-nose syndrome)
Not directly but a lot of birds of prey eat other smaller birds which cats do kill in large numbers.
Most birds of prey (well just about any predator species really) are usually endangered not because we directly kill them directly but because we destroy their ability to eat either by destroying the environment they hunt in or lower the amount of prey species available for them.
There are some exceptions like wolves, etc that kill livestock and thus farmers will hunt them usually to the point of wiping out the local population if given the opportunity.
German regulation on wind turbines does not and will not in the future ignore birds.
Absolutist statements aren’t very helpful in that context. Obviously wind turbines do kill birds. The correct consequence of that fact is not to never build wind turbines. It’s to find the right trade off between protecting birds, while still preserving the ability to have a shot at the needed energy transformation.
Bird killings just aren’t bad enough or frequent enough to justify that.
What specific issue do you take with the way this change proposes to deal with birds?
1. Because Germany is still producing 6× more energy with coal than Poland;
2. Because Germany deliberately shut down low-carbon footprint nuke powerplant to please their voters, then built coal-burning plants to compensate for the lack of production.
3. Because Germany is the first economy of Europe and arguably the top political power (which is not the case of Poland, far from it) and thus should be leading bby example.
> It's almost as if Germany proving the model that you can reduce CO2 while turning off nuclear plants that is the underlying problem.
Germany is not proving anything: today is a good day (https://app.electricitymap.org/map), and her electricity is still 4× carbon heavier than France, and closer to Balkan-level than Western Europe level.
> Because Germany is still producing 6× more energy with coal than Poland
That's already not true.
> In 2020, Poland produced 152,208 GWH from primary energy sources, relying heavily on coal and fossil fuels. Hard coal, accounted for 47% of primary energy production in 2020, followed by lignite (24.9 %), natural gas (9.1 %), crude oil (1.6%) and renewables (10.75 %). More than 6% of Poland’s energy was produced by industrial power plants.
In Germany there were 560,000 GWH produced with 16.2% from lignite and 7.5% from hard coal.
According to my napkin calculations that means Germany produced approximately 1.4 times the amount of energy by coal.
>Because Germany is still producing 6× more energy with coal than Poland
Not 6x more. They're producing about 150 TWh from coal for 84 million people while Poland does about 120 TWh for just 37 million people.
Per capita, Germany uses far less coal and with current trends it'll use less actual coal for its 87 million people fairly soon.
>Because Germany deliberately shut down low-carbon footprint nuke powerplant to please their voters, then built coal-burning plants to compensate
That accounts for the slight blip on the graph I linked to above that lasted until 2014. This blip has received an overwhelming amount of attention given that it was relatively small, lasted a few years and coal usage started diving again in 2014.
It was symbolically important to the nuclear industry, but for all the wrong reasons.
Going back in time and building nuclear plants in the 1960-70s probably is the best way to have a relatively cheap, carbon free grid in 2020 but unfortunately it also means that there's an almighty gargantuan bill to pay when those same plants age out in 2030. France is sitting on either a financial ticking time bomb if they choose to rebuild or a potential nuclear disaster if they choose to extend their lifetimes well beyond viability.
It would be great if globabl warming were per capita, too.
> This blip has received an overwhelming amount of attention given that it was relatively small, lasted a few years and coal usage started diving again in 2014.
That's the whole problem, that it stayed a ‶blip″ instead of becoming the foot of a growing curve. No one said that Germany was 80% carbon-free then, only that they nipped in the bud any chance of decreasing their carbon production for the last decade.
> a potential nuclear disaster
Is that much worse than the actual half-a-century running disaster?
I agree with your general claim (Germany isn't half as low in electricity CO2 as many others), but today is far from a good day. Solar is high, I give you that, but wind is almost exceptionally low.
Germany greenwashing stupidity is more irksome than other countries just dragging their feet. It's like being stabbed in the front vs the back.
Germany's behavior also makes it harder for other countries to do what they do. Since it's a unified grid, Germany gets to virtue signal without getting serious about the centralized storage needed to make all renewables possible. Other countries hit the storage needs way sooner because the grid as a whole is already trying to buffer Germany's intermittent power.
We had a government that was actively dragging its feet and, in many ways, hindering progress. You can call that greenwashing, I would describe it as paying lip service to transformation while doing little to get ahead and also hindering progress in certain places when things got difficult.
It never felt very virtue-signaly to me, though.
