Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

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This is a fair point. But the part that’s almost always missing is the comparison to what the windmills are replacing. It’s fair to say that wind turbines kill some birds and that they require some resources to build and maintain, etc.

When people try to point at the need for infrastructure for windmills as a risk or negative, and they leave out how much infrastructure is needed for the alternatives, it is a sneaky way to leave people with the impression that wind power has some kind of net negative or net risk, when often it’s a massive landslide of a net positive compared to what we will do if we don’t build the wind farm and get power some other way. The degrowth ecologists know this better than most of us.

As an example, the usual comparison brought up with birds getting killed is the number of birds killed by cats. We often don’t hear about the number of birds killed by oil spills. Deep water Horizon killed as many birds in a single spill as are killed globally in a year by wind turbines, and spills continue year after year. We don’t talk about the number of birds killed by power lines either.

I completely agree that in terms of nefariousness of industrial facilities, wind turbines are quite ok (in comparison with other energy infrastructure). But since you're talking about what they replace, i can't help but mention that they almost never replace anything, they're meant to absorb growing demand. That's the single biggest argument for global critics like degrowth: we always talk about switching to better X, but most of the time we also keep the old ones running. We typically picture coal usage as having peaked in the 19c with these images of london in smoke, but in fact it has never been as high as say last year (i didn't look at the numbers, but its basically a steady upwards trend for every primary resource since 200y). Rule of thumb your energy consumption is proportional to your GDP (it's actually pretty accurate).

So that's why, sure, wind or renewable (or even nuclear to some lesser extent) is better than fossil in some ways, but this in itself, in our current system, won't translate to much unless our prime effort goes to first maintain consumption at a steady level and then actually reduce it.

But i'm getting a bit off-topic! :)

> they almost never replace anything, they’re meant to absorb growing demand

That is a replacement though, when the alternative was something else. Yes I didn’t mean they tear down coal plants and put up turbines, but using the word “replace” is valid and accurate to discuss adding wind turbines instead of adding coal power, even if it’s in the future.

> most of the time we also keep the old ones running

This is true, and a good point. Hopefully what we’re talking about is phasing out the old ones over time, that it’s more of a slow dismantle than a permanent freeze of the existing infrastructure along with it’s existing environmental problems.

> then actually reduce it

Amen.

> but most of the time we also keep the old ones running.

I don’t think that this is true. [0]

Actual total energy production from things like coal have stayed constant despite some countries, e.g. china, building out large amounts of new coal power plants. This is only possible if other plants have been taken offline.

Part of the reason they are shut down (not just environmental ones) is simply because they are more expensive to run than the alternatives.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

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