I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.
I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry - they have the means, the motive and a track record of flexible morals.
A lot of currently very rich and powerful people lose in a world where most countries and even people can generate most of the power they require.
P.s. I think you meant to write fomenting
I have asked hundreds of local people what they think of them over the years, and not one of them have ever said anything about them spoiling the view. The farmers love them as they get subsidies for putting them on their land, and generally people think they are doing a good thing and are happy to tolerate them.
I personally dont think this is an issue with spoiling the view .
As a tourist I loved the sight of turbines on the far away hills.
They're a damn site nicer to look at than concrete cooling towers or gasometers.
In my experience off-shore wind, even off a popular tourist beech has very little impact. Often just about visible in the haze in the distance.
The impact of onshore wind is definitely more notable. I personally don't find it that offensive, I find them elegant in the day way as an aircraft might be. Also, the blot on the land could be almost completely eradicated in hours if something better was invented tomorrow. Compared to the decades long process of decommissioning even fossil fueled power plants that seems like a pretty big win.
The logic against them seems to be - can't rely on wind power alone ( true - but nobody is suggesting that ), so we must destroy them all as a symbol of 'netzero'. It makes no sense.
>p.s. I think you meant to write fomenting
Yep. Thanks.
People might object to the view of wind farms, but they'll also object to any other new building. There are quite a lot of existing power stations in scenic areas! Torness, Longannet, Cockenzie come to mind in the Lothians/Fife area; any one could be seen from miles around, as they were built on the coast for water access. The latter two have been demolished. There is no way you could build them today without a similar huge level of objection. Similarly there is a spot in the plain of Yorkshire where you used to see three coal-fired power stations in relatively close proximity, dominating the countryside.
And if you look around London, you'll see the (long closed and repurposed) Battersea and Bankside powerstations. Yes, people built several massive coal fired power stations right in the middle of the city! No wonder there was a smog problem worse than 90s Beijing or LA. Again, completely inconcievable that you could build them today.
Once you build it and it exists for a few years, the complaints melt away. Leave it long enough and there will be a society for preserving historic wind farms.
BTW I was talking about offshore farms - they are typically only just visible if you are at the coast on a clear day.
Renewable energy is a route to energy independence for various nations that were previously highly dependent on foreign nations and corporations and there are very powerful fossil fuel interconnected groups / nations that are terrified of that.
Russia wants Germany to buy Russian gas. The U.S. wants Europe to buy their gas’s too. The Saudis want Europe to buy their oil. Wind turbines, solar power and electric vehicles are a direct threat to that hegemony.
The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.
I believe that to be the primary root cause of the geopolitical instability we see today globally.
What Germany has done with its reliance on Russian gas is truly insane. Not only they closed nuclear stations, but they also have been closing coal power stations. They should be pushing electrical vehicles and modernization of coal plants instead as China is doing. Even from green perspective an electrical car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant generates less CO2 than a car running on oil products.
Not true - it's just more prevalent in Europe than oil, especially in Germany. And the CO2 emissions are much worse, which is where all this starts from.
I guess, this is the era for consequences
> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels in all rock, soil, and water. It is the highest-numbered element found naturally in significant quantities on Earth and is almost always found combined with other elements.[12] Uranium is the 48th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust.[60] The decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40 in Earth's mantle is thought to be the main source of heat[61][62] that keeps the Earth's outer core in the liquid state and drives mantle convection, which in turn drives plate tectonics.
> Uranium's concentration in the Earth's crust is (depending on the reference) 2 to 4 parts per million,[11][22] or about 40 times as abundant as silver.[17] The Earth's crust from the surface to 25 km (15 mi) down is calculated to contain 10¹⁷ kg (2×10¹⁷ lb) of uranium while the oceans may contain 10¹³ kg (2×10¹³ lb).[11] The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers),[63] and its concentration in sea water is 3 parts per billion.[22]
> Uranium is more plentiful than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver, and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.[12][22] Uranium is found in hundreds of minerals, including uraninite (the most common uranium ore), carnotite, autunite, uranophane, torbernite, and coffinite.[12] Significant concentrations of uranium occur in some substances such as phosphate rock deposits, and minerals such as lignite, and monazite sands in uranium-rich ores[12] (it is recovered commercially from sources with as little as 0.1% uranium[17]).
Now, 0.1% uranium is 1000 parts per million, which is a lot more than 0.7 to 11. But that doesn't mean current technology is incapable of recovering uranium from these 300× lower concentrations. It's just that it requires processing 300× as much rock, which is expensive, so it can't compete in the market with more concentrated sources.
There is a danger that if you spend 300x more energy to enrich your uranium then you might achieve netzero - but not in a good way.
I understand that you might randomly spread FUD like this if you haven't bothered to do any calculations at all because you don't care whether what you're saying is true or false. You're off by orders of magnitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Nuclear_reactio... says uranium as burned in a breeder reactor yields 80TJ/kg; if your soil contains 10ppm of uranium, you're getting 800MJ per kg of soil. Lignite coal is 10–20MJ/kg, so regular soil yields 40–80 times as much energy as a source of uranium as coal does as a source of carbon.
Or, looking at it a different way, to supply a given amount of energy from uranium, you only have to mine about 2% as much random soil as if you were mining coal from an open-air coal deposit. (Subsequent processing is somewhat different, involving leaching with sulfuric acid.) Since mining coal requires significantly less energy than the coal yields, uranium mining is not close to net-zero on its energy return anywhere in the world.
Nuclear reactors are not economically competitive with solar and PV, but that's a different issue.
Now I freely admit I don't know the costs of enrichment. I just used your numbers - you said you'd just have to mine 300 times as much rock - and obviously that's 300 times more expensive - for something which is already not energy cheap.
ie to convince me you have to show the full costs of mining and enrichment, to the point you actually have a fuel that's reactor ready.
And even if that's net positive energy - I'd suspect you'd be much better in investing in wind, hydro, tidal and solar and a decent storage and grid system.