I‘m all in favor of (critically) giving this new government at least a couple of years until we measure to what extent they were able to clean up that mess.
This, for example, is a necessary step because many of the states have been actively hindering wind power expansion with overly broad regulation. That‘s why wind power expansion fell off a cliff during the last couple of years.
Whether this measure can change that I do not know, but that’s the relevant background and with that context it makes sense why this is happening now.
They've taken the low cost, fast approach to cutting CO2 emissions rather than the high cost, incredibly-so-very-slow approach of commission a bunch of nuclear plants and then burn a LOT of coal and send a lot of money to Russia until they're finally done, over-budget and over-time circa 2040.
Storage is kind of a moot point when half of your grid energy is provided by burning gas. A megawatt provided by wind in 3 years time is 100 euros not sent to Putin - no matter how intermittently it is produced.
The graph above refutes any idea of this being virtue signalling. % renewables is only going up, fast.
> They've taken the low cost, fast approach to cutting CO2 emissions rather than the high cost, incredibly-so-very-slow approach of commission a bunch of nuclear plants and then burn a LOT of coal and send a lot of money to Russia until they're finally done, over-budget and over-time circa 2040.
Stop being a stupid marginalist. The cost of renewables is only cheap when one doesn't both to do the grid storage and other serious steps that make it actually scale to a 100% solution. Then it balloons right back up again.
Any country that cannot build a nuclear power plant on time will also hit delays trying to do other major infrastructure projects like grid-scale storage.
If they were going to turn any of the nukes back on for winter they would have had to have already started. If they started today I doubt there would be enough time, though I'm not an expert.
There's no way The German ans Austrian Greens will ever backtrack on their anti nuclear stance since that's will make them look stupid and loose credibility. Guess we'll just have to suck up to Putin for a few more decades.
You missed quite a lot in German politics. This is no longer true, in fact Habeck already said couple times that if nuclear would still be an option they would do it. Unfortunately it is not, yet every discussion on HN about German energy policy eventually gets back to bashing Greens for „their nuclear policy“. You‘d better ask Merkel and CDU why they decided to shut down nuclear plants faster and build NS2.
Words are cheap, and it's easy to lie about "oh, the decommissioning process has started, we just can't back out".
It's not true. If you look at their "analysis", it has gems like "fuel might be more expensive in the future".
If Russia turned off their NG and oil, Germany could absolutely keep those plants running for decades, with minimal or no safety risk.
Wiki article is interesting, but it does not list two important cost elements.
When there is no wind, we need some other source of energy (for now we don't have any practical energy storage - we don't have batteries and pump storage can work only if we have a big lake on the hill and the other at the bottom of it), this is also cost of having wind power plant.
Since it is not easy to plan upfront when and how big energy deficit might happen, we need to purchase energy on request and this is expensive.
There is also another problem: what if it is very windy and you can add that much energy to the grid? Easy, you just turn off some windmills, the problem is that wind power plants owners does not like that idea, so they also want money if production needs to be lowered beneath some level. Obviously there is some margin, nuclear/coal power plants have some means to slow/speed up electricity production, but only to some extent.
The irony is that we have a energy source, which is "magic", it is clean, predictable, we know how to operate it - nuclear energy plants, but for some reason we are chasing some silver bullet with horrible energy density, that looks bad and is not reliable.
If eco people were not fighting nuclear energy for last 50 years we would have been now in much better shape today. People who wanted to work on nuclear plants in the academia were treated like Holocaust deniers, so we have seen hardly any progress in the field for a long time, that's why we don't have any good way to handle nuclear wastes except storage (if they are radiating, there is energy there, why not to find a way to use it?).
Depends on whether you include the costs of funding a totalitarian state's war efforts in your calculation. In other words: Usually decades, faster with rising energy prices, even faster when accounting for externalities.
Under such accounting, you would also need to avoid sourcing your blades and turbines from totalitarian China, which is emerging as the leading manufacturer.
Suppose China invades Taiwan. Suppose their turbines are assembled using slave labor. In my opinion, we need to incentivize China to clean up its act, not reward them for reprehensible behavior.
Meanwhile we are using devices to type on HN that use that same slave labor from a totalitarian state. Why is it energy we draw the line but not the latest iPhone or the chips in our alarm clocks.
Finally. And yes it will be a good answer to NIMBYsts: "if you don't like to see windmills on the horizon, next year they will be standing right in the middle of your village".
