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Comment by bigpicture | Hacker News Reader

I've driven through wind farms in middle America and for the most part, each tower has a small gravel pad around it with a gravel access road to the nearest public road. Everything in between is farmed as normal. While the overall footprint is large, the majority of the land continues to be used in the way it has always been used. If all the farmland in America became one gigantic wind farm, I don't think you would see a noticeable difference in agricultural production, especially as the farmers collecting lease payments are going to be able to invest in newer equipment.

So when they say that a downside to wind power is the much larger amount of space required compared to previous expectations, is it in the NIMBY "I don't want to see a turbine when I look out the window", or something else? I'd like to give the authors the benefit of the doubt; I wish they'd spent a little more space explaining the downside of the land requirements.

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I think there was the implied question "can we scale up wind power or are we going to run out of space?" Not all locations are equally suitable for wind power; one of the observations was that capacity per turbine has gone up but overall area required remained constant. That implies that builders have got better at siting them in precisely optimal locations - but everywhere nearby is less optimal. The paper also proves that there is a slight negative return to scale on huge wind farms.

The implications of these are that more area than expected will be required. I don't think there is any consideration beyond that of implications in this paper.

Given what you say about wind farms being placed on traditional farms, I wonder if the localized warming the paper discusses would actually be a benefit to the crops. It could extend growing season just a bit more and maybe help buffer against frosts and cold-snaps.

A lot of farms already use wind turbines to keep freezes away as long as they can. They’re all over California, mostly in orange fields. Some places used to even burn oil at night.

https://extension.psu.edu/orchard-frost-protection-with-wind...

>So when they say that a downside to wind power is the much larger amount of space required compared to previous expectations, is it in the NIMBY "I don't want to see a turbine when I look out the window", or something else?

Extra space means extra dollars. It seems that the necessity for reliable backup power, and overly optimistic output projections figure into wind power's costs being underestimated.

From the article: "The observation-based wind power densities are also much lower than important estimates from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Utility solar installations aren't looking good either: "For solar energy, the average power density (measured in watts per meter squared) is 10 times higher than wind power, but also much lower than estimates by leading energy experts."

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