Germany's Giant Windmills Are Wildly Unpopular (financialpost.com) 287
"Local politics are a bigger problem for renewable energy growth than competition from fossil fuels," warns a Bloomberg columnist:
It's getting harder to get permission to erect the turbine towers. Local regulations are getting stricter. Bavaria decided back in 2014 that the distance between a wind turbine and the nearest housing must be 10 times the height of the mast, which, given the density of dwellings, makes it hard to find a spot anywhere. Wind energy development is practically stalled in the state now. Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin, passed a law this year demanding that wind-farm operators pay 10,000 euros ($11,100) per turbine each year to communities within 3 kilometers of the windmills. Wind projects are also often rejected or stalled because they're deemed to interfere with military communications, air traffic control or broadcast radio stations.
Besides, local opponents of the wind farms often go to court to stall new developments or even have existing towers dismantled. According to the wind-industry lobby BWE, 325 turbine installations with a total capacity of more than 1 gigawatt (some 2% of the country's total installed capacity) are tied up in litigation. The irony is that the litigants are often just as "green" as the wind-energy proponents -- one is the large conservation organization NABU, which says it's not against wind energy as such but merely demands that installations are planned with preserving nature in mind. Almost half of the complaints are meant to protect various bird and bat species; others claim the turbines make too much noise or emit too much low-frequency infrasound. Regardless of the validity of such claims, projects get tied up in the courts even after jumping through the many hoops necessary to get a permit.
Another reason for local resistance to the wind farms is a form of Nimbyism: People hate the way the wind towers change landscapes. There's even a German word for it, Verspargelung, roughly translated as pollution with giant asparagus sticks... This nasty political and regulatory climate creates too much uncertainty for investors, just as the German government prepares to phase out wind-energy subsidies...
Without technological breakthroughs -- for example, in energy storage, which would make fewer new turbines necessary -- Germany, and then other countries that try to build up renewable energy generation as it has done, will be hard put to push production to the level required to reach climate goals.
Besides, local opponents of the wind farms often go to court to stall new developments or even have existing towers dismantled. According to the wind-industry lobby BWE, 325 turbine installations with a total capacity of more than 1 gigawatt (some 2% of the country's total installed capacity) are tied up in litigation. The irony is that the litigants are often just as "green" as the wind-energy proponents -- one is the large conservation organization NABU, which says it's not against wind energy as such but merely demands that installations are planned with preserving nature in mind. Almost half of the complaints are meant to protect various bird and bat species; others claim the turbines make too much noise or emit too much low-frequency infrasound. Regardless of the validity of such claims, projects get tied up in the courts even after jumping through the many hoops necessary to get a permit.
Another reason for local resistance to the wind farms is a form of Nimbyism: People hate the way the wind towers change landscapes. There's even a German word for it, Verspargelung, roughly translated as pollution with giant asparagus sticks... This nasty political and regulatory climate creates too much uncertainty for investors, just as the German government prepares to phase out wind-energy subsidies...
Without technological breakthroughs -- for example, in energy storage, which would make fewer new turbines necessary -- Germany, and then other countries that try to build up renewable energy generation as it has done, will be hard put to push production to the level required to reach climate goals.
Energy sprawl (Score:3, Insightful)
The large-scale problem with small sources of energy is that you need to deploy large numbers of units to achieve utility scale. The first few wind turbines were brave and futuristic symbols of Something Being Done about the carbon problem. After that, they just looked ugly, and larger numbers of them just look uglier still.
Solar at least disappears into the built environment when deployed on rooftops and other structures. But solar arrays out in fields are just another part of the ugly sprawl of small energy.
Re:Energy sprawl (Score:5, Insightful)
A 130m tall tower of a windmill, with an 80m rotor does not loko ugly.
A field of them, where you have 50 or 100 does not look ugly, it looks majestic.
It shows mankind in harmony with nature, a field where you grow grain and grow energy, too.
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Depends on where you live. Not really sure I would want to live between two 100m wind turbines in an array. Yes, they are better than the old ones, butare they good enough?
I might chose to live 200m from a 5MW wind turbine than 200m from a 5MW diesel genset, but that is closer than it should need to be....