What I'd really like to yell at those people: "if you don't like to see windmills on the horizon, how about a coal mine instead?" - maybe a windmill is the lesser evil after all...
They do complain about those, Germany desperately needs a connector from north (off-shore windparks) to the south (Bavarian industry), but it is not getting done because people don't like the idea of seeing the practical necessities that make their modern lives possible.
iirc(!!!!) parts of the transmission line is planned as "earth" cable, so there will be no poles. This is going to be more expensive and you need to dig trenches(? not sure it is the correct word) in something like a 80-100m wide path.
Again iirc(!), line operators get a guaranteed return of 8%, while land-owners get a low one-time payment.
And maybe the crisis will finally push this, but my guess is, this will take plenty more years until finally being built fully.
> wind turbines look great. They’re a visible symbol of technology, progress, and elegance.
Exactly. Since watching Macross Plus when I was young, wind turbines instill a deep nostalgia in me. Though Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack is likely partly to blame. :)
Simple, cheap, clean, and effective are pretty much the best metrics to optimize technology for. "New" is not a desirable attribute in a technology.
Though I would argue that current wind is extremely new, in the advanced manufacturing methods for such massive structures, in the design of blades and placement on wind farms. And for flaring offshore wind, the engineering is truly impressive. Thinking that modern wind turbines are centuries old tech is like thinking that nuclear power is centuries old tech because it boils water to generate mechanical force.
But again, "new" is not the desirable property, it's only a means to other better attributes.
While things probably aren’t that great for the local wildlife. Consider also the effect on the weather systems for the rest of globe when all that energy that usually goes towards melting ice has no more ice to melt.
It is not only about the looks, but also about the sound. You can hear wind turbines quite clear, and since they emit defined frequencies (as opposed to white noise), the noise can be quite annoying. I would not want to live close to a wind turbine even if I could not see it.
General rule of thumb with wind turbines: the bigger they are, the less annoying the noise (and the drop shadows). They are designed for about the same tip speed from smallest to largest (basically: highest rpm that doesn't make tips go too close to transonic), so rpm is inversely proportional to size. I believe that if turbine size was only constrained by structural engineering and not by transport, they'd be almost as imperceptible as jets passing by at cruising altitude (visible from "everywhere" and also audible if everything else is quiet, but perfectly ignorable ambience).
Perhaps your memory of turbine perception is dominated by some examples that weren't quite as big as you might have thought? It's really difficult to judge the size of those things (they are all "much bigger than a house") if you don't deliberately focus on rpm (this little trick only works in reasonably high wind conditions of course)
No they really don't. I have been standing in a farm of Enercon turbines on nearly full load and it's actually rather quite. The wind in the trees is louder.
It took me a bit to come around to windmills, but I got used to them. It would be pretty tragic if the landscape was homogeneously windmills though (of course, if that's the only way to stave off climate change, so be it).
It did in the past, and could in the far future, but nuclear is incredibly expensive, and the construction logistics are so difficult and slow that it is not a feasible solution for the energy interchange. Perhaps in 2060 or 2070, we could build enough.
Our ability to manufacture has so outpaced our ability to construct that nuclear doesn't really fit modern economies very well.
I probably agree with this for traditional reactors, but I'm not sure if this holds for small modular reactors. A lot of our nuclear dialogue assumes a very narrow kind of nuclear. I don't think nuclear needs to be the only approach, but we should definitely diversify even if one of the options is more expensive.
If we allow SMRs as a feasible tech, that aren't shipping and have no reliable cost estimates, we may as well also assume that advanced storage tech that isn't even shipping will be feasible. Storage companies have a far better track record of delivering on their promises than the nuclear industry does, so the we must assume that engineering of nuclear is too difficult to provide reliable cost estimates ahead of time.
> If we allow SMRs as a feasible tech, that aren't shipping and have no reliable cost estimates, we may as well also assume that advanced storage tech that isn't even shipping will be feasible.
Yes, we should invest in both SMRs and advanced storage, not because we are assuming feasibility, but because we can't know their feasibility without trying them.
> Storage companies have a far better track record of delivering on their promises than the nuclear industry does
I disagree, and anyway I'm not saying "invest in SMRs instead of storage" but rather in addition to because it increases our odds of finding a viable solution and moreover a diverse grid is a robust grid (different energy sources are likely to have different failure modes, such that we have a fallback in case one source experiences a catastrophic failure).
