Interestingly, the very first statement is quite misleading. The statement:
> On average, a humble wind turbine uses less land area per megawatt-hour than almost any other power source.
The article itself refers to this citation [1]. It says, unsurprisingly, that the most land efficient power source is nuclear. The statement is of course technically true because it says "almost any power source".
With wind, however, even that is tricky because you can either count just the area directly below the turbine body, which is still higher than nuclear and unreasonably optimistic because you severely limit a far bigger area. If you count also the spacing (too pessimistic on the other hand because part of the land might be used for farming) then wind farms range across the whole scale of land efficiency.
I think its fair to say that land use of wind farms is "complicated", but saying its almost the best in this regard sounds like manipulation.
Wind turbines can be built big enough that the blades, at the lowest point, are higher than almost all other land uses, except perhaps forestry.
To be honest, the access roads are probably the biggest real impediment to using the land around a wind turbine. Can't exactly farm millions of acres of corn with robotic combine harvesters with a criss-cross of access roads to the base of every turbine.
That's a turbine in the middle of active farmfield, off a dirt road, servicing a town a bit under a mile away that is barely 10 city blocks wide at its widest point. In the middle of Iowa.
My point just because you can build the turbines to clear everything, there are areas in this nation where there's just no point to doing that; and it's more economical to just make them shorter and put the money towards something more useful
OK, I think I agree but I was responding to london. The idea that wind turbines and large-scale corn cultivation are incompatible is contrary to an abundance of counterexamples.
I'm not sure robotic combine harvesters are a real concern (yet ?) - modern "manned" harvesters are already crazy effective and fast & I've seen them navigate some pretty crazy field geometries at times, so I'm sure they can handle a straight road.
> Can't exactly farm millions of acres of corn with robotic combine harvesters with a criss-cross of access roads to the base of every turbine.
You certainly can; single-objective suboptimality is not the same as impossibility. But perhaps this would be an excellent use-case for heavy-lift dirigibles.
Odd shapes and constantly starting/stopping the plougher/seeder/harvester mean you get less ROI on your equipment. Farming is super tight margins - if your machines waste 20% of the time starting and stopping every time they pass over a road, your farms profits are wiped out.
This is true whether the machines are robot driven or not, and it's the reason most commercial farms have huuuuuge fields rather than lots of small ones.
Why would the access roads create a complex shape? Fields already have access roads. Either the farm is flat and the turbine access roads can be on a minimally invasive grid or the turbines are on a hill and the fields are already a complex shape.
I have trouble imagining that the cost of interrupting your seeder or lifting your plough every quarter mile is really higher than the profit generated by the wind turbines.
Sounds like the article used just the right wording then.
“…less land area per megawatt-hour than almost any other power source.” As I read it this implies there is one (or some very small percentage) power source which uses less land per megawatt-hour, which is exactly the case.
I'm wondering if the OWID data takes the 3,400km^2 of exclusion zone from Fukushima and Chernobyl (more like 5,000km^2, see below) into account when calculating the average size of a nuclear plant?
I think if we're saying the space beneath the blades can count towards aggregate wind-power land use, an argument can be made to include nuclear wasteland in the aggregate nuclear-power land use.
>Of course it doesn't. We don't build nuclear generators with pre-approved unusable exclusions zones. This is a ridiculous suggestion.
I'm not suggesting we assign 5,000km^2 to each individual nuclear plant, just in case they explode. I'm suggesting the 5,000km^2 that currently exists as barren nuclear wasteland should be included in the total land attributed to nuclear energy. That would bring down the average generated energy per km^2 pretty significantly.
The dataset does what I've suggested for hydroelectric. The dams are relatively tiny (and in fact, would outperform both wind and nuclear in this dataset), but they render huge areas unusable. The unusable collateral land is attributed to hydroelectric power, as it should be.
It stands to reason that collateral damage caused by nuclear should be included, if collateral damage by hydroelectric is too.
At least we can put lots of nuclear plants in that 5,000 km^2 area so that definition becomes irrelevant for this discussion. Maybe putting the absolute maximum power generated if we turn all available lands to that purpose only is the best metric
It appears it's not far from the truth. According to https://www.britannica.com/story/nuclear-exclusion-zones it's 4100 sq.km. for Chernobyl and 371 sq.km. for Fukushima (800 sq.km. at peak) which isn't an exaggeration. Interesting.
I see. You weren't saying the size was exaggerated. You were saying that the unusable land was being exaggeratedly described as "barren nuclear wasteland". It's unusable land, so it is nuclear wasteland, but it isn't barren AFAIK.
> Should we consider the potential blast radius of the catastrophic failure of wind turbines as well?
Please? (Not as policy, just, like, in general.)
I imagine falling over and/or yeeting a blade-tip is about the worst thing they're going to do, right? I've know they can burn, but I don't think they explode. What's literally the worst that could happen?
There are nuclear plants that have been decommissioned and have not exploded. So using just this data, there is a probability that a given nuclear plant will melt down in its lifecycle. And that probability is greater than 0, but far less than 1.
Yes but wind turbines can’t melt down in that way. Even in a worst case scenario the literal blast radius is smaller. This has to factor in to the possible locations.
> It says, unsurprisingly, that the most land efficient power source is nuclear
Not true if you factor in waste storage and the time to store it
Long after all the nuclear energy has been used making your toast, and long after many cycles of climate change, you will still be storing hi level nuclear waste, and monitoring it.
But who cares about tomorrow? Party on, and let future generations pay!
Take simple chemical pollution, for example with lead - as far as I can tell, it stays around forever and we,ve poisoned vast landscapes with it during mining coal copper for example.
Or take simple industrial waste , say wind turbine blades, they go to landfill, sure they aren’t hurting anyone but there are a lot of them- does it count?
> On average, a humble wind turbine uses less land area per megawatt-hour than almost any other power source.
The article itself refers to this citation [1]. It says, unsurprisingly, that the most land efficient power source is nuclear. The statement is of course technically true because it says "almost any power source".
With wind, however, even that is tricky because you can either count just the area directly below the turbine body, which is still higher than nuclear and unreasonably optimistic because you severely limit a far bigger area. If you count also the spacing (too pessimistic on the other hand because part of the land might be used for farming) then wind farms range across the whole scale of land efficiency.
I think its fair to say that land use of wind farms is "complicated", but saying its almost the best in this regard sounds like manipulation.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source