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3 blade fan, to me, is a kind of eye-sore. It is asymmetric.
If they put up the 4 blade fan, the shape is like a Dutch wind mill,
which has been running over a century and attracts a lot of tourists.
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Yeah, but how are you going to make any money thinking like that?
That's what all this is about. People doing everything they can to perceive wind turbines as ugly, so they can complain and get compensation.
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Wow, "how much do we pay to power a refrigerator per year". The limitations on the statistic alone should raise massive accuracy alarm bells.
Re:Energy sprawl (Score:5, Informative)
So much rubbish in one forum. My family live out the country, there are wind farms, they look fine. UK has no natural wilderness, it's all human manicured anyway.
It only takes a very small percentage of people to take legal action against a wind farm regardless of what the rest of the people want, a handful of people taking legal action is not a poll and is not representative of the will of the majority.
Germany's domestic electricity price is nuts because it's taxed to the hilt, the price has practically nothing to do with the current cost of renewables, here in the UK we have modest electricity prices and lots of renewables, coal is almost gone from the picture "Coal supplied 5.4% of UK electricity in 2018, down from 7% in 2017, 9% in 2016, 23% in 2015 and 30% in 2014." Germany is now the dirty man of the EU along with Poland, both have far too much coal derived electricity.
And if we are struggling to put wind turbines on land then we have the north sea - the whole thing was land only a few thousand years ago, it can probably be populated with enough wind turbines to run Europe.
Not Deep - Doggerland etc:
https://www.theguardian.com/ne... [theguardian.com]
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So much rubbish in one forum.
The guy you were responding literally said "you have the second highest price for power in the EU, thanks to lots of unreliable renewables". So the question is: does "renewable" power negatively impact the energy bill? The answer is YES. British householders were forced to foot a £173 million bill to compensate wind farms ordered to reduce the power they provided the country [telegraph.co.uk] in 2018. This compensation bill is on the rise year after year.
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And ignore the fact that deaths due to wind turbines are an insignificant speck compared to deaths due to other human activities such as building homes with windows, owning cats and using gigatons of pesticides to kill the food-chain.
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Re: Energy sprawl (Score:2)
I think you should find a new they
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Vertical Axis wind turbines are much quieter and have less environmental impact. Good designs are available to develop and with it produce much safer more decorative wind turbines, low noise and in conjunction with elevated artificial reef desalination, very large scale structures (covering hundreds of square kilometres, with many turbines on the edge of the horizon), produce, water, electricity and seafood. More of them much closer together, like sails on the horizon, so as to reduce impact on the foreshor
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But, patents.
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No turbines work well in the messy air of urban evironments, still less so small VAWTs, much as I wish it weren't so.
Come over to fieldlines.com and read the discussions there on this very topic.
Rgds
Damon
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Well, place "ugly" on one side and then "species survival" on the other and prioritization becomes pretty clear. Also, "ugly" is very much in the eye of the beholder.
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The "weirdly informed" nutjobs are really out on this one. Yes, wind turbines can kill birds. Far fewer than are killed by flying into windows and a much more serious problem for birds is from pesticides killing their food - insects and damaging their environment.
This is not something that's new. It's been discussed on Slashdot more or less every time this comes up, so it's very difficult to believe that the people bringing up the birds thing don't know all of this. Seems to me to show that wind power
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also makes sense (Score:2)
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Well here's what we do. They say "NIMBY" and we say fine. Then we just let them sit in the fucking dark when we unplug the last coal plant.
Fuck'em
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Go the cell tower route. Pay people to put them on their property. This could be especially popular with farmers, as there is still going to be lots of room around them to work.
To get others to agree, offer a small monthly discount to their power bill for each windmill visible from their property. Watch how people then line up to get windmills built in view of their property. I'll bet a field of fifty windmills would start looking downright beautiful. It all depends on one's perspective.
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ban glass window and glas building and cats (Score:3)
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Lived 30 years in the country. Got my internet over slow ass dial up and satellite. I live in a small down close to a city now.
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I like the "we", as if you nutjobs will ever attain enough control to be in charge of that decision.
I bet you will be one of those sorry SOBs that we say fuck you too. That is fine, sit in the fucking dark then.