Sometimes I feel nuclear is fetishised because it's cool science - however I'm more interested in practical solutions, and if that means a simple wind or water turbine - so be it.
Happy to be convinced otherwise - but you need to show the numbers.
In the case of things like coal, the energy cost of mining is significant compared to the energy obtained from it. In the case of uranium, simply because the amount of material processed is so small by comparison, it is not significant. As I showed above, it would not even be significant if you have to mine 300 times as much rock as uranium mining currently does.
Obviously you would be better off investing in wind, solar, and storage than in nuclear energy. (Hydroelectric and tidal are less clear wins.) But that's not because sufficiently concentrated uranium deposits are rare. On the contrary, there's literally nowhere on the planet where uranium is insufficiently concentrated.
> The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.
Nuclear is not a Trojan horse, nuclear proliferation and meltdown fears condemned Europe to energy dependence. It's too late now, the capacity should have been built 30 years ago, but the successful fearmongering meant there was virtually no construction for the last 30 years[1].
The real Trojan horse is natural gas, they greenwashed it, invested and continue to invest in natural gas projects[2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reactors_in_Euro... 2. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/06/world/eu-votes-natural-ga...
Nuclear is a distraction to defocus from renewables and battery tech. There’s a reason this kind of nuclear propaganda is all over TikTok amongst right wing social media.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien...
https://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de/projekte/erneuerbar-st...
In France for example the domestic energy production is virtually free from fossil fuels. [1]
In other parts of Europe, all the capacity that renewables provide has been offset by the shutting down of nuclear reactors. Instead of replacing fossil fuels they replaced nuclear. See Germany's energy mix for example [2].
[1]. https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix (See the second graph) [2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
Yeh, maybe. But then there is a certain class of people who live lives of wealth and leisure who like to go boating on their $10 million yachts, for whom windmills "spoil the view". And I think their opinions are somewhat consistent regardless of whether they are heavily invested in fossil fuels or not.
If it were just about windmills, the gigantic oil companies are flush with cash to invest in them and don't much care where the profits come from as long as they keep rolling in.
We can have cheap clean energy, it requires a small amount of change, oh no, let's destroy everything instead.
I'm going to start suggesting that planning should have a local referendum: approve this set of projects and you'll get cheaper electricity. Disapprove and your bill goes up. Democratic choice, but with consequences.
We will see a return of composure as central element communications culture. If you get emotional or irrational angry, you are considered possessed, ridden by loas and not worthy of communication.
"I say Sir, the rabble seems to be quite in tatters and without a plan, all back and forth on windmills, but ultimately in the dark."
They went a full month with zero coal electricity generation back in 2020 and 2025 will be entirely coal free.
Even natural gas is in decline.
And the switch to zonal energy pricing will likely have a similar effect for other sources of generation.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/brell-lithuania-latvia-and-estonia-tur...
Not directly stated about wind power, but there is this account of why lawsuits might be common, slowing and derailing projects because the damages if you lose in your complaint are capped at a relatively low figure (not low for the average person, but not that expensive either).
I think this is very high for the average person.
There are a lot of rich people in the U.K.
£5k for someone with £2m in assets and fears losing £200k due to the “blight” of a power plant is not a lot.
due to the screwed up energy pricing system, if there's a single watt of electricity in the grid produced by burning gas, we pay for the entire grid output as if it was gas
In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.
In the goods market, individual buyers buy depending on their elasticity of demand unless the good has inelastic demand (rare).
Neither matches what you seem to say.
The lowest seller price is the highest demanded price among all the sellers. All the sellers bar one would typically be willing to sell for a slightly lower price. As it is said; prices are set on the margins.
Imagine that every seller has a secret price they are willing to sell for and that is some statistical distribution. The market price will be the highest price in that distribution that actually gets sold. Most sellers aren't selling for their secretly acceptable price, but for a higher price determined by the seller with the highest demands. The distribution, if it is ever discovered, becomes the supply curve.
Such a behavior only happens on artificial markets that have been designed for that purpose to match an ideological vision of how an “ideal market” should behave.
Turns out the “ideal market” is a dystopia instead of the intended utopia.
Why? This market is pretty much ideal and sets the right incentives. You have little to no information asymmetry, you need to strike a price that clears the market because you must balance production and demand.
Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody else gets triple the price?
Says whom?
> Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody else gets triple the price?
It doesn't make sense to force them to sell at their marginal cost either (which is much less than their operating cost, consisting mostly of fixed costs).
In fact, in real life, for most good or services the marginal price is decreasing with volume (or even zero for most of the supply curve with occasional spikes), pricing at the marginal cost means you're pricing way below the average cost and will drive all businesses to their doom.
In the electricity world, this kind of pricing only makes sense for electricity produced from fossil fuel as the marginal cost represents most the underlying cost, but it makes zero sense for renewable or nuclear where the cost is swallowed upfront and close to zero afterwards.
Typically what existed in France and other places of Europe before we decided to “liberalize the energy market”.
I do and given the practice is pretty common, it seems like most people would.
To be clear, the incentive is: you make more money when you can produce energy cheaper than everybody else.
> In the electricity world, this kind of pricing only makes sense for electricity produced from fossil fuel as the marginal cost represents most the underlying cost, but it makes zero sense for renewable or nuclear where the cost is swallowed upfront and close to zero afterwards.
Are capital costs not real underlying costs? If I borrow money from a bank I have to return that money plus interest. I would argue that this is a very real cost. Also, renewables do require maintenance. That is not as expensive as the ongoing cost of burning fossil fuel, but it’s still a cost
Definitely not “most people”, only the small number of economists and politicians that designed these scheme.
> To be clear, the incentive is: you make more money when you can produce energy cheaper than everybody else.
Which is a bad incentive for an electricity market, because as I said above, “energy” is free basically free for both renewable and nuclear. What ain't free is “installed power”. And what customers need is “available power”. If you design a virtual market around things that have nothing to do with the underlying physical reality of the actual value being produced, it's simply never going to work well.
