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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Here's a critique of small wind turbines. Basic problems:

- Unless you're in a fairly windy location, wind turbines are useless. Most places aren't windy enough. Power goes up as the cube of wind speed.

- Tower height is a big deal. You have to go up about 80-100 feet in most places to get good wind. Also, wind turbines on buildings are useless - the building disrupts the airflow too much.

- A small wind turbine is nowhere near as reliable as the average car. So you need to be able to fix something that's 100 feet up. Tilt-up towers are a good thing.

- The turbines themselves aren't that expensive. Here's one for $450 from Wal-Mart.[2] It's nominally rated at 450 watts. It takes 28 MPH wind to get full power. That's not common.

[1] http://www.solacity.com/small-wind-turbine-truth/

[2] https://www.walmart.com/ip/45798215

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Depends what type of wind turbines they are selling, dollar for dollar, you can produce nearly 5x more power compared to solar with this specific turbine, 5kw worth of generating capacity would cost $3500 in solar panels at wholesale costs[1].

This is one of the major reasons you see wind corridors like Eastern Washington & Oregon, or Texas being covered in wind turbines right now, which inevitably end up powering AWS Oregon & Google's massive datacenter in the Dalles and a few bitcoin mining operations with a ton of very cheap power.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_per_watt

all going points. Also they kill birds. I read somewhere that the small ones kill more than the big ones - small ones spin faster?

the project seems a little misguided. India is a sunny place. Never been to India during monsoons, but if it is like costa rica, it'll rain in the mornings or at night. don't get too many overcast days.

The number of birds killed by turbines is extremely small (hundreds of thousands [0]) compared to the number of birds killed by cats (hundreds of millions to billions [1, 2]).

[0] http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-... [1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cats-kill-more-one-billi... [2] (slight counterpoint to 1) http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...

Not to mention cars. I hit 1-3 birds a year in my car. If every car in the US hits one bird a year, that's 300 million birds.

The fact that cats kill birds in no way legitimizes killing of birds by wind turbines no matter the ratio of deaths. The two are unrelated, and one bad thing happening doesn't mean that we should pile on more unnecessary bad things. If anything it's the opposite, we should try not to add to the pile.

It's a big problem only in a few narrow corridors. The California coastal range has a few passes that are both migratory bird routes and good wind turbine sites for smaller turbines. Pacheco Pass is particularly tough, with row after row of older, smaller wind turbines (mostly 65KW) going on for miles. It's like a Veg-O-Matic chopper for migratory birds.

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