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I think it's quite different for solar. People who love green energy also love solar roofs on their own houses, and don't object when their neighbor gets one.
Wind turbines are frankly unpleasant to be anywhere near. There are better options anyhow.
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Generally people do not care about them as long as they are out to sea, when they are inland they are problematic, no question. Of course looking at the countries deploying them claiming environment, yeah nahh, that ain't the reason why. The real reason why, it puts a huge hole in fossil fuel imports and the debt it creates which must be covered by exports. They would aslo go nuclear, if a good nuclear reactor design was developed and certainly there are ones with low output and long fuel life to be develop
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And yet (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: And yet (Score:4, Insightful)
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Unless you drink a special cocktail, using drinking straws, especially if they are made from plastic, is rather stupid, don't you agree?
Re:And yet (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. For the elderly — particularly for people with motion disorders like Parkinson's, a bent drinking straw means the difference between being able to drink on your own and not. So no, I don't think it is stupid at all. What I think is stupid is banning something because of people disposing of the product incorrectly.
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Or, for special needs, we can just keep using plastic straws, and then throw them in the trash or recycling bin. I bet the percentage of special needs plastic straws in the ocean is pretty much zero.
Steel straws are a bad idea for people with motion disorders, as you can easily hurt yourself on the hard and sharp edges. And how are you going to clean a bent steel straw properly ?
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Um... no, they're not (Score:5, Interesting)
NIMBYs are usally scared more than anything else. They turn on nuke, for example, because they're afraid of meltdowns. Most people have indifferent to positive feelings towards wind turbines.
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Actually, these are very different people. Some actual knowledge of what is going on required to see that.
one good thing about solar panels (Score:2)
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Windmills are pretty darn quiet.
We've got huge swaths of them around Ellensburg and the Columbia Gorge just east of the Cascades, in Washington state. The advantage in that placement is there aren't a lot of people living there - lots of cows, but they rarely complain.
But in any case I've been out in the middle of a big field of those windmills, and it's hard to believe anyone could complain about that level of noise.
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Go camping around any? or just the drive-by?
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Walking.
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They just have minor drawbacks such as producing no power at night, and virtually nothing during winter.
The "Greens" have always been the biggest enemy (Score:2, Insightful)
Energy is always political. Not greens, originally (Score:4, Interesting)
> Coal was more expensive than nuclear in the mid 60s. Had it not been for the green movement no one would have been generating electricity with coal by the mid 70s.
Originally the greens were for nuclear power. Anything is an improvement over coal, and nuclear was* the way to replace most of the energy production from coal and oil. What happened was a political alliance of convenience/hippyism between the peace activists, who protested nuclear weapons, and the greens. Hence Greenpeace. In order to get along with the Peace wing of Greenpeace etc, the greens couldn't keep advocating for nuclear technology.
It's sad how much energy policy is controlled by politics rather than reason. Different sources of energy makes sense in different places, and for different purposes. A rational approach is about finding the right mix. Due to the cube power law, wind energy is great when the wind is just right. We should definitely use it on those days. It's not a reliable, steady source of energy. It's a "make use of it when you can" source. Germany put up a shit-ton of wind turbines because at the time it worked politically, not because it made logical sense. Now wind installations are being stopped, not because it isn't a logical location that works well, but because of politics.
In the US, the politics was solar-electric vs fossil fuels. Never mind passive solar, which makes way more sense than solar-electric for many uses, or any of the other dozen types of alternative energy, US politics (hype) focused on solar-electric. So we ended up way lopsided with far too much emphasis on solar-electric versus other sources. It's all politics. Which is sad.
I've written much more extensively elsewhere on what a rational, workable energy policy looks like, but here's a VERY short summary:
Use whatever renewable sources are handy at a given location and time. Wind, wave, geothermal, passive solar, etc.
Have modern nuclear plants for steady, reliable energy equal to average load minus average renewable production.
Use natural gas, which can quickly throttle up and down, to adjust for short-term differences between supply and demand.
* It still is, but that's a different topic
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Use nuclear for base load, use hydro for peak production or to complement the unreliability of most other renewables.
Use variable pricing to get people to consume power to match when cheap renewables are available.
