Warren Buffett is spending billions to make Iowa 'the Saudi Arabia of wind'
markets.businessinsider.com
markets.businessinsider.com
Long-term investors should factor in their models that carbon heavy industries will be negatively hitted by regulations and taxes. Especially as climate change will get worse and younger generations already overwhelming support such meassures.
Leading world economists such as Jeremy Rifkin points out that carbon assests will likely be stranded and this may be the biggest bubble of our times.
Now what do we do about it? Discounting carbon heavy industries is one move. How much? When will those heavy costs hit?
My own preference is to start coffee farming in North America, to offset the coming end of global shipping. What year will that be, so I can have my crop ready?
Coffee requires a very particular environment to grow, so you are going to spend more energy adapting your local environment to produce coffee that is expended by the shipping of coffee.
What I think will happen is someone will make a completely artificial "coffee flavor" beverage, with added caffeine that the mass market prefers to coffee and doesn't require importing coffee beans.
This is a good resource to determine what is financially viable to assess where to put wind farms. According to the chloropleth, light blue has the highest average wind speeds.
As for the few turbines in the urban areas, they're completely unnoticable. They're silent and just blend into the background.
The only thing I could maybe see as annoying is the red flashing lights they use to help aircraft see them at night. The flashing is at least synchronized so there isn't a constant twinkling effect.
I'm also from Iowa. It's a really eerie effect driving through a wind farm in the pitch dark! I noticed it most recently on 80 near Newton when they put in a wind farm in the last couple years.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/apr...
The state of Jefferson has bright offshore wind future ;)
The long-term costs of climate change and inaction are unfortunately still mostly external costs to energy producers. We should expect that to change as we start developing competencies in evaluating the costs and frequency of weather disasters exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change. We all get to pay for floods, fires, tornados, hurricanes, landslides, blizzards, and the gosh darn heat.
Insurance firms clearly see these costs. Our military sees the costs of responding to natural disasters. Local economies see the costs of months and years spent on disaster relief; on just getting back up to speed so that they can generate profit from selling goods and services (and pay taxes to support disaster relief efforts essential to operational readiness).
The cost per kilowatt hour of wind (and solar) energy is now lower than operating existing dirty energy plants that dump soot on our crops, air, and water.
With wind, they talk about the "alligator curve". With solar, it's the "duck curve". Grid-scale energy storage is necessary for reaching 100% renewable energy as soon as possible.
Iowa's renewable energy tax incentives are logically aligned with international long-term goals:
UN Sustainable Development Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy https://www.globalgoals.org/7-affordable-and-clean-energy
Goal 13: Climate Action https://www.globalgoals.org/13-climate-action
SDG Target 12.6: "Encourage companies to adopt sustainable practices and sustainability reporting" (CSR; e.g. GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards that we can score portfolios with)
https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-develo... :
> Rationalize inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption by removing market distortions, in accordance with national circumstances, including by restructuring taxation and phasing out those harmful subsidies, where they exist, to reflect their environmental impacts, taking fully into account the specific needs and conditions of developing countries and minimizing the possible adverse impacts on their development in a manner that protects the poor and the affected communities
...
> Thanks. How can I say "try and only run this [computational workload] in zones with 100% PPA offsets or 100% directly sourced #CleanEnergy"? #Goal7 #Goal11 #Goal12 #Goal13 #GlobalGoals #SDGs
It makes good business sense to invest in clean energy to take advantage of tax incentives, minimize future costs to other business units (e.g. insurance, taxes), and earn the support of investors choosing portfolios with long term environmental (and thus economic) sustainability as a primary objective.
Better to build these things on land with steady wind, less agricultural value and nearer big population centers, such as Wyoming and Colorado (near the I-25 corridor from Cheyenne to Colorado Springs) or the barren hills on either side of the Bay Area.
Maybe a slightly biased source based on the name, but probably roughly right at least.
A 5x growth in yield over 80 years is due to ethanol political mandates starting around 20 years ago?
One day, we may recognize the problem and pass laws to limit or prohibit the use of chemicals. (I think the horse is out of the barn on genetic modification.) That will mean lower yields. Further, if California's droughts continue, the Midwest may need to start growing a greater variety of crops beyond corn and soybeans. There is no other place in the U.S. with soil as potentially productive and useful. Wasting it on wind farms when literally any other place will have less potential impact on agriculture is ridiculous.
Zoom in to basically any random wind farm in Iowa, and the vast majority of the land area is crops. For instance: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2818954,-93.8007446,2829m/da...
What skin do you have in the game?
I live on a planet and consume food. My family has rural acreage in Wisconsin, too, but that's irrelevant. Privilege doesn't have to stop the ability to think critically.
That you're lobbying to make wind harder to deploy doesn't give you better moral or intellectual clarity, here...
This also ignores the other part of my original comment, which was to build turbines nearer to population centers. Why aren't the hills east of Oakland and southwest of SV filled with wind turbines?
And as far as non-wind clean energy, there are literally zero options that are immune to NIMBYism like you're engaged in here. Not hydro, not geothermal, not even solar... And SURE as heck not nuclear.
There is plenty of space to put up wind turbines without reducing farm land.
There is a lot of prime wind farms land on the hills east and southwest and northwest of the Bay Area. There is a lot of vacant land in the hills above Los Angeles. The Olympic peninsula and western slopes of the Cascades have plenty of room for wind farms to serve Seattle. Same on the east coast: Cape Cod actually had a proposed wind farm that was stopped by the moneyed interests that live there, but that could supply Boston with all the power they need.
What is the answer for not pursuing those areas?
