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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

The combination of a very windy, shallow North Sea, where wind turbines are productive most of the time, and the fact that large concentrations of people live in close proximity, gives British wind electricity quite a boost.

It is a different story in Germany, where North Germany is, apart from Hamburg, thinly settled and connecting far-off places like Baden or Bavaria to the North Sea wind farms runs into tons of NIMBY initiatives.

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There's NIMBYism in the UK too. My local Tory MP managed to kill the offshore wind farm navitus bay you would have been barely able to see (12-15 miles offshore).

Reference : https://static01.nyt.com/images/2008/10/04/nyregion/wind600....

He did it by collecting signatures from local business owners complaining it would "ruin the view".

I think he may have been lobbying on behalf of incumbent utilities. He clearly wasn't doing this because of a few specks appearing on the horizon, but exploiting knee jerk NIMBYism over the view was how he got the project canceled.

New industries should factor extortion, hush money, bribes into their budgets, to buy off these gatekeepers.

New industries have the long term cost advantage, old industries the cash flow advantage, that's why the less corrupt places adopt new technologies first.

Sure. How long you willing to wait? Given the circumstances, I'm fine with cashing out all the mobsters.

I do what I can. I'll finally buy a Tesla in 2021. I was delaying my car purchase for years to have enough money for one.

Nice. I'm waiting for the soccer dad (minivan) economy version. Something I don't care if it gets trashed.

As for extortions, I keep thinking of a scene from Boardwalk Empire. Nucky wants a highway to Atlantic City built. Some local political bosses are hemming and hawing around the issue. Frustrated, Nucky demands "Just tell me how much."

It's not right. But then life's rarely fair.

Unusually, for the time of year, the wind in early November dropped so low, that wind power in the UK, dropped to around 1GW, something like 2-5% of the grid total demand.

The uk needs to diversify its green energy, instead it seems to be consolidating on wind.

At the present time, investing in wind is the most cost-effective way to reduce the carbon emissions of electricity generation in the UK.

That is, for every £ invested, putting that £ in wind farms produces more energy and reduces carbon emissions more than it would by investing it in other technologies. That will continue to be the case so long as each MWh of wind generation offsets a MWh that would otherwise be generated from fossil fuels (or dirty biomass, for that matter!).

That's not to say that we shouldn't be developing other technologies too. They will certainly be needed in the future to reach a 100% fossil-free grid. But it makes sense to continue building wind turbines for the foreseeable future.

(Side note: one thing that should help in the future is increasing geographic diversity of wind farm sites. Today we have light winds over Scotland and the east coast where most turbines are located. But plenty of wind on the Irish sea / Atlantic side where there are, currently, comparatively few turbines)

Much of the sea off Scotland and the east coast is just too deep to build cost effective wind turbines at the typical current distances off-short in the rest of the country, and I suspect it is typically much more stormy with waves rolling in from the Atlantic. The southern North Sea/Doggerland is ideal in this respect on account that in geological terms, it is relatively recently flooded land that is still particularly shallow.

Yes, but note the recent developments in floating turbine technology that promises to make developing deeper-water sites more practical. Besides that, there are still plenty of promising shallow water sites yet to be developed.

Even as I write this, wind is only 2%: https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Sure, but look at yesterday. In the near term, we clearly can't decommission the gas power plants because we still need them sometimes, but when the wind blows (as it often does), we save burning that gas and the associated CO₂ release.

Still 38% renewable/low carbon sources, so that's not bad even with wind nearly out of the picture this afternoon.

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