The matching demand to supply part is what I've been working on for the last 12 years. It works great but the advocates for the poor hate it. The rich can more easily change their consumption habits which means the rich can save a lot of mo
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Base load isn't really a thing IMHO (nor the optimion of the previous CEO of UK's National Grid)... It was in effect invented (as domestic demand) to use some of the electricity from plants that could not easily ramp down when industrial demand fell daily, eg at night.
About the most obvious thing that typically "needs" to run overnight in a home is a fridge/freezer, but people leave all sorts of unnecessary crap on such as cable TV boxes (would be half the load of our fridge/freezer if we didn't turn it of
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Btw I mentioned that you shouldn't actually eat long half-life waste. Note that's the same as hydrogen peroxide, bleach, and WD-40. These things are dangerous if you injest them. We've found ways to safely handle them, without injesting them. Keep them ar least three inches from your mouth.
Re: The "Greens" have always been the biggest enem (Score:3, Insightful)
Environmentalists really hate people. That's what you have to realize. Then everything else makes sense.
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Environmentalists really hate people. That's what you have to realize. Then everything else makes sense.
People talk about "saving the planet". The planet will always be here. Even when the sun explodes and incinerates whatever life may still be left gets sterilized out of existence, the planet itself is going to still be there. Even the overheating of the planet so that no human life could survive will still leave creatures living underground, in the earth, at the bottom of the oceans all sorts of places. There are likely many "bunny huggers" who hate the cruelty people do to animals and wish that most of
Let the communities becomes (part) owners (Score:5, Informative)
Many of these projects are by traditional energy concerns, indeed without any regard for local communities, and also reaping all the (direct) profits. In Belgium, several provinces have mandated that every new renewable energy project needs to be open for investment by people from the local community for at least a certain percentage (20% and up).
Additionally, there are many so-called REScoops [rescoop.eu] —renewable energy cooperatives— in the EU. They generally have a "1 person, 1 vote" policy (regardless of how many shares you own), and are often much better at involving the communities from the start. The information sessions they organise about new projects are not just to listen and answer to concerns, but also to attract new investors (i.e., local people). It's a much healthier dynamic, and while it does not take away all protests, it does help a lot.
Germany is so conservative that it's petrified (Score:2)
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Lignite and Russian gas are Germany's replacement for its nuclear baseload. What in hell is "conservative" about importing gas from your ages-old worst enemy, and what is "environmental" about strip mines leaking toxic waste?
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See how despite the massive investment in solar and wind the fossil share of the baseload ("Mineral oil" and everything below it on the chart minus nuclear) has barely moved? That shows you that the small renewables are only nibbling at the fossil baseload rather than replacing it. There could have been some improvement if the nuclear share had even just been left alone, but it been reduced so far that fossil sources couldn't be cut despite the added sun and wind.
There is another factor not shown here: so m
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Germany is run by a Left wing mess, which is where a number of their problems are coming from.
CDU is not left wing, what are you talking about.
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Complete nonsense. That your country is run by ultra-nationalist ultra-conservatives (both large US parties qualify) does not make regular conservatives "left-wing".
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Your neighbor country (the Netherlands) is a windy place, it's neighboring the sea after all. Also the windmills in Holland were used for milling grains, not for energy production.
As I said above, Germany has increased the capacity of renewable power plants by ~100GW over the last decade, basically doubling the potential grid production. Yet power consumption hasn't doubled and actual consumption from renewables increased from ~10% to ~13% in the same period.
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Well here's what we do. They say "NIMBY" and we say fine. Then we just let them sit in the fucking dark when we unplug the last coal plant.
Which explains the gag orders on those that allow these things onto there property.
If these things were so great, there would be forthrightness... instead.. there are gag orders.
Welcome (Score:2)
Welcome, windmill investors/promoters/enthusiasts, to what nuclear power has been dealing with for many decades.
People who vote against energy production should be free to do so, but should pay more for power, or do without.
We have those giant fans here in Texas ... (Score:2)
... and they are used to cool things down to offset climate change and stuff.
Well that explains it. (Score:2)
Now I know why I can't put these [wikipedia.org] in the garden right next to the house.
Only solution (Score:2)
Move them to a place where the natives worship them as gods. I recommend Lower Saxony for starters.
