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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Wind produces noise, has moving parts that require quite a bit of maintenance, too much wind and the breaks are applied, too little they don't turn, they require a very large foundation made of an enormous amount of concrete and may cause issues with birds depending on location.

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.

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> Wind produces noise

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?

Noise doesn't only affect humans.

Funny how people are suddenly concerned with other species when a wind turbine is placed near their home. But when an out-of-sight coal plant belches out tons of pollutants which affect thousands of species, that concern seems to vanish. Quaint.

The discussion is comparing solar to wind, nobody is suggesting coal as an alternative, so this complaint seems out of place.

Not really. It's an observation on human nature. It's about how certain problems are only problems when they fit a narrative, and can be conveniently ignored otherwise. It seems like the toxicity of solar panel production is also conveniently being ignored, or how much water it requires. Certainly less than coal, but more than wind turbines.

It’s less water over the life of the product though.

Well, let me know when you have a study showing how the mice and vipers in those fields are affected.

Well, there is a DLR (essentially Germany's NASA) study about the effect of wind turbines on insects [1]. It's not pretty. Neither is the study on the effect on birds [2] by NABU, one of our "Sierra Club"-style organisations.

[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...

There's no mention of sound or noise in either one of those.

The insect study focusses on getting hit by the turbine wing, that's right. The bird study only talks about effects, without specifying effects, and takes note about bird-specific things like "avoidance distance", which is linked to - among other factors - noise.

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.

>>> Wind produces noise

>> 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.

It's not pretty is not what the research concluded.

"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.

No. I live near a large onshore wind farm with 2.5MW wind turbines and go walking near them regularly. They are inaudible from more than 200m away.

Could that be related to other maritime noises, like waves or seagulls?

I walk through one of these eyesore fields regularly, and I can hear them easily from 200m away.

I like the wind farm views. It's very subjective of course. Though most people don't like change, and since old power generating stations were high density (eg. a coal plant, just a big building and a smokestack) the new low-density things are naturally running into this change resistance.

Some people seem to develop an allergy to the frequency, the way some people are sensitive to MSG or Gluten while others are unharmed. There haven't been many studies that I'm aware of but I've met enough people who reported these symptoms that I don't think they're making things up.

Is there evidence that that is a real thing opposed to completely made up nonsense like many other "sensitivities" [1] that are popular right now? Real question; I'm not qualified to know the difference.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...

No, it's a classic nocebo.

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.

It's a bit of a hot take, but I think there's insufficient understanding of just how much of our everyday health complaints are psychosomatic, and just how much of our mental activity doesn't take place in the brain. An allergy to subsonics is certainly a made-up complaint, the only question being whether it's made up by the brain or the immune system. And the only practical difference between those two is that the brain is more plastic.

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.

India’s demographic distribution is very different from America’s.

May as well tell them to avoid tundras.

Also the land distribution is vastly different. 60% is agriculture, 24% is forest cover. Compare that to US where most of the land is cow pastures.

You people talk about changing where you live as if replacing your house was cheap and easy.

I don't know who "you people" are but I wasn't talking about anyone moving. People don't live in the middle of grain fields, so nobody needs to move.

The average size of an agricultural holding was 1.08 hectares (2.67 acres) in 2015-16 and declining over time [1]. A lot of Indian land is small farms with houses clustered among them.

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”

Is 1.08 hectares enough for a sustainable grain farm? I would imagine those smaller ones are for vegetables but I could be wrong...

I think you are forgetting about the environmental impact of hydro damns. It floods entire valleys, displaces lots of flora and fauna and it uses much more concrete than wind farms.

The advantage of hydro is that you can turn it on whenever you want. Environmental impacts aside, wind will never have that.

Except when the reservoirs run dry, which many will do at times unless you spend only a rather small proportion of the available capacity.

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.

Norway is a huge energy exporter, but regularly imports because of reduced hydro generating capacity.

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.

A similar dynamic between Spain and France: Spain sells wind to France, France sells nuclear to Spain.

Yes, and when you have already paid the environmental cost of hydro, it's a good tradeoff. If you need to destroy new large parts of your ecology and display people, it's a much trickier decision. I'm not fundamentally opposed to hydro including building new dams, but it's important people are aware that they have both massive ecological and humanitarian challenges, and create a long term maintenance commitment (or they become potentially disastrous) that means they're not no brainers. When they're still a decent fit, they're then absolutely a good complement to other renewable resources.

That’s not really a counterpoint. That hydro isn’t an infinite source of energy isn’t remarkable.

The point is not that it isn't infinite, but that you can't rely on it always being available, just as with wind or solar. You still need fallbacks unless you over dimension massively, and over dimensioning hydro storage comes with massive ecological impact.

> Expanding storage capacity is generally a problem because of the massive environmental impact

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.

Energy is a grid. As long as you have wind and FV, hydro is accumulating water for less windy/sunny moments. We tend to look at batteries as something that has to be physically linked (the wind mill must reverse a hydro or must store in a lithium battery), but it can be though as avoiding to release the water in the first place.

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.

I am aware but as a total I find that impact to be minor especially if great care it taken to determine where such a damn is built.

There aren't many places to build hydro left where the impact would be low. The typical environmental impact tends to be huge and the number of people displaced tends to be huge, because the type of places most suitable to build up also tends to be the types of places that have historically attracted human settlements.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

> Wind produces noise

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.)

Plus wind energy kills birds. Engineers try to minimize this risk, but greedy entrepreneurs with connections to lobyists and the government tend to "flex" restrictions.

Hydroelectricity also kills the nature, I heard that some argue that hydroelectricity shouldn't be classified as environmentally friendly.

It's odd to think no one has come up with a way to repel birds. It would be interesting to see all the things they've tried.

Airports have: https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/birds-at-work/

Yeah, that's one approach. Far more often, airports just shoot them.

Some work has been done. I seem to recall that painting the turbine blades to create a visible flicker helped keep birds away. I am sure some studies are ongoing. The number of birds killed by windfarms is miniscule compared to the number that die simply from flying into windows on skyscrapers, however.

Studies show that a windturbine kills approximately as many birds as a domestic cat does.

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.

I can't read the study as it is in French. I am living under a highly corrupt government. You can build wind turbines / airports directly on bird migration paths here, no one says anything if you got an OK from the government. That's why I said engineers figure out ways to minimize bird deaths, however they are not always enforced. France may apply these principles, but my country doesn't.

A news article (in Turkish) substantiating what I'm talking about: https://www.sozcu.com.tr/2021/gundem/kuzey-ormanlari-simdi-d...

I understand. Any corrupted government seems a dangerous proposition to me. As for gridpower it means that nuclear is out of the equation (because corruption distorts expertise) in a gov-corrupted nation. Sadly most active nuclear projects run in such nations.

> Plus wind energy kills birds. Engineers try to minimize this risk, but greedy entrepreneurs with connections to lobyists and the government tend to "flex" restrictions.

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...

US doesn't have a corrupt government like mine :). Under ideal circumstances this might be the case. But here you can build wind farms directly on bird migration paths without any counter measures. It would only become a problem if there are mass bird deaths you can't cover up. Environmental impact studies in my country are a joke.

An article (in Turkish) substantiating what I'm talking about: https://www.sozcu.com.tr/2021/gundem/kuzey-ormanlari-simdi-d...

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