> Are capital costs not real underlying costs? If I borrow money from a bank I have to return that money plus interest. I would argue that this is a very real cost.
It is a “real cost” indeed, but it cost you the same whether you produce electricity or not, it's a fixed, upfront, cost, not a marginal cost.
> Also, renewables do require maintenance. That is not as expensive as the ongoing cost of burning fossil fuel, but it’s still a cost
Most of maintenance aren't linked to how much electricity you've produced (for solar, for instance, it only depends on time, and cost you the exact same amount whether or not you've produced any electricity), so it's again not a marginal cost but a fixed one.
And let say you restrict yourself to the maintenance that depends on electricity production (for nuclear, refueling maintenance is like that) you'll end up with a marginal cost that is very low compared to your average cost, and if you price at marginal cost then you're going to go bankrupt.
For illustration say operating your 1GW solar plant cost 200 million a year in fixed costs (including maintenance and the cost of capital) and then it costs 0 to produce a MWh as long as the sun is up. If you price it at marginal cost, then you'll never make any money, so the only hope you have is that in a long enough period the market prices will be high due to the marginal cost of fossil fuel plants, in a way that it ends up covering your fixed costs. But, as a plant owner/manager, you have absolutely no control over that, you aren't being incentivized into doing anything.
There isn’t an ideal free market in electricity generation.
Your renewable energy is worth 0 if it can't meet that need. No other power supply anywhere works on the principle of "yay maybe!". It's not a fucking game, it's our capacity to heat, to operate industrial processes that are equally worthless if interrupted. I've been involved in ordering steel. The UK-spec was uncompetitive if free, because of the unpredictability in delivery, directly downstream from the unpredictability in power. THERE IS A WAR ON.
Different energy sources contribute unequally to that second important factor - the stability of the grid - and that has to be factored in somehow. Nuclear, gas, hydro-electric storage and buying from abroad provide that stability in the UK.
How it's done - I've no idea - but it's not just a question of units of electricity.
One way is to bring in more surge pricing however people like the predictability of stable prices.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Price-Wrong-Capitalism-Wont-Planet/dp...
We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one?
> get dirty
You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels.
> require significant maintenance
Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, thermal generators require maintenance.
> they get destroyed by weather
A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity.
But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will soon become irrelevant.)
> get dirty
Each person stopping to clean their own panels is much less efficient than professional cleaning centralized panels. It does increase your electricity costs.
> require significant maintenance
Home maintenance is an entire other level of inefficiency. That extends to any kind of equipment in your home.
But again, none of those is a big deal. Solar is mostly operation-free, so distribution mostly doesn't matter.
Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems
https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_Kingdom_miners%27_...
Nickel-Iron batteries are very good for this purpose: practically unlimited charge-discharge cycles and overcharging/overdischarging won't damage them. They should be dirt-cheap too, but almost there are very few manufacturers so there's not much competition.
Instead there would be electric relay connected to mains in your home and when there is less supply than demand you would get blackout. That would be similar comparison to this.
People would install a battery at home the way most of the world installs solar and they’d see massive reductions in electricity bills more than paying for the battery. The UK is absolutely terrible location for solar, and it’s still installed because UK’s electricity prices are so high.
That said, wind going to absolutely zero nationwide is extremely unlikely but the more people who signed up for such a system eventually just a little power wouldn’t be enough for all of them. So there’s be an economic feedback loop.
That said with a battery and dynamic prices, there are many days where you can charge a battery when the prices are low and use them battery when the prices are high.
Hedges like this are a useful risk mitigation strategy as going bankrupt is a much larger downside than making slightly more money.
So the consumer does not gain anything.
Wholesale prices are really just one aspect of grid manufacturing and paying them doesn’t mean you’re getting the equivalent of a percentage of wind farm productivity.
Tesco doesn't care if the freezers in store run at 04:00-04:15, or 04:30-04:45, and will pick whichever is cheaper.
Open cycles gas turbines are extremely cheap to build and expensive to run. For a green future these can be run on biofuels, hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives.
Therefore they perfectly complement renewables.
Nuclear power on the other hand is an awful companion due to having extremely large fixed costs and acceptable marginal running costs.
The coal or nuclear plant that commits to generating a set amount consistently but never even attempting to meet the actual demand is some kind of hoax?
In reality we're moving from baseload and peaker gas plants to follow demand to renewables and firming (the same gas plants just running at different times). It's a holistic system with parts working together.
The main difference is that renewables are cheaper and cleaner which gets them built faster and displaces more and more coal and gas from the market. With batteries eating the market from the other direction (starting with daily peaks and expanding out from there).
You can see this in carbon intensity of electricity production and the ever increasing share of renewables around the world.
Of course that plan falters a bit if you ban cheap onshore wind across an entire nation for a decade.
Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
For residential uses, heating, cooling, and refrigeration are the main uses.
For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation.
For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical process.
The only categories that I guess could be easily shifted is process and boiler heating. But some industrial processes need to run uninterrupted for weeks. Machine drive, perhaps, but then workers would not be able to work a regular schedule. Not to mention, industrial applications in total is less than 25% of electricity use.
Demand shifting is a lot easier said than done. I see it proposed very frequently, but I've yet to see a detailed plan for what electricity uses will be shifted, and how.
Labour have pledged to bring it back down to 2030, but when they begin the talks with the motor industry to try to achieve this they will fold like they have done several times so far in this government.
Heating and cooling can be offloaded into grid peak availability hours relatively easily with the price serving as a reliable trigger. This assumes proper insulation for the most part, but is viable and using the price as an indicator automatically sets up the right incentives. As for refrigeration, the energy use for that in a private household seems to be overstated.
> For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation
For cooling the same applies as for private households, maybe to a lesser extent. The other loads remain pretty static in their demand, but once a commercial operation has a certain scale building out the own battery storage to optimize for purchasing price (assuming a flexible price that reflects spot pricing) may be a viable strategy.
