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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Understandable.

The tech is not the problem, the people are.

A friend of mine sells these things and you could literally gift people money to build these things on their land, but many won't do it.

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I guess the transaction costs are what's stopping people. Takes a non-trivial amount of time to evaluate whether it's a good idea. Might get easier after a while as social proof becomes available.

Is it fear of damage or danger that would keep them from taking it for free?

It's probably a lot simpler than that. They destroy the nice scenery and the money being offered isn't enough to compensate for that.

It is not just about the scenery, there is noise and light pollution as well.

Plus often the need to build high-power transmission lines, not to mention the land depreciation after 20-25 years (the lifespan of the average wind turbine). The cost of decommissioning just one wind turbine (and you probably have at least 3-4, building fewer in one site is rarely worth it) is likely to make the land it stands on completely worthless.

> likely to make the land it stands on completely worthless.

Sorry, what? Are they building the pylons with nuclear waste? How could land depreciate?

For one, you have an enormous block of concrete there now.

That won't cause any land depreciation or decrease in the value of the land. It may reduce the sale price, if concrete block has no value to a purchaser, but only by the amount that it would take to remove the concrete block. And if the land is so valueless that concrete removal significantly impacts pricing, the land wouldn't have been valuable enough to instal wind turbines in the first place!

So this sort of FUD seems to be extremely weak. Wind power is a massively profitable business, the amount of money that can be made dwarfs the capital costs of the construction, which in turn dwarfs the cost decommissioning of non-toxic materials.

The cost of decommissioning a wind turbine is a simple disincentive, approximately the same as installing it in the first place (although data on this seems scant and dependent on several factors.)

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