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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever been to Iowa? I suspect you haven't. Look at literally any wind farm in Iowa via satellite, and the vast majority of the land is taken up by crops: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2818954,-93.8007446,2829m/da...

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I grew up in Iowa. I inherited 160 acres of prime farmland from my grandparents and parents. I actively participated in the successful lobbying of the county commissioners in the county where my property is located to change the offset rules for wind turbines to make life livable for the people directly affected by them. I personally turned down the offer to build turbines on my land.

What skin do you have in the game?

That's astonishing, then, that you weren't aware that wind farms share land with productive farms just fine.

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...

When you do the research, you discover that wind is not the panacea it has been portrayed to be. Building and placing turbines is not carbon neutral, the cleanup costs of decommissioned turbines are completely ignored because they are 40 years out, and they are not very profitable without subsidies. There are better alternatives that are less destructive to the environment.

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?

We need to fire on all cylinders, here, to fight climate change.

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.

Have you invited the wind farmers to put a turbine on your acreage?

Svierge: I don't own the land yet (parents are still alive) and no one has approached us, but I absolutely would put wind turbines on it if there was an opportunity. My father and I have regularly discussed putting solar and wind and possibly some form of microhydro on the land at our own expense. We have planted trees on it.

Those hills funnel the wind through the Livermore pass, where there have been wind turbines for decades

So all the available land suitable for wind turbines has been used? There's no more capacity?

How do turbines affect people living nearby?

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