Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

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Depends how much area you want to repurpose (note that it includes roads, power lines, and regular tree trimming near those power lines in addition to the turbines themselves), but I'd estimate that with current and projected Finnish population density, this would actually be a realistic option, yes.

Now that I think of it, I've never anyone speak of the impact on wildlife, nor seen a wind turbine in a forest (only ever on open farmland). Considering both noise and large shadows moving constantly, I assume it will have some impact. (I did hear that bird strikes are a non-issue in relative terms.) Even Wikipedia has no info on anything but birds/bats for on-shore installations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...

Edit: double checked that Finland is actually mostly forest: [PDF] https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/landuse/land-cover-country-... Screenshot from relevant part of PDF: https://snipboard.io/KFDEIr.jpg

The 9+5+4=18% water bodies, arable land, and pastures/mosaics (respectively) might also be a good target.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_power_density says 1.84 W/m², so at 18% of 338'662 "hundreds ha" = 61 billion m² you get 112 GW which translates into 983 TWh after a year (8760 hours). Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Finland that's 2.6 times more energy than they used in 2013 (this includes heating, driving, etc. but not things like imported clothes, plastic products, etc.). All this is considering only the land area, not sea.

Future work: calculate how many years of monopolizing the world's steel production it takes to get these things produced, much less built in the middle of nowhere with frozen winters.

Forests are a hassle to work in, and add a lot of extra costs. It’s often cheaper and better in many ways to clear the land first if you’re going to do wind there.

1) wind moves faster/freer the higher you are above the ground. the height of the trees moves the ‘ground’ up, without actually moving it up from a foundation or structure perspective. So you spend the money for a 300 ft tower, but only get 200ft of usable height. Not fun.

2) trees grow into things, fall on things, burn at inconvenient times, and are generally a maintenance headache.

3) many types of trees are very, very strong and require expensive heavy equipment to clear at large scales, especially if you need to remove a lot of stumps. So it adds extra cost above some already significant costs of land.

If you already have some cleared land somewhere, assuming all other factors are equal, it will definitely be preferred.

That sounds like a world of pain. Between the displaced wildlife and released carbon from all those trees, I'd be quite curious if that's even worth it.

It probably isn’t, which is why you don’t see it happen much I imagine.

If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the options quite a bit. I also forgot to mention, in most climates trees are a hassle this way, they also grow naturally, so even if you clear the land you need to go back and keep it clear every couple years.

Solar has similar drawbacks but worse - you can’t just clear the trees around where you’d put the windmills and roads, you’d need to clear pretty much everywhere including from where they would shade the panels. Which greatly increases the footprint.

Trees can of course be burned for heat and energy, but it’s a time consuming, dangerous, and inefficient process (time/land/manpower) compared to petroleum extraction. It tends to only happen for individual use, at small scale; or when heavily subsidized from taxes on petroleum products.

> If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the options quite a bit.

Just to make sure, did you see the edit of my comment above? I checked out the land cover in Finland, it is actually a fairly high percentage trees and I did some math on putting wind in the other places.

Now that I'm writing this I realized a major flaw: not looking at https://globalwindatlas.info earlier. It turns out that Finland looks about average (just eyeballing it, I can't figure out how to use this area energy yield tool, it just gives me a blank image instead of a simple number).

The forests are not a big issue for wind in Finland nowadays, you just build towers that are high enough. The biggest problem is the long Russian border. You cannot build a wind farm where it would hide Russian movements from the Finnish radars.

> many types of trees are very, very strong

Now you are just making things up. The bigger and stronger trees are, the more valuable they are as timber. But there is plenty of non-forest land to use, and wind is wholly compatible with mixed use with developed farm and pasture, which is why we see that instead.

What exactly am I making up?

Timberland owners (at least in my experience owning a lot of timberland) need to time market conditions quite a bit to make a profit. If someone is lucky, an offer for the land CAN coincide with good market conditions for the specific timber they have at the state they have it, but that is far from guaranteed.

All the species I happen to have a good stock of went crazy high earlier last year, then crashed hard due to burn damage to forests in other parts of the state (from over 100% increase in margin, to negative margin) in less time than it would have taken for me to get the paperwork through the state to harvest them.

Depending on market conditions, it could be very expensive to clear, to wildly profitable to clear, but no one is going to sell it to them for less than the profit they’d make in a case like that.

And it is pointless to talk about when there is no need to build there.

That looks very much like blaming the commenter you replied to for posting a "pointless" comment.

Which is not a very gracious spelling of "Sorry, my comment you replied to was stupid; I retract it and apologize", which I'm sure was what you were trying to convey.

No, he is making up imaginary impediments to wind power build-out. If trees could be a problem, they would be built in ways that trees would not be a problem, full stop.

> No, he is making up imaginary impediments to wind power build-out.

No, he is pointing out very real impediments to wind power build-out in forsests.

> If trees could be a problem,

As has been convincingly shown elsewhere in the subthread that they can, if one were stupid enough to build one's windmills among them.

> they would be built in ways that trees would not be a problem, full stop.

i.e. not in forests. Which was user @lazide's point all along.

And if you were going to say -- as the remains of your argument seem to be boiling down to -- "So don't build windmills in forests then", YTF did you say that to @lazide and not to @Aachen?

In fact wind turbines are routinely erected in forests with no difficulty. But, we neither need to build them there, nor need to avoid building them there. Talking about trees as if they were a problem for wind turbines is just noise. Complaining about that fact being pointed out is more noise.

You have contributed exactly nothing of any substance to the discussion.

> You have contributed exactly nothing of any substance to the discussion.

Did you?

Finland has a vast and long coast that could be used to build on or offshore farms. There are also wave hydro systems and Finland has many rivers etc that could be used.

Really a choice to go nuclear. Not a necessity.

I don't think there is very viable wave energy in the sea around Finland. It is small, shallow and surrounded by land. Sure sometimes there is build ups, but in general it is not too reliable.

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