IF it is really cheap it will win ... eventually. (Score:2)
Wind has a high environmental impact (Score:3)
For people who like numbers and data, the Energy Reality Project has some really good resources on the topic:
http://energyrealityproject.co... [energyrealityproject.com]
The book "Roadmap to Nowhere" by the same people is also very insightful:
http://roadmaptonowhere.com/ [roadmaptonowhere.com]
Nonsense (Score:2)
local regulations are getting stricter. Bavaria decided back in 2014 that the distance between a wind turbine and the nearest housing must be 10 times the height of the mast, which, given the density of dwellings, makes it hard to find a spot anywhere.
Germany and also Bavaria is not that densly populated. A 100m high mast would translate to 1km distance. You an build millions if not billions of wind mills at that range from dwellings.
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Germany and also Bavaria is not that densly populated. A 100m high mast would translate to 1km distance. You an build millions if not billions of wind mills at that range from dwellings.
Yeah, it's not very densely populated which is actually the problem. Outside of Munich, Nuremberg, Augsburg and a few other cities the population is spread out in little towns all over the place. If you try driving on country roads, you'll be entering a town every few km which is where the problem is. Here, I just zoomed in on the most empty-looking area away from major roads:
https://www.google.com/maps/@4... [google.com]
Even if the towns are 2km away from each other, it doesn't mean you can just put the windmill right
A solvable problem (Score:2)
If the Nimbies don't want to see wind turbines, the obvious solution is to locate the wind turbines offshore, sufficiently far away that people won't see them from the beach. The technology exists to do that now; it's a bit pricey but OTOH the wind over the ocean is usually a lot stronger and more reliable than the wind over land anyway.
Another option is to put up solar farms instead of wind turbines. Solar farms don't rise up into the sky, and if land use is a problem, locating the solar panels on existi
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FAKE NEWS! It is NOT the people, actually!! (Score:5, Informative)
WARNING! This is fake news.
People don't actually have much of a problem with them. Even though Germany is rather dense and you hardly ever find a spot that is not a town or some farmer's actively used land.
In actuality, this regulation was directly written by the likes of RWE & co. Our local lignite mining corporation and literal town eradicator, to stifle green energy sources. Solar power got its subsidies cut short by surprise too, leaving the businesses out to die, hadn't it already been too late, since they were already profitable. Nonetheless it was a promise, deliberately broken to destroy them.
Source: Die Anstalt, 2019-04-09.
(They always post extensive lists of sources on their website. Unlike certain other "journalists".)
Anyone got any experience? (Score:2)
I'd call myself a very very pro-sustainable energy kind of person, but I'm also quite noise sensitive, unfortunately. Not quite extremely, but I'm up there.
Are these things actually audible in any capacity at the 2/3/4/5 (?) KM distances? (1.5 -> 4 miles)
I can hear shit like you wouldn't believe, it's a curse, but I do find it somewhat difficult to believe you can hear a turbine spinning at the 2+ mile mark? even if there's many of them?
At the end of the day, we need sustainable energy, very much so,
Why WOULD anybody want a windmill nearby? (Score:2)
At first the windmill seems like a good idea. It provides some extra power to the grid. But that's at pretty much the same time as the grid is overloaded with solar input. Ah well, it's still great, we're generating nice power for everybody. That is the good.
The bad is when the windmill experiences a mechanical or electrical glitch. It does not get repaired. It get abandoned. It costs more to repair them than the estimated value of the electricity they produce. They are an initial win only because of constr
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Re:Makes sense they'd be against it (Score:4, Funny)
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Indeed. The stupidity is staggering. They want electricity, but they want no power-lines or new ways to generate it. Apparently, these people are dumb enough to somehow not make the connection.
Re:Makes sense they'd be against it (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not that simple. Wind power has two serious drawbacks: the swooshing sound every time a blade passes, and the accompanying shadow that traverses your garden every few seconds. It's enough to drive people crazy, and I can imagine that people who suffer from epilepsy really can't live near a windmill.
I live in the Netherlands and we have the same problem as Germany. Our government tries to get as many windmills as possible in the east of the country, because most members of our government don't live there and it's less densely populated than the west. Many people are very much against, which has led to similar political struggles as discribed in the article. Luckily we have a lot of North Sea to put windmills in, so much of our power will eventually come from there.
