Denmark: 1,000 Megawatts Of Offshore Wind, And No Signs of Slowing Down

Is looking at them significantly worse than looking at the car traffic on a major street in the rush hour? As far as the sound is concerned, I doubt that the effects are anything more than purely psychological. There are established hygienic limits for a reason.

The only problem described in the article is having too much energy (crikey Moses, what a nightmare, we have to fix the grid). If a wind turbine falls over, the impact is a little less than if a tsunami envelops a nuclear plant, isn't it? Not to mention dealing with waste for hundreds or thousands of years? (I'm not anti-nuclear, just not delusional about its downfalls, and let's face it, there are many. Thorium has waste too.)

Nuclear as commercially implemented today is uninsurable. Even without insurance, a nuclear power plant is an extremely complex, capital intensive machine. The technology may be perfectly sound, with scientists able to control it perfectly, but the problem to me is the top heavy organisational structure. The management water head.

I do agree more research is needed towards passive security compact scale fission using thorium. After investing a lot of money into harvesting wind, that is.

Nuclear power depends on public trust (which is reflected in politics). That trust was just about built up again after Chernobyl when Fukushima happened. Now we'll probably have to wait another 20-30 years (except in China and India, which as both actively pursuing nuclear energy).

A team of journalists just discovered the barrels of nuclear waste that the UK threw in the ocean. 17,000 tons of nuclear waste just near the British island Alderney.

"It is just as environmentally friendly." Yeah, sure.

source: http://www.dw.de/atommüllfässer-im-ärmelkanal-entdeckt/av-16...

Or read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

The nuclear power I look forward to, and which i think is the real hero to come, is fusion power. The way it works, it simply cannot physically create disasters similar to fission, because it needs energy to create energy, and if the energy stopped, the output would stop. Additionally to that, it doesn't generate the nuclear waste products associated with fission power, and can thus without worry be installed in more problematic countries.

1.

If you think of the country of Denmark itself as a large corporation of sorts, its goal in the international market is to go high-end. The workforce is too high-wage to compete on regular manufacturing, cheap worldwide food prices mean the traditionally important agriculture sector now contributes a mere 5% of GDP, and it doesn't have the oil of Norway. So it's the only choice really: to be a leader in high-skill services, R&D, and high-end manufacturing.

[This paragraph is an aside:] This view underpins lots of stuff that goes on in both the governmental and industrial sectors. As one example, there is a goal that within 20 years, 100% of Danes will earn a college degree, and 50% (!) will go on to get a masters degree, in order to position the country's workforce as highly educated, almost like a 6-million-strong consulting shop. They're willing to pay for it, too: there is no tuition, and students receive a modest living stipend. The similarities to a company are surprisingly deep, e.g. the unemployment program is even run a lot like an HR department, viewing un/underemployed people quite literally as potential "human resources" who can be used to plug labor shortages elsewhere, with the right matchmaking and training. On the services side, it's been reasonably successful, though honestly in part due to good fortune in making the transition: Carlsberg and Maersk are huge parts of the Danish economy, despite the fact that actually brewing beer and building/sailing ships are long-gone as mainstays of the economy. They managed to transition into having Danes as the managerial class of global companies when the manufacturing jobs moved elsewhere. It's not hard to imagine an alternate-history scenario where Copenhagen ends up as a poor post-industrial city full of derelict shipyards, instead of a rich post-industrial city full of loft conversions in former shipyards.

Wind energy has been a lynchpin of the R&D and high-end manufacturing part of the strategy for a while now, from both the public and private sides. Denmark's location makes wind a reasonably good choice among the various things you might want to pursue in the energy sector (I wouldn't recommend a solar-based strategy here). And so it's become not only big domestically, but a major export business. Denmark-based Vestas has long been the #1 worldwide wind-turbine manufacturer, one of the few global "#1s" in a country of 6 million. You can aso see it in the "branding strategy" of both the government (http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/wind-energy/) and the industrial sector (http://www.windpower.org/en/). And it spills into other things, e.g. "smart grids" to manage the variable load of wind energy are now a big R&D initiative at the university I'm at, with hopes that Denmark will become a leader in smart-grid tech too.

So what I'm getting at is: domestic wind farms are rather multi-purpose. They do serve a primary function of actually generating energy. But they also serve a secondary function of building up the wind-export sector, and another secondary function of building up a certain image that Denmark wants to project, of a 21st-century R&D and high-end manufacturing hub, and of generally being "ahead".

2.

Many of the wind farms are organized as consumer cooperatives, so have broad-based ownership, which produces built-in supporters. For example, the farm offshore of the island of Amager (just east of Copenhagen) is co-owned 50% by the municipality, and 50% by a cooperative with 10,000 members.

But few people do.

But as far as the new ones: I recently moved offices in Copenhagen, to a 5th-story office looking east towards the Øresund. I think the offshore wind farm there adds substantially to the view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middelgrunden). It's especially nice on overcast, windy, gray days, when you can see the white turbines rotating in the fog. But it's nice on sunny days too, at least in my opinion. Here's a snapshot from my window: http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/598966_1010047304...

And if you get closer, e.g. at Amager Beach, it's even nicer (again imo). It's like a modernist kinetic sculpture or something, an aesthetically pleasing series of 20 massive but sleekly styled turbines in a row.

However, in Denmark you can make an interesting experiment in several places. You can place yourself so that you are in 100-500m from a windmill AND have a road with traffic between you and the windmill.

What kind of noise, vibrations and view do you think are significant in that situation?

But anyway breeders are a partial solution to that problem and we haven't actually put a lot of effort into the waste disposal.

Nuclear power has much less waste.

I like wind power, but that's not a very strong argument without numbers.