In the 2010s the efficiency of solar cells have been so exaggerated that some scientific journals felt it was necessary to enforce rigorous checklists and guidelines on that topic:
Additionally small wind mills don't make economic sense and that is why they are getting bigger and bigger. This limits where you can install them and make the approval process a huge burden. Compare this to solar which can be installed on almost any size house.
We can easily store this energy with hydro storage and hydro damns. Hydro storage is an amazing thing as it requires very little maintenance and can go from 0 to 100% in seconds which is great for areas that require a lot of power in a short amount of time. Even nuclear power doesn't have such a quick ramp up/down.
Norway is a huge energy exporter, but regularly imports because of reduced hydro generating capacity.
Expanding storage capacity is generally a problem because of the massive environmental impact.
I have recently come to the conclusion that hydro is a very good complement to wind because the hydro is dispatchable when the wind doesn't blow. As long as the average wind and hydro together exceed needed capacity, things should be good.
As I understand it, this is what Norway is doing. Importing wind from Germany when there is excess and exporting hydro when there is a shortage.
Meh. It could be put completely underground. (We could put nuclear power plants hundreds of meters deep underground too.) People don't want to spend on it is the real problem.
Viewing the different technologies on the grid as isolated competitors in which one must "win" over the others as if they were Walmart vs Costco is a mistake. E.g. nuclear providing 20-30% of the load is a must, but providing more than 60% is a drag. The trick is to get, slowly evolving, a good mix in the grid that is reasonably cheap and green (wind and solar) and reasonably stable (nuclear, hydro and gas). Too cheap and you get blackouts. Too stable and you get high prices and CO2.
On top of that, the ongoing release of e.g. methane for years after construction coupled with the environmental cost of the construction materials means it takes a long time for dams to even pay off the environmental debt they create.
The death toll from hydro is also not all that reassuring. Even if you subtract the Ban Qiao dam failure, the single most destructive power plant failure in history[1], beating e.g. Chernobyl several times over, construction accidents and the like adds up, and contributes to a lasting maintenance burden where guaranteeing sufficient maintenance becomes a growing risk to downstream downstream populations for as long as the dams exist.
I'm sure there are places where dams are still reasonable choices, but they're no unambiguously good choices.
Don't live in the middle of a grain field surrounding a wind turbine then. Seriously, I live around tons of these and you can't hear it until you get near and they're almost always in the middle a field or between several fields, so you can't really get near. Are there louder ones in different countries that can be heard further away or something?
[1] https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/01/20190326... links to an English-language interview.
[2] https://bergenhusen.nabu.de/imperia/md/nabu/images/nabu/einr...
Tbh: it does feel like you are moving goalposts because the studies do not show what you'd like them to show, that wind energy is green and ecologically friendly. We see that a lot.
>> Noise doesn't only affect humans.
> Well, let me know when you have a study showing how the mice and vipers in those fields are affected.
This part of the thread is about noise. I'm not moving the goalpost, you're just off topic.
"From the currently available figures and the DLR model calculation, we cannot conclude either that wind energy plays a significant role in the reduction of insect numbers, or that it has no impact. "
Needs more research.
I walk through one of these eyesore fields regularly, and I can hear them easily from 200m away.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...
There recently was a bit of a scandal in Germany because for years a major government authority has reported levels of "infrasound" from wind turbines far above what was physically plausible. A lot of the fearmongering relied on those numbers - yet it turned out they were due to a calculation error.
If the subject doesn't practise deliberate reprogramming of their mental architecture, it doesn't matter much whether the illness is in the more or less pliable medium, because they don't have the tools to reshape it either way. I guess one could run an experiment by seeing whether it's amenable to talk therapy and categorise the issue that way, but it would still depend a lot on the therapist in question and the subject's willingness to participate.
May as well tell them to avoid tundras.
That’s not to say that India doesn’t produce a lot of wind energy, though - it’s the second largest source of renewable energy after solar according to the most recent source I could get (Feb 2020) [2].
[1] https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=199780
[2] https://cea.nic.in/dashboard/?lang=en check “Renewable Energy” under “Generation”
Hydroelectricity also kills the nature, I heard that some argue that hydroelectricity shouldn't be classified as environmentally friendly.
According to a French study ( https://www.lpo.fr/la-lpo-en-actions/developpement-durable/e... ): 0.3 to 18.3 birds/windturbine/year 5.2 according to Loss et al, 2013 and 8.2 according to Zimmerling et al. 2013.
A news article (in Turkish) substantiating what I'm talking about: https://www.sozcu.com.tr/2021/gundem/kuzey-ormanlari-simdi-d...
That is a long-since debunked myth. In the US [1], 2.4 billion birds are killed each year by cats, 600 million die in collisions with glass buildings, 214 million in collisions with cars... and not even 250.000 due to wind turbines.
If you really care about birds, go and argue for cat TNR programs and for restrictions on glass usage on buildings. Otherwise, you're just using a strawman argument.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...
An article (in Turkish) substantiating what I'm talking about: https://www.sozcu.com.tr/2021/gundem/kuzey-ormanlari-simdi-d...
Wind will always produce noise. The rustling of trees, the whispering of grass, or he howling though narrow streets. Might as well capture the energy from the wind.
If the wind "turbine" produces noise, this should be solveable by noise insulation. (which likely isn't done because it's not a large enough issue.)
Wind is a better fit for Europe where there are far fewer sunshine hours but fairly constant wind due to macro-scale atmospheric weather patterns.
With that said, the cost of PVs is dropping so fast - faster than wind power - that I expect solar to become more important in Europe as well. Even in northern latitudes, solar farms are popping up on land that was previously used for agriculture, and I expect this trend will accelerate. If you're a landowner, you can potentially make more money using the land to generate electricity with PVs than with agriculture.
You mean Northern Europe.
Why not just have more capacity than we need, and a grid to redistribute it.
I would think energy storage is harder to solve than building more transfer capacity?
You can't just leave critical infrastructure like power generation up to chance, even for once-in-a-century events. You must always have some kind of buffer to make sure there is no chance you will have to shut down industry and hospitals for a week (barring maybe war conditions).