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Wind power has two serious drawbacks: the swooshing sound every time a blade passes, and the accompanying shadow that traverses your garden every few seconds.
No, no it doesn't have those issues. If people are putting wind turbines in populated areas, maybe these would be issues, but they're not putting wind turbines next to houses.
If you are north or south of a wind turbine, you do not get any shadows. The sun doesn't work like that. If you are east or west of wind turbines, right near sunrise or sunset you might get that issue for an hour, but that's it.
Nobody is putting a 150m wind turbine in someone's back garden. And if they're proposing that, I'll be on the
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Yes, that's the other thing they have in common.
Re: Makes sense they'd be against it (Score:2)
Bavaria is the only part of Germany worth living in. Beautiful countryside, a great balanced climate, plenty of jobs, superior schools.
I fail to find any parallel.
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Populated by hillbillies who can't speak proper German and vote for the most corrupt politicians in the country.
No thanks, never again.
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No, it is not. It is on paper, with life expectancies of 50 years and the wind blowing 100% of the time at the right rate (because too fast means the turbine has to be shut down, too low and obviously it doesn't move the blades).
Germany has installed renewable power sources by ~4x over the last decade (25GW to >100GW), yet they've only increased the share of renewables in actual energy consumption by ~3% since 2009. If their renewables worked, they could've replaced pretty much all of their "dirty" produ
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No, it is not. It is on paper, with life expectancies of 50 years and the wind blowing 100% of the time at the right rate
Under these circumstances, it would be absolutely unbeatable by other sources. As it stands, it's just highly advantageous.
Germany has installed renewable power sources by ~4x over the last decade (25GW to >100GW), yet they've only increased the share of renewables in actual energy consumption by ~3% since 2009
Haha, you're very funny. [cleanenergywire.org]
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Haha, you're very funny. [cleanenergywire.org]
That's only electricity production. The parent talked about total energy consumption. Which is the actually relevant metric.
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Seriously? Do you also think the earth is flat and vaccines are a bad idea?
Scarecrow (Score:2)
I don't see why they can't develop an electronic system that will scare birds away, but have almost no impact on humans and other land animals.
"must be prepared" (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to build a windmill in Germany, you must be prepared to tear it down as well.
Well there are thousands of rusting windmills across the U.S. that say no, from decades ago
But honestly even a there year old could have worked this out. Just WHO do you mandate tear down the windmills if the company that put them up is gone/bacnkrupt/has no employees? How exactly "must" anyone do that if they are gone?
There is some bullshit here for sure, it's just your hand-waving around who is really going to be cl
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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... [wiktionary.org]
People hate the way the wind towers change how landscapes appear.
This is the level of stupidity the world has to fight.
Is there an equivalent word for how power line pylons do the same thing or is that too practical for them to make up NIMBY terms?
I have not even heard "Verspagelung". These people are just against anything that changes anything. That there is pretty much no choice and that they are not rational is completely outside of what they can understand.
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Just because you live in an urban area and are completely content with buildings and lighted signs all around you doesn't mean that people living in the country are all okay with their life and view being disturbed. There is a thing to be said about not seeing anything man-made in your field of view. I'm a photographer and cannot even tell you the number of times I've had to travel to certain spots and look for "things" that do not belong in a particular area. Farmland needs to look like farms, not with
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"Farmland needs to look like farms."
I used to live on a farm and I have no objections to farms per se, far from it.
But nothing much about a farm, even a small one, is "natural". Nothing about the hills that we've stripped of natural cover to put sheep on, or woods that we've turned into flat monoculture fields is "natural". No more natural in any case than a wind or a solar farm.
And if every household reduced consumption by a factor or 2 or 3 as I have (while adding children to mine) we could get by with
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Farmland contains lots of man-made stuff? Or are you referring to those all to few areas were nature is allowed to grow wild?
Regarding what farmland looks like, it is very much a question of the beholder. While I was growing up, quite a lot of windmills were built in the countryside where my father lived, so for me farmland includes windmills. Their slow, lazy turning is a part of an idyllic landscape. You call them monstrosities, I call them pretty.