> For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical process.
For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses. For other energy intense workloads, demand shift is already frequently happening because the ROI is fairly quick. It’s not easy to assess from the outside because you do need an in depth process understanding that you just cannot provide as an outsider. But I have personally witnessed plenty of examples that demonstrate it is well within the realm of possibility
If you try to offload it otherwise you just waste power heating/cooling yourself at wrong hours.
A boiler in this setup is a thermal battery. These are good, but space consuming and relatively failure prone and expensive to maintain. Inefficient compared to central too.
Tackling climate crisis requires All The Above.
Wind, nukes, solar farms, tidal, whatever, by themselves, aren't silver bullets.
We also need heat pumps, renovations (insulation, air sealing), district heating, etc. That's just for housing.
We could also talk all day about industry and agriculture.
As the saying goes: The opportunities are insurmountable!
The French grid would collapse without 30 GW of fossil based production to manage cold spells.
This is Frances' electricity generation breakdown: https://aleasoft.com/france-leading-european-nuclear-energy-...
Fossil fuels are 7%.
You said:
> Non-intermittent sources of energy don't need to be supplemented by alternative sources of energy.
Like I said the. The French grid would crash during cold spells if not supplemented with 30 GW of fossil fueled power production.
I'd suggest reading people's comments in greater detail, before accusing people of lying.
Lazard expects peakers to run at 10-15% capacity factor because you know, how often do we have cold spells in France or whatever other reason causes them to run? A couple of weeks a year at most. Lets say 15%.
Lets calculate what Hinkley Point C costs when running as a peaker. It has a CFD at $170/MWh for 30 years. Lets assume it runs at a 85% capacity factor and that $20/MWh are O&M costs.
153/0.15 + 20 = $1040/MWh
You want to solve the problem by forcing electricity costs on the consumers at double of the peak of the energy crisis.
All because you view the world in nuclear fanclub fantasy land glasses.
You're right that nuclear is more expensive than continuing to burn fossil fuels. And the reality is nobody has a plan to build fossil fuel free grid based on wind and solar. Absent a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage, solar and wind will always have to be deployed in tandem with fossil fuels. If we're looking at actually eliminating carbon emissions, nuclear is the only viable option besides geographically limited sources like hydropower.
Typical. Let me quote you:
> They could always build more nuclear plants to fill additional demand.
And then
> If you've already provisioned enough nuclear plants to meet peak energy demand, producing less energy has no marginal cost.
If the magic tooth fairy comes with free nuclear plants... Nuclear cult member fantasy land.
So at what capacity factor will the entire fleet run at when built out to manage both outages and cold spells requiring 30 GW of fossil fuels to handle?
France currently run their fleet of 63 GW at a ~70% capacity factor. Add another 30 GW (lets call it 100% reliable when a cold spell hits) and the capacity factors vastly lower due to extremely low utilization factors of the last 30 GW.
You can spread out the lower of capacity factors across the entire fleet or just let the peakers bear them.
But in the end the results are the same because you still need to finance the your fleet now delivering a measly 45% capacity factor.
Lets translate a 45% capacity factor to Hinkley Point C numbers:
Now you are forcing the consumers to pay $355/MWh or 35.5 cents per kWh for all electricity delivered the whole year.
All you have done is take the ~$1000/MWh cost from 15% of the time and spread it out over the whole year.
Do you see the pure insanity of what you keep proposing now?
What's the alternative to nuclear power for reaching a carbon-free grid? No doubt, your plan will assume a breakthrough in energy storage that delivers orders-of-magnitude more scale than existing solutions.
> It is the only viable path to decarbonization for most countries.
The research disagrees with you.
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
Or if you want meta analysis have articles like:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
But they are of course all wrong by some tiny insignificant factor you will now pick up and attempt to blow up like it would be the end of the world.
> Storage of energy is an important element of 100% RE systems, especially when using large shares of variable sources like solar and wind [14], [40]–[42], and it can take various forms [43]–[45]. Batteries can supply efficient short term storage, while e-fuels can provide long-term storage solutions. Other examples are mechanical storage in pumped hydro energy storage [46], [47] and compressed air energy storage [48], [49], and thermal energy in a range of storage media at various temperature levels [43], [50].
Nowhere do they actually outline how much storage of each system they will provision. How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? Totally unanswered. They just mention the existence of storage, and avoid any tangible discussion of scale. Like I said, there's no realistic plans for a grid primarily powered by intermittent sources. The storage required for such a grid is orders of magnitude larger than what can be feasibly provisioned.
This isn't a tiny insignificant detail. It's is a foundational part of a primarily renewable grid. And nobody has a plan to solve it that doesn't amount to "assume some different system, which has never been deployed at scale, can tens of terawatt hours of storage".
In the real world the energy crisis was a cost crisis. But you seem to no care the slightest about massively increasing the ratepayers bills and by that creating a new self made energy crisis. This time fueled by nuclear subsidies.
So you skipped the first two studies. I suppose because you found nothing to complain about in them. Good to know.
Then you go on a meta-analysis on the entire field and demand them to produce a TWH figure for some energy system you can't even specify.
You truly are grasping for the straws.
Here's the quote you missed:
> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]– [282]; storage [40]– [43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]– [92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
With the conclusion based on the meta-analysis:
> The main conclusion of the vast majority of 100% renewable energy systems studies is that such systems can power all energy in all regions of the world at low cost. As such, we do not need to rely on fossil fuels in the future. In the early 2020s, the consensus has increasingly become that solar PV and wind power will dominate the future energy system and new research increasingly shows that 100% renewable energy systems are not only feasible but also cost effective. This gives us the key to a sustainable civilization and the long-lasting prosperity of humankind.
Since the study was released in mid 2022 has it become easier to harder to create 100% renewable energy systems? Easier.
Nowhere in that quote does it list how much of each type of storage is required. Again, they just list a range of storage systems, most of them never deployed at scale, and just don't even bother to lay out a concrete plan. The quotes you're posting are fitting this pattern of vague statements about storage and a total absence of concrete plans.
