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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

    Many countries that have
    invested heavily into offshore
    have done so either because land
    is a premium or the geography
    makes in difficult to buil
    on land.

The Netherlands is investing heavily in offshore wind, and last I looked it's not those reasons, but NIMBYs.

The cost per kW for offshore wind is higher, and even in a country as dense as The Netherlands the footprint of a windmill is relatively trivial, and can be combined with farming etc.

But people don't like how they look and sound, so we're paying a premium to have wind installed offshore.

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I think this is all a way of saying The Netherlands land is at a premium. Views and noise pollution are valued higher than cheaper electricity. The United States has over 200 times more land than The Netherlands, and only 20 times the population. The US has plenty of windy places with adequate infrastructure where selling electricity is valued higher than view/noise because no one lives within 30km of the windmill.

> Views and noise pollution are valued higher than cheaper electricity.

Nothing like walking on the beach to relax and seeing wind farms or oil rigs off the coast.

I love walking on the beach, and I can’t imagine seeing a tiny structure miles off in the distance somehow detracting from the experience.

I’m thinking the sight of this (oil rigs off the Huntington Beach coast):

https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/californias-oil-spi...

I loved for years on the coast with wind farms in the distance, I quite liked it. Like living in a solar punk town.

Interesting the official Ørsted promo video about South Fork Wind is 3 minutes long, and contains no more than 8 seconds of footage showing the actual turbines.

8 seconds! Don't blink. The main focus is slow-motion shots of smiling people and kids. They really don't want any focus on how they look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5R_5Tzd5wQ

Maybe the advertising company believed vibes were more important, or maybe they had focus group claim so, or figured you needed lots of smiley vibes to deal with local population being NIMBY about possibility of barely seeing a wind farm from the famous beach resort New York /s

Or maybe the advertising was just crap which is why American investments failure hangs over recent firings.

I went to college on a beach town. The oil rigs in the distance was a fixture of the landscape and generally referred to positively (even by those who were no fan of the oil and gas industry.) I can only assume wind farms would be even cooler!

Or ships passing by on the horizon, or aircraft painting contrails in the sky. Really terrible to have a sight line to evidence of human existence. And all those fields, vineyards, orchards and meadows humans have created in place of native forests! Unbearable!

I’m thinking the sight of this (oil rigs off the Huntington Beach coast): https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/californias-oil-spi...

Seems ironic that the last generation of windmills is an iconic image of the country.

> I think this is all a way of saying The Netherlands land is at a premium.

Artificially at a premium because of local government (and by proxy their upper midde backers). Or basically always why houses are expensive absent major population booms or extreme land shortages. So basically we can just call it "land is a premium" because people don't seem to care these days even though hypothetically people knocking on your door offering millions is very persuasive even to NIMBYs but that option is so out of reach for developers they don't even try to rally support (unless it's a mega project with people richer than the local powerbrokers).

The land is expensive. The people that own the land have capital. The people that own the land leverage their position of authority to influence local regulations. This is all just part of the premium.

I mean, if there are countries where one can legitimately say land is scarce, Netherlands is definitely one of them. Compare maps of the Netherlands today with 100 years ago and you can see they've done tons of land reclamation and draining projects. And it wasn't for fun, it was because they needed the land for agriculture and human settlement.

And population density is way higher than most places in the US.

So they use less Land for housing!

Haha, per person, yes, but even then I'm fairly sure that a way larger percentage of land is used for housing than it is in most areas in the US.

As in, you really can't travel in a straight line for very long without encountering man-made structures anywhere in the Netherlands.

There's been research done showing that people's view on how windmills look is most strongly influenced by how they feel about wind energy in general. I wonder if people in the Netherlands have disproportionately negative views of wind energy. As for noise, it probably varies a lot depending on how close you are, and the type of turbines in use so maybe it does bother some people (although not everyone feels that way https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/26/minimal-...) but I know there's also a lot of fear around "wind farm syndrome" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome) which I'd place in the same category as people worried about wifi and 5G signals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...) making them sick and hopefully that can be overcome with education.

Give the people who have to live near these machines a benefit from it, such as a monthly discount on electricity? Has this been tried?

Sort of like the people who are willing to have a cell phone tower put on their property. Ugly, but the rent more than makes up for that.

Or like oil - “black gold.”

It is not just where people live.

People like to walk and hike and camp and holiday places, and sometimes they don't like it if their view is "ruined".

So called Bürgerbeteiligungsgesellschaften (citizen participation companies) are quite common in rural Germany. Basically a citizen of a concerned community can opt to become a shareholder of such a company and gets a yearly kickback from the proceeds. It's not quite that simple but that's the basic idea.

The other form you find even more often is the so called Energiegenossenschaft (energy cooperative) which is organized like any other cooperative. The federal system of the FRoG promotes these local cooperatives over capital companies in certain areas, such as utilities.

AFAIK, there is no model where you reap benefits without doing something first, ie. join a cooperative or buy shares.

I wonder if it's more proximity that's the issue. In larger countries a wind farm would most likely just be an eyesore on the horizon or nearby hills, but in the Netherlands it could effectively be in someone's backyard, blocking the visible sky and casting large shadows.

I went to university in Aberystwyth 20 years ago, and there were wind farms visible in the distance.

As people were still complaining about them being eyesores back then, on one occasion I just scanned over the horizon, seeing what I could see — Those turbines were only noticed because they were unusual, they were greatly outnumbered by the unsightly clutter of pylons, the roads[0], and even particularly ugly farm buildings.

[0] despite this being rural Wales where even the major road from there to anywhere else, the A44, was slightly narrower than an American residential street: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YitFrEFRt576Yz7K9?g_st=ic

> but NIMBYs

a high rise is one thing, but having windfarms near residential areas is probably not great. they are quite loud.

> But people don't like how they look and sound

and they have the right to object. They should not have to pay a sacrifice without compensation. This is why that premium exists - it spreads the cost of that sacrifice (to whoever is going to consume the power generated).

"people don't like how they look and sound" is just another effect of density. I doubt Dutch people are inherently more NIMBY than Americans, it's just there's nowhere to hide infrastructure in the Netherlands (unless offshore).

At least here in the UK (which has the second most offshore wind generation in the world behind China) it's both - onshore wind got stuck in NIMBY planning hell and there's not really enough land in the right places to make it an easy option. Also, it looked for a while like with sufficient investment offshore wind could actually wind up being cheaper due to higher capacity factor, larger turbines, etc. Frustratingly, a lot of the British press has been pretending that the NIMBY issues didn't exist and the current government just made them up for ideological reasons or because their super-rich donors didn't like wind turbines, along with presenting onshore wind as the solution to all our problems and essentially ignoring the offshore wind and pretending the government has done nothing on renewables. (This seems to happen with literally everything - whatever the current governemnt didn't do or cancelled is spun as a magic solution and any problems it was having before are written out of existence.)

Sea is much more windy than land as well

Cost per kW might be higher, but offshore has higher capacity factor which is very important.

> but NIMBYs.

This is tired. Let's build a busy train track outside your bedroom window and see how long this condescension last.

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