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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Annoying article, it talks more about the (in my opinion very naïve and utopian) ramifications about the technology if implemented on a massive scale, than about the technology itself.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/lens-wind-turbines-magnify-po... is marginally better (and more brief), I'm sure there are further sources.

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I'm confused. The discovery article says "Each Lens, which measures 112 meters in diameter, can provide enough energy for an average household." Does that mean we need millions (or even billions) of these structures?

Article says we'd need "about 2,640,000".

So the diameter more than the width of a football (NFL) field. And... one of those per each household? Besides the visual obstruction, just finding such space for each abode is daunting anywhere (not to mention somewhere with the population density of Japan).

EDIT: Or, consider the transmission costs from areas where such land is available.

I've heard that wind turbines currently are dangerous/lethal to many birds. If we widely deploy a great many "wind lenses" or normal turbines we'd see a substantial loss in bird population.

I wouldn't say "substantial loss", unless there were a truly gigantic number put out there. Currently, wind turbines kill approximately 0.01% as many birds annually as household pets do (around 60k-80k birds annually in the United States for windmills, versus 500m-700m for pets). So, regulating outdoor pets would be a better place to start if we were truly worried about bird populations. Second place to start would be buildings with plate glass, which kill around 100m. Numbers in the tens of thousands are pretty small as an additional factor.

The point of observing that wind kills birds is more to shake people out of thinking it's a matter of "green = holy = perfect" vs. "conventional = evil = bad", and returning to thinking about costs, which are never zero, and benefits, than specifically about birds themselves. Once we're back in a frame of thought in which costs and to a lesser extent the benefits aren't being manipulated behind the scenes to produce a pre-desired result, and once we're back in a frame of thought where we once again remember we're talking about powering a civilization with these power generation methods and not just abstract numerical "houses" or whatever, we can have much better and connected-to-reality discussions on the topic of power generation.

Unfortunately, wind doesn't hold up very well under such examination for a variety of purposes, and I seriously doubt this changes any significant aspect of the analysis. But that's not the "evil's" fault, it's just engineering.

I have trouble saying that wind is worse than coal when looking at the externalities. Among it's many problems Coal directly results in thousands of deaths and 100's of thousands of cases of respiratory distress in the US every single year. It's only when you consider the direct costs and ignore everything else that coal is in any way competitive with wind when building a new power plant.

I didn't say anything about coal. I think the winner on the net is not-insane nuclear. ("Not-insane" would entail things like not having a lot of nuclear waste because we pretty much already know how to fix it, we just aren't allowed to.)

I also wonder how many birds die from things associated with other forms of power (eg. burning coal)?

Naturally this would have to be scaled based on power output (maybe?), and of course it would be harder to find the bodies and determine cause of death, but it's not like these other sources of power are clean compared to wind as far as birds are concerned. I guess it's just easier to guess what killed a bird whose body is next to a turbine...

Buildings/Windows are far more dangerious to birds than windturbines. It's really an order of magnatude problem where people see X deaths per year per turbine and think that's bad and ignore far more significant issues like domestic house cat's. For comparison consider well over 1 billion, aka 1,000,000+k birds die a year vs ~80k from wind turbines.

What happens when, as the article suggestions, you cover "1/4 the area of Alaska" with wind turbines?

You end up with a larger number of deaths that is still a tiny fraction of total bird death.

Think of it this way, each turbine supply’s enough energy to meet the needs of several households. On average far fewer birds die from the turbine than the households whose energy comes from that wind turbine and that does not change as you scale up the wind turbines. Now the exact numbers depend on the type of turbine and their placement but 5+MW wind turbines are far less dangerous than their smaller and less efficient counterparts that started the whole issue. If the total energy generation needs of the US where met from large wind turbines there would still be negligible impact on birds.

PS: If you look at small turbines the blade spins so fast hit’s hard to see, if you look at large turbines the blade easy to see because huge and moving though a much larger area.

More than one billion birds die a year from building strikes.

1,000,000,000 birds. I hope that puts "green" technology's impact in perspective.

http://www.fws.gov/birds/mortality-fact-sheet.pdf

http://www.birdsandbuildings.org/index.html

And that's just in the US.

Thanks for the info- The Ornilux glass shown on that birdsandbuildings site is a really great idea:

http://www.ornilux.com

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