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Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

Very amusing that the article ends with

   “It’s pretty slim pickings right now,” 
   Ferguson said. “God is not manufacturing 
   more coastal property.”

Part of the concern for renewable energy folks is that you could argue that God is arranging for more coastal property, though not perhaps in ways useful to wind farmers on the Texas coast.

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> Part of the concern for renewable energy folks is that you could argue that God is arranging for more coastal property

Not really though, the overall coastline length will shrink so assuming constant coastal property size, the number will go down not up.

Climate change will make climates in parts of the globe more extreme though, no? Is that beneficial to wind power?

No. More extreme = less consistent, and likely too violent, these are not things you want for wind power.

You want consistent wind within the efficiency band of your turbines. Wind spikes are not a good thing, best case your turbines go into protection (they brake and the blades are feathered), worst case they're on fire. Significant gusts also increase wear of the blades, aging them prematurely and increasing the risk of catastrophic failure.

what about offshore wind farms? More water wouldn't be "so bad". haha. Plus, there was a cool idea about how they could be use in mass to mitigate hurricanes' strength to some degree but I'm not sure how feasible that is

It's going to be great for wind farmers on the Oklahoma coast, however.

I have my doubts that sea level will rise 88 meters.

I was joking of course, but 88 meters is not that far above the sea level if all the Earth's ice caps melted. I think if that happens, it would add up to about 70 meters. So Oklahoma is safe, but it would get a lot closer to the coast.

Hopefully we can prevent all ice caps melting, and even if they do melt, the process would probably take 1000 years (+/- an unknown number of centuries based on how this plays out, how much we manage to mitigate or accellerate it, etc.).

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