How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? How many TWh of some more exotic storage systems like compressed air or hydrogen? There's a reason why plans for a renewable grid don't go into this detail and stick to vague statement: actually sketching out how much storage would be required would show just how infeasible it really is.
Like I said, proponents of a mostly renewable grid don't have a plan to address intermittency. Or rather their plan is, "assume something solves storage, and don't worry about it".
Trying to frame it like you disprove something when you truly don’t. You can go and read the individual studies it sources the statements from, which are then used to build those arguments arguments.
But I suppose that is too hard when you gotta find any possible straw to grasp instead of accepting reality.
Lets go back to the to studies you’ve decided to completely ignore. Likely because they answer your complaints and you haven’t found any nitpick to paint as the end of the world.
So again:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
No, you have not. The quotes you posted just list various storage systems and don't bother to set specific capacity requirements. I'll ask again:
How many TWh of battery storage are provisioned in your hypothetical 100% renewable world?
How many TWh of pumped hydro?
How many TWh of other storage? And what are these alternative storage systems?
The posts you link only talk about the cost of storage, but not the total capacity requirements. This is important, because 12 hours of storage for global electricity consumption is 30TWh. Only about 1 TWh of batteries are produced each year globally. So actually trying to provision grid scale storage would massively increase battery demand and drive up prices. This is the a reason why nobody wants to talk about the total capacity requirements for a primarily renewable grid.
However lets say that it is 12 hours/30TWh. In 2023, the world produced ~1.1 TWH of batteries. In 2014, the world produced 0.05 TWH of batteries (with steady growth year over year while prices fell by 10x). If you give grid scale batteries a 5 year lifespan (before recycling), that means we need 6TWh/year of grid scale battery production, which at current rates of increase in battery production, we are 5-7 years away from.
For comparison, 5-7 years is roughly the time it takes to build a single nuclear reactor.
> However lets say that it is 12 hours/30TWh. In 2023, the world produced ~1.1 TWH of batteries. In 2014, the world produced 0.05 TWH of batteries (with steady growth year over year while prices fell by 10x). If you give grid scale batteries a 5 year lifespan (before recycling), that means we need 6TWh/year of grid scale battery production, which at current rates of increase in battery production, we are 5-7 years away from.
Even ignoring the fact that 12 hours is insufficient, you're making the following assumptions:
1. The production of batteries will sextuple in the next 5-7 years.
2. 100% (or close to 100%) of battery production will be dedicated to grid storage.
3. Electricity consumption will remain static.
The first one may or may not pan out. Battery production is already bottlenecked by resource extraction, and it's unclear if the rate of extraction can keep up. The nature of extraction is that once easily accessible deposits are exhausted, companies shift to the harder-to-access deposits. This is only economically viable if cost increases enough to incentivize that investment. The HN crowd tends to assume that everything adheres to Moore's law, but that doesn't work in reality. The price of steel, for instance, doesn't exponentially decline.
The second two are certainly not true. EV are predicted to make up the vast majority of battery sales. Redirecting batteries to grid storage would necessitate delaying EV adoption, ultimately increasing emissions. Stationary storage accounts for a small fraction of battery production (https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-...). Electric vehicles only account for a bit under 20% of vehicle sales worldwide. With many countries slated to stop sales of ICE vehicles in the next 5-10 years, we're still looking at most future battery production going to satisfy EV demand even if it grows to 6TWh per year as per your assumptions.
And electricity use will certainly increase. Both as poorer countries develop and start deploying air conditioning and other electricity consumption. And as other sources of primary energy consumption is shifted to electricity. Remember, electricity generation only makes up ~40% of total energy consumption. The remainder will have to be converted to electricity as part of full decarbonization.
Also my battery assumptions were missing the fact that the world already has ~5TWh of hydro which can be used as a battery (even when not pumped hydro by releasing only when you need power).
Why do you keep dodging? Because you truly can't bring yourself to read anything that would disprove your nuclear fanboyism? You truly keep tumbling strawmen instead of disproving the studies.
Pathetic.
I'll add the studies without any picked out quotes:
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...
Come one now. Stop dodging! Is accepting that nuclear power is horrifically expensive that scary? Is your income dependent on the nuclear industry?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
And don't come and tell me that the Uranium supply chain is cleanest thing known to mankind. It currently is generally outsourced from the west because the enormous amounts of cost managing the externalities adds. Especially the processing steps from raw uranium to fuel rods.
There was a first large scale attempt at scaling nuclear power culminating 40 years ago. Nuclear power peaked at ~20% of the global electricity mix in the 1990s. It was all negative learning by doing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Then we tried again 20 years ago. There was a massive subsidy push. The end result was Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto and Flamanville. We needed the known quantity of nuclear power since no one believed renewables would cut it.
How many trillions in subsidies should we spend to try one more time? All the while the competition in renewables are already delivering beyond our wildest imaginations.
China is barely investing in nuclear power. At their current buildout which have been averaging 5 construction starts per year since 2020 they will at saturation reach 2-3% total nuclear power in their electricity mix.
China is all in on renewables [1]() and [2] storage.
Then rounding of with some typical ”SMRs” nonsense!!!
SMRs have been complete vaporware for the past 70 years.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
Or just this recent summary on how all modern SMRs tend to show promising PowerPoints and then cancel when reality hits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XECq9uFsy6o
Simply look to:
- mPower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%26W_mPower
- NuScale: https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2024/10/29/the-rise-and-f...
And the rest of the bunch adding costs for every passing year and then disappearing when the subsidies run out.
[1]: https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...
[2]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...
The article you posted from sciencedirect supports this. The study points primarily to a changing complex regulation landscape as a primary driver of costs. Meanwhile, France is in an excellent position in the EU in terms of energy in large part because it stuck with nuclear instead of attempting unsuccessfully to transfer to wind and solar like some of it's neighbors (who now burn lignite to meet energy demands).
