Why the Dutch oppose windmills
economist.com
economist.com
- A legal requirement to cut CO2 emissions
- A ban on building new nuclear plants as well as a commitment to close the remaining one
- A moratorium on building windmills because they scare birds and pollute the horizon
- The largest supply of natural gas in Western Europe, but an increasing limit on exploiting this because shifts in ground level are causing cracks in people's walls.
- A ban on fracking
- There so notoriously little sunshine that people refuse to take solar power seriously, even though it seems to be working just fine in Germany.
Different groups want opposing things. The energy situation would be fine if environmentalists would allow the construction of more windmills and nuclear plants, or if the CO2 reduction target was dropped. You can't have it both ways.
The people in Groningen would probably be fine with continued exploitation of the gas wells if the profits were spent there, but the money is needed by the national government to meet the EU's budget deficit requirements. Now much of it will remain in the ground while we buy Russian gas.
In my opinion the very concept that a horizon is something that can be polluted is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I think the Dutch landscape is featureless and boring, and windmills are a vast improvement. They look modern, industrious, cheerful.
I recently visited relatives in a German village where in the last few years a bunch of windmills where built. We went for a walk outside the village, and I heard a surprised "oh, those windmills are much smaller than I remember them to be".
Turns out they looked imposing and scary in the beginning because they're of such a different scale than anything else in the area, but they got used to them quickly.
Like the Netherlands it's a relatively flat area, so I guess the effects will be similar (windmills looking huge at first, then perceptually shrinking).
[1] https://stock-foto.nationalebeeldbank.nl/nationalebeeldbank_...
[2] https://stock-foto.nationalebeeldbank.nl/nationalebeeldbank_...
It's simply a matter of visual expectations: There's this flat land, with tiny houses, some forests surround it. Everything is laid out horizontally more than vertically. Then these vertical spikes appear.
In such an environment windmills can seem frightening at first and feel like they're at least(!) 500 meters high since there's no frame of reference to them in the vertical.
At some point they're simply large (still larger than everything else, but church towers, the former larger-than-everything structures, aren't frightening either - because people are used to them).
Well, sometimes it can be wonderful to be in a place without any sign of civilization, except perhaps the road you're walking on.
But, I think they could easily put windmills in places which are already polluted on way or another.
As another solution, they could build those windmills in 19th-century style :)
Agree, but in Holland, that ship has sailed.
The coastline of Zeeland is very artificial of course, much of it is reclaimed land. In the north of course there is the sea dike of Camperduin and reclaimed land, and Wieringen is no longer an island.
The Waddenzee is quite unnatural. The closing of the Zuiderzee has changed the water chemistry such that seagrass will not grow there any more, and the islands have all been fixed in place, while they would naturally migrate east.
I mock Staatsbosbeheer in their constant effort, working hard to keep the landscape from evolving and to keep it in its 'natural' state. The natural state would be a low lying brackish wetland that's regularly flooded by the sea, and the natural state would be constantly evolving.
I wouldn't mind it if they placed more windmills there either, it's not a densely populated area.
So, not all Dutch oppose windmills and renewables at this scale really do make an impact.
I can see how this would be a very annoying thing to experience, do you know how many minutes per day this line-up causes the problem?
According to the video description the windmill is 1000 feet (304 m) away, and is 40 stories (132 m) tall. FWIW in Denmark windmills have to be at a distance from nearest (inhabited) building by least 4 times the height of the windmill (source: http://naturstyrelsen.dk/planlaegning/planlaegning-i-det-aab...).
This article <http://www.windpower.org/da/energipolitik_og_planlaegning/na... says that the windmills can cause shadows for up to 4-6 weeks a year. It is computed when this will happen and the windmills can be stopped for that period, although the law doesn't mention this.
I linked the Danish sources. You might want to put it through google translate.
You never hear them and hardly ever notice them once they are placed.
https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.037446,4.506723,3a,75y,90t/da... < is one of them.
Zoetermeer used to have 3 other windmills about 20 years ago, those were replaced with these.
Only thing i would like is to get cheaper power, that has not happened :|
I don't have an online subscription now, which makes Hacker News submissions for Economist articles are a little problematic.
I wouldn't mind knowing why the Dutch oppose windmills.
I'd say, for it's size, Netherlands is densely populated.
So depending on where you are you can travel for 150 Km and never leave the built-up areas or you can travel for 150 Km and you'll see nothing but grass, cows, the occasional farm and the highway you're on (A6/A7).
The Netherlands is most certainly not quite average as far as population density goes.
Actually I think wobbleblob's reason (because they scare birds and pollute the horizon) is a more prominent reason, I find the Netherlands always quite pretty in comparision with surrounding countries so I'd understand people are reluctant to change that much. Nicer, more colourful buildings, nicer gardens, ... then again it's also a bit boring to me due to being quite flat.
Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this is really not something I have ever heard before. There are many things to like about living here, but what parts of it are pretty?
- not a lot of ribbon development. That alone makes a huge difference.
- cities of comparable size seem to have more green overall (trees, plants in front of houses, more parks etc). Typical example is something like Ravenstein. Seems to have more park than actual housing area.
- nicer architecture (again, eye of the beholder, but hey we have a 'ugly belgian houses' book :]) for instance streets whith all pretty much the same houses, but every third house has a door in a different pastel color etc. Not sure that even existst here. Or apartment buildings with some color to it.
Of course there also are more ugly things (e.g. there are beautiful pieces of the Waal with nice tiny isles and such, then you look more to the left and there's a rather ugly concrete factory or so; some cities have more 'ghetto-style' places but still not as bad as some parts of Brussles I think). But in general I like it more.
Dutch governemnts, especially right winged ones are very paternalistic and dislike individual oportunism where it costs the big and powerful companies.