We are researching SMRs, but they're not ready and they may never be. Just this week some research came out showing they make the nuclear waste worse than large scale reactors which would have serious cost implications.
In London, there's this skyscraper with wind turbines on the top[0]. It was supposed to generate some of its energy from these, however due to the vibrations and noise it creates they were turned off.
It probably isn't worth it as rural sites will just be cheaper and easier. Also, there is more of a safety risk when people can go underneath a turbine. In the unlikely event that it topples over it count hurt people. There is also a risk of ice falling off the blades.
Wind turbines are rather noisy and would become an irritation to people living or working nearby. I would think there are limits to how much people should sacrifice for the sake of clean energy production.
Shouldn't the ones doing that sacrifice be the primary users of the energy? That is people living in cities? It should not be forced to those on country side.
People in the countryside are also primary users of the energy. And they're lifestyle is only made possible by people living in cities. Maybe we could compromise and put them on golf courses?
"Germany’s economy and climate ministry will present a package of measures to speed up the expansion of wind energy, documents reviewed by Reuters showed on Wednesday, as the country turns to renewables to cut its use of Russian fossil fuels."
What a brilliant take. Use fossil fuels to make wind turbines? No, let's continue using them to make some other thing, not specified here.
Refusing to build green energy because doing so consumes natural resources does not stop those resources from being exploited. It leads to more exploitation.
Thats a good point. There is a problem around critics guiding only towards a 'reentrenchment' narrative rather than offering (and applying themselves to) some other paths.
I'm not against renewables, but I bring up the above point to proffer that it needs to come with some social niche changes to facilitate less overall energy load.
Vaclav Smil told me personally on a conference in Switzerland, Zürich (he was presenting at the european food service summit), that he does not believe in climate change. That's it for me.
Wow, interesting to hear. I still like some of thoughts he and others have inquiring about net EROEI of renewable energy, but distanced myself from his seeming reductionism around human energy use and blind spots around the social niches leading him in other talks to evangelize cities.
I still recommend reading Energy and Civilization: A History if you were planning to before. It's still good historical perspective. I say that as somebody who believes that AGW is a serious problem that we aren't yet doing enough to curb.
> If states fail to meet the targets by certain deadlines, the government will wave regulations on the minimum distance between residential areas and wind farms.
That sounds like a way to make lots of people hate wind farms.
It's an incentive to accept wind farms in places where they can go within the regulations. Essentially it's a threat - if people reject wind farms far away from them, then they might end up with wind farms much closer.
The expected value clearly is different. The mob primarily destroys and extracts and at most provides a token amount of real protection. The government provides advance warning for them to handle things on their own without further intervention and pursues a net-positive goal of reducing emissions and dependency on foreign fuels.
It's not a threat, it's a statement of preferred outcomes with a "we truly prefer not to do this" fallback in case the preferred solution is not achieved on their own terms.
The incentive here is for them (or their local governments whom they lobbied on the minimum distance rules, which are quite excessive in some cases) to look for alternatives if they insist on NIMBY.
It will only escalate if they don't meet goals and it is telegraphed in advance.
People who hate wind farms have set minimum distance rules that rule out almost all places in their state. The new rules aligns incentives in two ways:
- if resistance is too high on projects that meet the minimum distance rules then you instead get projects even closer to home
- if minimum distance rules are set too restrictive they get waved entirely, so you are better off setting reasonable rules in the first place
We know about how much wind power we need and how much space is needed for that.
Theoretically the federal government can define the regulation around the necessary distance of wind farms to where people live. However, the federal government gave that power to the states – which lead to some states creating very restrictive distance regulations, effectively making it impossible to build many wind farms and making it impossible to meet their targets that are needed for the energy transformation.
This is the federal government giving the states fair warning that those targets are non-negotiable and that it’s the federal government who has the power to make overriding distance regulations. But, obviously, the preference is still for the states to figure this out on their own, depending on their own unique circumstances.
If the federal government were to step in it‘s not as though the would build wind farms in people‘s backyards just to spite the states. They would then just define distance rules that would allow them to meet the wind farm targets. That‘s all.
Wind is great. But consider: at 1.5MW generation capacity max per generator, it takes 600+ of them to produce 1GW. Other commercial generation plants produce many GW (30? 50?)
Wind power may be a red-herring as a generation option for our civilization as a whole.
Sorry if this is disappointing to readers. But unless you want 10,000 wind towers in your county I don't know what other option to suggest.