Solar panels, for instance, are mostly made in places where actual costs of construction are externalized to the environment and workers with depressed wages. Nuclear plants need to be built and decommissioned in the same place - places that are often actively hostile with complex regulation meant to curtail nuclear specifically for the sake of non-proliferation. SMRs help sidestep a portion of this hostile regulation but there are countless reactor designs that are possible that we can't even begin to explore until regulation is made reasonable.
We should of course keep our existing fleet around as long as it is safe, needed and economical.
Then you round of with an endless stream of excuses as to why nuclear power does not deliver.
The only thing hindering nuclear power is its economics. Otherwise less regulated countries would pounce on the opportunity to have cheaper energy. That hasn’t happened.
Where nuclear power has a good niche it gets utilized, and no amount of campaigning limits it. One such example are submarines.
So stop attempting to shift the blame and go invest your own money in advancing nuclear power rather than crying for another absolutely enormous government handout when the competition in renewables already deliver on that said promise: extremely cheap green scalable energy.
Unsubsidized renewables are today cheaper than fossil fuels. Lets embrace that rather than wasting another trillion dollars on nuclear subsidies.
You do know that nuclear power as a share of the Chinese electricity mix is dropping?
> For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses.
Note that this refers to "process and boiler heating". There's plenty of industrial processes that need to be kept at temperature for long periods of time, otherwise the batch is ruined. Titanium smelting is one example. I've yet to see a breakdown of what specific industrial processes can be shifted.
Intermittent sources are baseload, your argument applies to any baseload system, I.e. you always need some additional dispatchable energy source (unless you over build by large amounts). Again if your main energy would be e.g. nuclear you need even higher amount of dispatchable power because if your nuclear plant goes down (planned or unplanned) you need to compensate for a lot of power.
This statement is about as incorrect as it is possible to be, as even a cursory attempt to check this before posting would show.
It is difficult to understand why anyone makes claims such as this, unless they are consciously or unconsciously attempting to redefine a word that already has a well-understood meaning.
E.g. today in Germany you can buy MWh at 14€ at 13:00 and sell it back at 180€ at 18:00. I didn't look all of Europe but it looked like the biggest spread today... You can make money with crappy storage under those conditions...
Remember, 66.8 TWh of electricity is used daily. Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuations, but seasonal fluctuations lasting days or weeks. Even 12 hours of storage would still leave us with periods of insufficient production multiple orders of magnitude more frequent than the status quo: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuation, but also seasonal fluctuation. Even just 3 days of storage amounts to an impossible amount of batteries to provision, even assuming growing battery production capacity. Not to mention, even modest amounts of battery grid storage would severely hamper EV adoption, which would increase emissions.
There's a reason why most plans for a primarily wind and solar grid assume that there will be some technological breakthrough that solves storage: hydrogen, compressed air, alternative battery chemistries, etc. are really common to see in plans for a primarily renewable grid.
1. https://interactanalysis.com/insight/global-li-ion-battery-s...
This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light. You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. Who cares about the 5% of times where we have to burn natural gas to stabilise the grid.
95% renewable is orders of magnitude better than today. Anyone saying different is literally a grifter.
Also battery storage cost prognosis is 50% less in 5-6 years. Batteries are already cost effective and there are a lot of grid storage options build right now.
No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of the time. The natural gas burned is only a fraction of its input costs.
Battery storage is headed in the right direction but the fact almost all articles on the subject can’t even get the units correct as it would betray how ridiculously small the deployments actually are is quite telling in itself.
The grifting are those pretending magic natural gas backing plants are going to pop up out of nowhere and not including that capital or maintenance expense when quoting intermittent power source costs.
Right now those sources have been able to cherry pick the cheap and easy problems to solve since they’ve been using someone else’s power when they can’t meet demand. Eventually you run out of it though.
Cheap intermittent sources have their place, and should be used maximally wherever possible. For example every watt of hydro production should have a watt of solar or wind built on top of it. Store the water for when the intermittent sources can’t keep up with demand.
Serious question: why do you think that’s true? If it costs X per year to run it 5% of the year and you save more than X with this strategy, then the maths is simple and someone will build it. Several energy companies could probably be convinced to each pay a share so no one is left footing the whole bill but everyone benefits from the existence of the facility. If the maths works, potentially even some of the cost could be passed on to the taxpayer.
In the UK we already have a couple of facilities that operate exactly like this, Cruachan for example (it’s not gas, it’s water). Over the years, ways to improve its utilisation have been found, but it’s still sitting there at a relatively low portion of its capacity so that it can black start the grid if it’s ever needed.
Because it has been, at least thus far. Perhaps in the hazy future this will change, and some regulatory/capacity/energy market will evolve into making such things profitable by paying someone to build underutilized power plants. I know of no such market currently.
I'm only somewhat familiar with the US market, not the UK. But a single plant is really not interesting for the discussion at hand. It can be considered a cost of doing business to have such a plant be useful for "black starts" - but that's all a single plant will ever be useful for. If it's ever being used for such a purpose you've already lost the game.
The scale is what matters. A single power plant that is 1% of your grid capacity being utilized 5% of the time is an expense that can probably be justified. Hundreds of power plants that match 100% (or close to it) of your grid capacity used 5% of the time would be an economically unjustifiable expense as you've effectively built your entire generation capacity twice.
Right now that's what we would be talking about building since every regional grid seems to experience week (or longer) periods where intermittent power generation is extremely unreliable due to weather events. It's not 100%, but it's close to it. You need to plan for the 1000 year event for something as critical as a national grid or folks literally start dying and the economic impact is astronomical.
I don't know what the exact capacity factor you'd need to have for a reasonable intermittent:dispatchable ratio, but it's certainly quite a lot higher than most would seemingly believe. Once batteries get to the point of backing the entire grid for a single night while the wind doesn't blow there might be signs of change. In most markets in the US where batteries are considered huge successes they have only recently (in the past year or two) transitioned from providing ancillary services to actual energy production for regular daily usage during the duck curve.