This by the way should be the rule for the EU as a whole - some countries are naturally better at producing renewable energy, others have nuclear plants or coal. The ones producing renewable energy should just export it so the ones that cannot or won't will be able to fill their quotas.
The only reasonable choice is nuclear power.
And it's not like a nuclear plant is cheap (oh boy is it not), nuisance-free (you can still use an onshore windfarm's land for e.g. pasture) or without environmental impact (ignoring seashore nukes which have their own extra risks, rivershore plants need regulation to avoid overheating downriver and they make the land they're on unusable long after their removal, and obviously because of the amount of cooling the average-sized nuclear plant requires you can't just plop them anywhere you want).
SMRs might be an improvement to some of the drawbacks, but they don't currently exist and we don't have >half a century of experience with them and they're not quite maintenance free (most designs seem to plan refueling every 1 to 5 years). Also "small" is relative, though it helps that you can partially bury the assembly.
Get a grip.
Also birds and bats that collide with the blades, many of which are endangered.
Collision with the blades rarely happens. Birds usually collide with the tower itself, because they get disturbed and try to flee. Towards the sky, which their evolutional programming has identified as "the light".
That's why lots of wind turbines today are painted in different shades of green and brown on the lower part of the tower.
The expense is lower per KWh produced over the lifetime of the machine than most other sources of power so I'm not sure where your 'huge expense' comes from (yes, they're expensive but you should not look at the up-front expense without looking at the total power produced over the lifetime of the machine multipled by the average price of a KWh over that time and then each and every windmill installed so far except for a very few that broke catastrophically and a lot of lessons were learned from those instances). The environmental impact is mostly in people's heads rather than something measurable (I should know, I have windmills within spitting distance from my house). Nuisance is a term that would require some explanation as well.
And each windmill may make 'little power' (though we now have machines capable of 8MW!), but in the aggregate they produce significant power.
If you feel the only reasonable choice is nuclear power then you've already made up your mind about this but as a windmill proponent I see a place for both, nuclear (pebble bed, not old style rod reactors) or natural gas for baseline, wind and solar for when it's available.
I wouldn't dismiss rod reactors outright, but developing new technology to improve safety and fuel efficiency should of course be a priority. Especially since weapons plutonium production isn't a priority as it was when conventional reactors were designed.
But so what, many windmills equate a nuclear power plant in generating capacity (but as you correctly state not in baseline generating capacity, windmills have 0 of that).
The visual impact of a windmill is a different category than the visual impact of a nuclear power plant, it is more distributed so affects more people, on the other hand, some people actually like the windmills.
Just windmills or just nuclear power is short sighted, there is an optimum mixture of both renewables and other sources of power.
This more modular approach to current wind power is also why wind parks tend to end at 300MW nameplant capacity. If you need more power its better to have more tenders for WEPs and benefit from improved technology and economics for the next phase.
Nuclear could be modular and cheap but currently you can't buy modular and cheap nuclear solutions if you wanted too. So you end up with multi year areva construction solutions.
Nuclear power with its current large plants is not easy on the grid either. In the UK wind was really helped because all the pumped storage build to make the 60&70's nuclear fleet cost effective.
Windmills alone cannot meet the total energy need of the Dutch economy, but the neat thing about windmills is that you could potentially plant them almost anywhere in the landscape, without them getting in the way, so it's a nice way to use land that's otherwise being wasted, like dikes, road sides, polders etc.
Sway and AMSC have 10MW turbines (respectively ST10 and SeaTitan)
Still, you've got to compare that with a modern nuclear reactor producing ~1400MWe, and account for nuclear plants having multiple reactors. While hydro beats all in power per plant you still need quite a lot of turbines to produce as much as a nuke (especially when you account for wind variations, so you generally need to overbuild on wind capacity to get the same annual generation).
Alta in Kern County (California) has 440 turbines and while its nameplate capacity rivals a single reactor (1360MWe) its capacity factor (ratio of actual production to nameplate capacity) is under 20% that of an average nuclear plant (at about 15%, Alta running at full capacity all year could theoretically produce ~11500 GWh, it effectively produces ~1700GWh; by comparison Palo Verde has a theoretical capacity of 34531GWh and according to wikipedia an effective yearly generation of 29250 GWh, an 85% capacity factor)
While that is very much true, you still need 20~25 times more surface area to get an equivalent effective production to a nuclear plant, so you need to have all that area available in the first place. And the original land may not be arable at all.
(I'm very much in favour of more wind power, I'm just sad so many people run scared of nuclear base production. Hopefully SMRs will eventually improve that situation though I'm not holding my breath)
In practice it rarely happens, I have windmills (large ones and smaller ones in significant numbers) within spitting distance from my house which also sits in the middle of one of the largest bird breeding grounds in the country. I have spent quite a bit of time at the base of the machines to look for evidence of birdstrikes but I haven't found more bird remains near the windmills than near other man made structures.
Of course I'm only one guy which happens to like rewewable energy technology so don't take my word for this.
There are some studies about this:
http://www.livescience.com/41644-wind-energy-threat-to-birds...
If anything my attempt at evidence collection indicates that the larger machines (which have a much larger swept area than the smaller ones) fare better in this respect because the rotors turn much more slowly, but the tips are still moving at very high speed (200 KM/h) and that's where the danger lies. Smaller machines rotate much faster and the whole disc area is a bad place for a bird to be.
Even so, anything we make (buildings, highways, windmills) affects wildlife and birds are killed by all of the above with the primary killer being the highways and the secondary one the buildings. Windmills do kill birds but they're a distant third.
The time horizon for a nuclear plant alone makes them inconceivable as anything but government white elephant projects...