No facility can produce 30 GW. The new Vogtle reactors are 1.1 GW each, which is pretty typical for nuclear or fossil fuel plant. Steam turbines over 2 GW don't exist afaik.
Also, the median new wind turbine in the US is over 3 MW now.
Eho needs cheap and reliable energy (you know from where as in last half century) or safe a bit more expensive one (wink wink France) when you can build useless wind farms and room whole landscape! Germany FTW, the suicide way, inflation FTW, people can handle anything to die for green energy. Can't wait for more exits from this union detached from reality.
I wonder why nuclear fanboys always attack low-carbon, low-capital renewables with a ferocity that they spare incumbent and well-financed, carbon-spewing fossil fuel power providers. i don't know if we could ever figure out "cui bono"!
The cost has been going down steadily, and even now onshore wind only costs half as much per MWh as nuclear[0], whose cost has been going up. And that isn't even factoring in the long term cost of nuclear.
> unreliable (can you provide guaranteed output 24/7/365?)
Fair. You can only do that with a globally distributed, modern, energy grid that combines solar and wind. Not really a problem with HVDC losses being only 3.5%/1000km nowadays.
On a global scale solar and wind are a remarkably stable energy source.
> and it ruins vast landscapes
I present to you, a brown coal mine[1]. I think wind turbines actually look pretty cool, but I guess that's subjective.
I like nuclear as much as much as the next reasonable person, but your stance on wind energy doesn't strike me as reasonable.
Europe has enough wind potential to power all of the world, strictly energy speaking. Combined with solar, storage, a bit of biomass, and robust transmission, wind is a reasonable generator to go big on (and balances well with solar generation). Green ammonia is probably also a great place to invest to store energy longer term and for transport, considering Europe spinning up planning and building LNG terminals recently.
Just because the raw amount of wind energy available is enough to cover the entire needs of the continent in aggregate doesn’t mean it’s going to magically solve the fact that wind isn’t always available. Energy storage sucks and can’t scale using current tech, where the state-of-the-art is pumping water up a hill. Oh, and you’re going to need that storage because wind is strongest at night which happens to be when demand is lowest. Simply spamming wind towers and hoping for the best is incredibly naive. It’s a critical part of the solution but it’s not the entire solution.
It kinda is the whole solution though. If you’re generating power cheaply intermittently, companies will buy cheap night power, store it, and sell it at peak for a profit. It doesn’t need some magical government body, it’s literally easy business to buy low/sell high and there’s a ton of storage tech out there, ranging from cheap batteries, exotic batteries, pumped hydro, flywheels..
And storage sometimes isn’t even needed. Just overprovision renewables and throw away excess generation you can’t store physically or economically (curtailment). The sun throws off enough energy every two minutes to power humanity for a year, we’re not running out of fusion at a distance.
Or use that excess power for energy-intensive processes that aren't economical to do at normal rates, such as producing hydrogen or jet fuel. (Or perhaps desalination, with massive fresh water storage tanks?)
If the UK built enough wind turbines, it could power itself using nothing but wind energy, without any storage.
The wind doesn't go to 0, ever. You would need a _lot_ of turbines, but that is a solved problem. We have the space and the resources.
Obviously this won't be the solution, nor would any reasonable person want it to be (because there are better solutions available), but I am quite tired of hearing 'but wind is not always available'. It's a true but pointless argument to make (because of the above point).
To clarify -- if you massively overprovision for peak demand, then in times where wind is low there would still be enough energy generated even in peak demand. We could then even sell the extra energy for times when wind is high to neighbouring countries.
There really aren't any other major sources for wind apart from natural gas, at least in Europe. Wind output tends to drop massively in the coldest bits of winter (when demand is highest), and solar output is also very low there. It is also insanely expensive to store energy in batteries for multiple days of low solar/wind output.
Solar energy is even competitive in Norway. In Germany, even flat layed panels (i.e. not angled towards the sun, or even on the side of buildings) are viable.
Technology marched on. Panels and installation are dirt cheap and solar is highly effective.
Installation unfortunately is anything but dirt cheap in Germany, at least not on houses. Currently it is hard finding someone willing to do the work as well.
I agree. But let's be clear, in Europe for the forseeable future installing solar & wind basically 'locks in' natural gas as a backup source.
Also, the price of the natgas plant will be much higher than otherwise - if it's only getting used 10-20% of the year, as capex and opex will be spread over a far fewer amount of kWhs.
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