This can all be solved in time and in theory with a number of technologies and additional grid interconnection. But the trends simply are not as positive as one would like to see when you start delving into primary sources.
Maybe, but the UK has 4, and is building another 5 in the next 5 years.
Average grid consumption is somewhere around 30GW, the existing facilities have around 30GWh of storage. The additional 5 should bring around another 100GWh.
So we’re already at 1 hour’s worth of grid capacity stored, by 2030 we’ll be at 4 hours, and that’s assuming absolutely zero energy from other sources (wind, solar, nuclear, fossil fuel, biomass, other countries), although to be fair the existing facilities can only deliver at around 3GW, and the new facilities will only bring that up to 6GW.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to the UK, but a whole week without either sun or wind seems a bit unlikely, especially when half of the UKs wind comes from offshore wind farms.
Stick in a few more of these, and keep a couple of the existing fossil fuel plants around in case of emergencies, and I can definitely see how this continues to be just a “cost of doing business”.
I appreciate the situation in the US may be worse.
I responded to a comment stating that excess storage can be stored in batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249008 I'd suggest reading the comments people are responding to before calling them bullshit.
> You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level.
"only" 12 hours of storage is 30 TWh of storage, at the world's current electricity consumption rates. This is an immense amount of storage, amounting to decades worth of global battery production. And that's ignoring the fact that the vast majority of batteries are going to electric vehicles, not grid storage. It's true that battery production is growing, but electricity demand will similarly grow as fossil fuel use in transportation and industrial processes are electrified. Out of all of our fossil fuel use, electricity production is only ~40%. Not to mention, poorer countries are developing and will eventually start deploying refrigeration and air conditioning on similar scales as developed countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time. This excludes large wind farms that add to base load if you average over the world. There is always wind somewhere around you.
Realistically if we reach 5Twh storage we are able to be >90% renewable.
Having 5Twh of storage is of course not an easy feat if estimates are correct we will have 6.5TWh battery production in 2030. If we amount for 10% of that used in grid storage we would need a decade for a 90%+ renewable grid. There is no faster method. It is realistic.
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf suggests 240 TWh of storage is required, but also that that's a realistic target
Ah yeah the magical 107 Twh hydrogen capacity. How far off is that? That's a pipe dream.
This is a plan for anything past 2050. I'm talking right now.
From your link:
> The global electricity consumption in 2022 was 24,398 terawatt-hour (TWh)
24,398. / 365 is 66.8 TWh of electricity used per day. And again, that's current electricity consumption. Before industrial processes are electrified. Before poor countries adopt air conditioning at the same rates as rich ones. Before transport is fully switched to EVs.
> Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time
That's not how th consumption curve works. Even in the summer, the ratio of daytime to nighttime energy use isn't so high. And in the winter it's inverted, with nighttime energy use exceeding daytime use.
You can find out how much energy Europe stores in gas fields to get through the winter. You can divide that number by what you think is a reasonable sCOP for your heat pump. That number you can put next to total battery capacity ever produced, and I'll even let you add any other convertible energy storage capacity. You will find a gap off by orders of magnitude, and powerwalls in every home are not going to cover it. As you said, they'll cover a day, maybe a few, which leaves us 3 months short in the season where we have virtually no home solar.
That then doubles your storage for gas that you may or may not need to burn depending on the weather.
So really the path to fully renewable just goes through a series of win-wins on the journey to fully phase out fossil fuels.
There will likely always be some gas peaking but we're talking less than a percent per year (maybe a few single digit percent in some places where solar isn't as good but still not much).
1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for...
That's still a gap two orders of magnitude larger than existing standards:
> Meanwhile, reliability standards in industrialized countries are typically very high (e.g., targeting <2–3 h of unplanned outages per year, or ~99.97%17). Resource adequacy planning standards for “1-in-10” are also high: in North America (BAL-502-RF-03)18, generating resources must be adequate to provide no more than 1 day of unmet electricity demand—or in some cases 1 loss of load event—in 10 years (i.e., 99.97% or 99.99%, respectively)19.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Even leaving 1% of demand unfulfilled amounts to multiple orders of magnitude more frequent electricity production shortfalls. Figures like "fulfill 99% of electricity demand" might sound promising, until you compare against the standards of reliability modern society expects of the electrical grid.
And that's in Australia, quite literally the best-case scenario for renewables. By comparison, in Germany even 12 hours of storage would only satisfy 80-90% of demand.
But some of us are trying to stop, not merely delay, climate change.
Europe, for example, is the other way around for most of the above.
The idea that if we can't have a renewable grid identical to the fossil fuel grid, then we may as well stick with the fossil fuel grid even if it means the end of the world is a bit weird.
The UK's biggest energy need is heating, but the housing stock in the UK is famously shitty, 38% of homes were built before 1946 and it's the worst value for money of any developed country[1]. It isn't well insulated, triple-glazed, heat-pump fitted, using local industrial waste heat for home heating.
Heat is harder to move than electricity, but easy and cheap to store - this 2019 pilot project can store 130MWh of heat for up to a week[2], something we couldn't reasonably or cheaply do with 130MWh of electricity.
It's possible that energy and electricity requirements could be reduced meaningfully without dropping quality of life, and that meaningful amounts of energy could be stored in heat and synthetic gas[3] rather than in more expensive electric charge storage.
[Is this used Nissan Leaf at 30kWh for £2,000 the cheapest battery storage I could buy in the UK right now?[4]]
[1] top few results from https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=uk+housing+stock+low+qualit...
[2] https://www.siemensgamesa.com/global/en/home/press-releases/...
[3] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
[4] https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202502289581699
It doesn’t fit their agenda.
Maybe also lighthouses. Sometimes.
If you replaced the ancient figures carved into the chalk in England with wind farms would that be fine because they arent natural features?
I would like to see more of them on the generic grass/wheat/rape fields that cover much of England. That was prevented by the blanket ban.
