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Comment by chadbr | Hacker News Reader

Clearly nobody in the responses has stood next to an oil well or a wind turbine.

I've been on several frack sites. On one, it was literally raining oil and chem on everything as they were wirelining. I'll take the windmill thanks.

Elaborate. Haven’t stood next to either. My curiosity is piqued. What should I be expecting when I find myself so lucky?

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQksc1-5Zoc

imagine living with that 12 hours a day. like a drop of water hitting your forehead every few seconds. forever.

I would go on a rampage.

Looks like it would be an issue for maybe an hour or two a day in either the morning or the evening. Unless that's a location close to the arctic circle where the sun stays that low for significant portions of the day.

Don't get me wrong, that looks extremely annoying, especially if it happens in the evening hours. And I don't whish it on anybody. But the people in that video don't have to endure it the entire day, only while the sun is very close to the horizon.

> imagine living with that 12 hours a day

Given the video clearly depicts sunset, that is indeed an imaginary problem.

Lol, thats it? This is the downside compared to the oil and coal?

When I picture an oil derrick, I see the arm going up and down and thus blocking the sun. Also the methane coming off, the the flares lighting up the night sky. And the smell.

A pumpjack is what goes up and down, not an oil Derrick. Pumpjacks are usually not that tall, rarely taller than a big tree. They also don’t have flares.

But yeah wouldn’t want to live by that either.

If you stand by the pumpjack, and the sun is at just the right height, and you carefully position yourself in such way as to place the pumpjack structure directly between yourself and the sun - you could personally experience the abject misery of having a moving shadow be cast upon your person - so that you can experience the horrors of the wind turbines first-hand.

However do take care of not breathing any fumes or stepping into any toxic spillages in the vicinity of oil equipment as not to pollute your immersive experience with any negative effects that are unrelated to the wind turbines.

As in most places the earth is rotating fully once every 24 hours the sun isn't stationary in the sky. Consequently the depicted shadow - if it is bothersome at all, is so only a few minutes per day. Mind that, only on a clear day, clouds would prevent taht too.

This is nothing that regulation can't solve. German regulations prohibit wind farms with such periodic shadowing if it occurs more than 30 minutes a day or 30 hours per year for a house.

For my taste - wind turbines are disgusting. A blight on the landscape for minimal benefit compared to other energy sources. Give me 1000’s of acres of solar vs 100 acres of wind farm. If you have to live close to them - they never go away… everywhere you look, giant white (why are they white anyway? Why not sky blue?) Not to mention the nighttime visual pollution. Drive into Rockport, TX after dark and its endless skyline of red flashing lights — that all cycle at the same time. Beyond obnoxious.

That just my view of the aesthetics…

Nobody ever bothers to talk about what will be done with these football field sized blades (I’m guessing at least 100k of them by now?) when they’re decommissioned? Completely useless material that has to be buried somewhere… I guess everyone here will volunteer to bury one in their backyard?

You think the “buy and dump” problem is bad in oil and gas? … do you think any of the companies who signed these 30 year leases will be around to de-com the turbines when they start falling apart? (Answer is no)

https://www.power-eng.com/news/evolving-regulations-for-wind...

Then there’s the never ending problem of freezing… nobody has good solutions and most of them involve the same harmful chemicals or secondary energy sources or helicopters or whatever that all derive from the hydrocarbons everyone seems to hate.

https://www.windpowerengineering.com/the-cold-hard-truth-abo... https://energypost.eu/how-to-keep-winter-ice-off-a-wind-turb...

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/dozens-scot...

——

As for oil wells - most are hidden from view (unless you’re in West Texas, of course … not much growing to hide them…)

Also fwiw - a pump jack is only one form of artificial lift for a well. There are lots of others systems that are far less obnoxious (i.e. you can’t see them in the brush unless you get close)

https://www.estiscompression.com/learning-center/how-to-comp...

> That just my view of the aesthetics…

As wind turbines aren't a very rare sight, I think it's reasonable to assume that most have already seen a wind farm in person. Newer generations in Germany also only flash when planes are nearby.

> Nobody ever bothers to talk about what will be done with these football field sized blades (I’m guessing at least 100k of them by now?) when they’re decommissioned?

At least I've seen a lot of talk about it, most of it ending in "we're trying to reuse them for something else with mixed success" or "recycling is possible, but not yet done on a large scale, but we hope it'll increase".

> do you think any of the companies who signed these 30 year leases will be around to de-com the turbines when they start falling apart? (Answer is no)

At least in Germany, where wind turbines from 20+ years ago are being replaced by newer ones (due to the much higher power output), this hasn't been an issue yet. In contrast to oil and gas sites, after the wind turbine has seen it's EOL the land isn't worthless for the purpose, but a new wind turbine can be installed. Thus for most sites this isn't much of an issue. This isn't to say that regulation is a bad idea (and I'm wondering why leases were signed without a clause to obligate the operates to remove them), but I don't see the fundamental point of conflict, since the land isn't worthless afterwards for energy purposes.

> Then there’s the never ending problem of freezing…

At least your first two sources suggest that electric heating works (but unfortunately not if it's doable from the energy generated by the wind turbine itself, but I assume that to be the case, otherwise it doesn't make any sense), and the third suggests a fault of the power connection of the initial fault (and quite a bit of tabloid rambling that I didn't read, I have to admit).

Why would you want to stand next to either?

They are not exactly located in urban areas...

I have stood at the very base of Wind Turbines multiple times. They are awesome, in the traditional sense of the word. A giant tower with an engineering marvel of a prop that slowly turns, nearly noiselessly sapping energy from nation sized air masses that continuously convect due to the immense amount of light and heat energy pouring into our atmosphere 24/7. They look futuristic, and yet at the same time so simple and elegant. Fields of fans sucking energy out of the wind currents.

I would love to live about five miles away (infrasound might be a real issue for some people) from a hundred acre installation of them. Here in Maine we have capped a few small mountains with them up north and it's very aesthetic.

Pumpjacks are also pretty cool though I've never seen one in person. Their simple design and brutal metal structure are pretty in their own way. Flares look pretty neat too.

..... Alright maybe infrastructure is just cool to me

I've lived within 200 meters of a massive windfarm and out of 365 days per year I would typically be able to actually hear them for maybe three or four of those and when the sun was just right (for a couple of minutes on those days when the sun lined up with the house and the windmills) there would be some shadows.

Don't the nearby homeowners usually get paid if they're really close?

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