In Iowa, farm land comes right up to the border of urban areas. There is no buffer between them like you're talking about.
This is false, as far as I can tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
> The project is expected to produce an average of 170 MW of electricity, about 75% of the average electricity demand for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket island combined.
Those three areas have ~250,000 people, and are largely residential. Boston has ~685,000, likely with larger per-capita electrical demand due to industry/office space.
I'm sure developers would be happy to if that was the case, but it turns out the valuable locations simply tend to be west central, and the easternmost regions of the mountain states https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/319
> such as Wyoming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokecherry_and_Sierra_Madre_W...
> and Colorado
Added a 600MW farm in 2018 (Rush Creek) following a 600MW farm in 2014 (Limon) and a 550MW one in 2011 (Cedar Creek).
> (near the I-25 corridor from Cheyenne to Colorado Springs)
That's a shitty place to put wind turbines: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Colorado...
> or the barren hills on either side of the Bay Area.
You mean like Altamont? And turns out california has pretty poor onshore wind prospects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_California#/medi...
If not, the ecological niche of eating the dead birds by our wind mills will be filled by some species.
Without knowing any numbers, I suspect the actual impact of wind power bird deaths is wholly insignificant, but it makes us feel bad since they're so visible.
Just like the whales will evolve to avoid humans and the pangolin evolved to avoid the Chinese market, right?
Some whale species live in excess of 200 years. They've only had a generation or two; evolution doesn't happen that fast.
We found a living whale a few years back with a harpoon stuck in it from the 1800s. https://www.foxnews.com/story/nineteenth-century-harpoon-fou...
Doesn't mean things can't go extinct but selection can change a population in a few generations.
Glass curtain walls have already provided competitive advantage to pigeons, parrots, and corvids over sparrows, thrushes, buntings, and warblers.
Some crows have figured out how to use window glass to get free meals. Herd that sparrow flock into the windmill, and the murder feasts below the mast.
Anthropogenic challenges overwhelmingly favor species with higher levels of individual intelligence.
The evolution will be that the dumber birds become endangered or go extinct, while the smarter birds expand their populations.
Bird deaths from windmills are less than other causes.
The number of birds killed by windmills is likely somewhere in the six figures annually. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-many-birds-do-...
> In the end, using 58 mortality estimates that met their criteria, they came up with an estimate. According to the current literature somewhere between 140,000 and 328,000 birds die each year from collisions with wind turbines.
Generally, it's worse along migratory routes, but even then it pales in comparison to other human impacts on birds. As the linked Wikipedia article states, estimates for bird deaths due to plate glass collisions are in the hundreds of millions per year in the US. By comparison, a Canadian study found an average of less than ten bird deaths per turbine per year in that country.
So, it's not zero-impact, and it's definitely something we ought to keep an eye on, but it's not nearly as bad as some people would leave you to believe. To hear the anti-wind lobby explain it, you'd imagine that wind turbines are giant spinning fan blades of death that migratory birds get sucked into and shredded in a cloud of gore. The reality is they have a bit of an impact on birds, but it's not nearly as bad as stuff we do already (like having windows on our buildings).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...
I'd wager it's concern trolling or outright lies more often than misconceptions. The people invoking this rarely give a wit about birds, they just find this a convenient stick to hit wind turbines with, either for denial purposes or for NIMBY purposes. Look no further than sverige downthread.
"It's very hard to evaluate what they're doing," the so-called Oracle of Omaha told the newspaper. "I like to eat candy. Is candy good for me or not? I don't know."
Wow Warren, really? You don't know if candy is good for you? You don't know if de-carbonization is good for the planet? I really don't get his rationale here...candy is a known treat, it is not "good for you" in any nutritive sense. Is he implying that there is a psychological benefit to the candy, even if it's not healthy? How does that apply to renewables and companies?
Overall, I know he's hailed as brilliant at investing, but what is this candy rationale??
It’s “difficult to assess” whether or not an investment will produce a financial return but he doesn’t apply that argument to criticize those who pursue investments with the goal of growing their personal wealth.
I think this is the worst quote I’ve ever read from warren buffet and it makes me very much dislike him.
In the case of candy, he probably thinks sugar isn't good in and of itself and doesn't eat it with a spoon. But it's the overall effect of candy that matters. If it reduces stress, then maybe it's not so bad or even a net good in some amounts or for some people. Warren himself made it to 89 (so far) eating quite a bit of junk food, drinking coke and is still sharp and has enough energy to be working, traveling and so on. Many examples like that, so indeed it's not so simple.
With CO2, he probably thinks there is or can be too much in the atmosphere. But again it's not the whole picture. For one thing, you need to be sure that building and operating the solution (making machines, transporting, maintaining, powering them) doesn't exceed their net benefit.
It's easy to find yourself in a situation where the cure is only marginally better or even worse than the disease. Which happens a lot with complex systems.
Warren is exceptionally skilled at getting to the ground truth. When he says he doesn't know about something that you feel is obvious or basic, then it may be worth re-evaluating your level of confidence.
Remember that SA is killing dissidents and subjugating women and minorities. It's basically an absolute monarchy.
They have also invaded neighboring Bahrain to subdue the democratic revolution there.
I'd choose my comparisons and metaphors more wisely.
Wind energy is fantastic as long as it doesn't kill birds (that depends on the way the wind turbines are built and where they stand).
It's strange how one of the richest men on the planet demands government subsidies though. Or is it just me?
I was basically looking for your comment but you're the only one that decided to look at the uncommon attributes between Iowa and Saudi Arabia. Metaphors compare dissimilar things with common attributes. The common attribute being an energy production behemoth.