It's quite simple: there is none. Moors are created by farming and logging. All woodland has either been planted and managed by humans, or self-seeded on land cleared by humans. Aside from a handful of tiny patches (which are questionable) there is no primeval forest in Britain.
Bringing up bird welfare to oppose wind turbines is bullshit. If people cared about birds or wildlife we wouldn't be in this mess at all.
Likewise, there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement, especially among whales.
It'd be nice to know that we're not replacing one disaster with another, though I'm out of date on my personal research as to whether any of these concerns still warrant further investigation.
The person I replied to was making a quantity-of-birds argument. Not an endangered species argument.
> there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement
Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts? I don't see much of a movement to ban those. It's almost like people decide the things they want to have for themselves (undisturbed views), then make up whatever noble-sounding reasons (whales, birds) will preserve those things.
Your comment seems to be a blanket opposition to bird welfare in general, not a limited critique of quantity harmed. I do think the distinction remains important, hence why I made my post.
> Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts?
Given that the ships are itinerant and their turbines are much smaller, I do believe the type of noise pollution they generate is qualitatively less harmful. I imagine the scale is something along the lines of:
1. windmills
2. sonar
3. marine vehicle engine and turbine noise
Sonar gets the second for the extreme volume some ships (esp. military) are capable of producing, though there are far fewer of them.
Marine vehicles come last. There's a greater danger of animals being hit by fast moving boats (for example, manatees) than discombobulation from engine and turbine noise.
I don't know how you got that. I just think a lot of fake bird lovers come out of the woodwork to oppose wind turbines because of $MADE_UP_REASON. Real wildlife lovers recognize that clean energy is good for wildlife.
Do you have sources for this scale?
> Windmills take the top spot for being a constant barrage over a large area.
They're also static, so animals can just avoid them. Their blades spin a hundred feet above the water.
Ships move around so their sounds can be anywhere. Their propellers spin in the water. And there are way more large ships than offshore windmills.
But you might want to sit down before i tell you how many are killed by cats.
The recent kurzsesagt video is a great intro to the topic ( https://youtu.be/5sVfTPaxRwk)
You're trying to turn "I don't care about that" into "it's logically incorrect to care about that" which is not a game you can win.
Other attributes the bird may have (wild/bred) or species (rare/common) has no bearing on the pain and kind of death they suffer. The importance of those attributes is lens we see from, it does not change their suffering.
> People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig
It doesn't make it acceptable to view life raised for food[2] as a lesser (therefore ok to be tortured) than other life because they are pets, merely because it is common practice.
How is it different than valuing human life was valued differently in age of slavery or even today if you say correlate level of aid, support, news coverage or empathy to simple numbers on human conflict impact[1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts...
[2] The argument here is not becoming vegetarian, it is about not torturing needlessly what we need to eat. The human equivalent is akin to not following Geneva conventions in a war not abolish war altogether, while ideal everyone agrees is not practical today.
As opposed to the minimal ecological consequences continuing to burn fossil fuels are currently yielding you mean?
Aka 0.2% of birds.
How many birds do coal power plants or other power sources kill?
> Climate change is a critical threat to birds. Recognizing this fact, ABC supports renewable energy, including wind energy, and the transition away from fossil fuels. However, not every wind project is proposed in a suitable location.
Wind/nuclear: 0.3-0.4 birds/GWh
Fossil: 5.2 birds/GWh
[1]: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
The nuclear source bird death estimates are extrapolated from one bad weather incident over two nights from a single plant on the Florida coast.
This is not a serious or rigorous study. Is there anything more recent?
Wow.
You can dismiss any source by saying “nuh-uh” but you need to back it up to be taken seriously here.
If you’re trying to save birds, the first place you should be looking is outdoor cats.
https://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mor...
I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?) And your second statement is laughably false as even elementary research would tell you.
Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
You said you “read” about turbines killing birds (shockingly with no citation). There is literally nobody else claiming such stupidity.
> Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
Do note, a tiny fraction of the 100m cats are outdoor cats. And yes, they are absolutely one of the top predators of birds and have been for decades.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/poultry-and-poultry...
I find the horrors of industrial animal farming horrendous, while not having a moral problem with the idea of raising an animal in decent conditions for slaughter.
Okay, something else which affects wild birds: "Bird corpses were counted - and, where possible, identified - at 166 locations throughout Britain during the summer of 1985. The survey covered all roads except motorways. It is the most recent such study, and the most comprehensive. The results were depressing. A minimum of 30 million birds are killed on Britain's roads every year. Depending on the assumptions made in the statistical analysis, the death rate could be even higher: 70 million a year is not impossible."[1] And that's as well as wild rabbits, hedgehogs, badgers, foxes, deer, and so on killed by cars which wind turbines don't affect.
So the wildlife in the UK would be much better off if we built more viable alternatives to driving and road trucking than if we scrapped wind turbines. We can also note that people are working on wind turbines that don't kill birds, e.g. [2]. It's not a fixed fact that all wind turbine designs do the same damage.
In the context of a world where fossil fuel propaganda really does exist[3] and Trump's recent executive order on unleashing energy generation where he tells government departments to look for all kinds of energy sources on their land - geothermal, hydroelectric, oil, gas, anything - except wind or solar - exists, and in the wider climate change context where there isn't a magically perfect answer - and where the UK is uniquely well suited in Europe to wind power - it can't just be left that "sensational $bignum means stop wind turbines" with nothing else mentioned.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/carnage-on-...
[2] https://www.audubon.org/magazine/surprisingly-simple-solutio...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 - Climate Town video on how the gas industry sets up groups of 'concerned citizens' which pay social media influencers to post about how great cooking with gas is, and agitate politically while obscuring the source of their funding, among other things.
(but we can; the UK has 30 million homes; if 500,000 of them put up wild bird feeders, that would lead to more wild birds. Again the context of the comment was the shock value of $bignum not a comment on specific species or habitats or desired outcomes).