The word "rights" surprisingly didn't come in that piece. By analogy to "water rights" [1], "wind rights" are a thing, both in the basic sense of permission to extract wind power from some chunk of land [2] and the messier sense of that article: conflicts between upstream and downstream users of the wind [3] (recent article and fascinating read)
Thanks for posting this. Water rights and who gets priority was the first thing that came to mind. The thought of “wind augmentation plans” is fun to think about.
Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I'm so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's the straw, you see? Watch it.
Now my straw reaches acroooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake. I drink your milkshake!
There’s a fun study from ten years ago modeling out what this looks like with hurricanes. Not particularly likely to ever happen but it’s a fun read. One of the things that surprised me is the authors assert that you don’t have to worry about building especially strong turbines because they progressively sap the energy of the storm as it approaches meaning the eyewall wouldn’t be as bad.
To move forward in wind/hurricane the propellers/turbine wings need to move faster than they currently are with the wind. Basically more energy is required to chase the wind. Unless the ship drops and settles inside the hurricane, it won't work.
You might be able to anchor. But the whole concept sounds wildly impractical.
And a vehicle charged by a turbine can travel straight towards the wind. There are physical models of such. Quite counter intuitive. I wonder of it is theoretically impossible if the vehicle is in the air?
Where does the energy go in this case? The ships would have to be pretty large to have any kind of impact. Should they extract CO2 from the air using the generated power?
If windfarms reduce overall wind speed around them and if there are enough of them built, wouldn't this measurably reduce the wind speed in the environment?
And if the wind speed of the environment is measurably reduced, wouldn't this affect the environment itself?
What are the negative effects of this on birds, climate, insect population, etc...? Do positive effects significantly outweigh negatives?
The amount we can extract is tiny compared to the volume of energy put into the air every day by the sun. At a certain scale it could definitely become an issue and change the local environment and reduce wind speeds, we have seen that with some of the biggest solar farms where the air temperature is changed and the shade increases vegetation and wildlife so presumably wind speed reductions will have some effect. But compared to the CO2e it saves from being emitted its absolutely worth it currently.
> The amount we can extract is tiny compared to the volume of energy put into the air every day by the sun.
Here's a study in how much wind power you can extract before adding more wind turbines doesn't produce more power overall.
At the 100m mark (as opposed to the whole atmosphere up to the jet streams), they calculate 250TW.
Total human electricity generation is well under 5TW (30PWh/yr, out of around 180PWh/yr of total energy), so we could supply all electricity from wind and still leave 98% of the "extractable" global wind potential in the air, which is itself less than all wind energy because of the Betz limit.
> But compared to the CO2e it saves from being emitted its absolutely worth it currently.
Funny. That’s a huge part of the argument made to justify that burning fossil fuels is OK. The problem with letting small problems linger while you scale is that suddenly you have a huge problem you can’t do anything meaningfully about because suddenly it’s a critical part of your economy.
No, it’s being used to say that ignoring the problems with Wind farms scaling to a huge scale (and fossil fuels is massive and wind has made less than a noticeable dent) means that you’ve solved one set of problems for another and hopes the second set isn’t as bad. I didn’t say the only alternative is to go back to fossil fuels. I personally think that nuclear has much better and cleaner scaling properties with fewer issues than wind and solar (for example it still remains generally true that the only countries that have meaningfully reduced CO2 emissions are those that have offset it using nuclear while solar and wind have a very poor record) .
And it's important to understand a lot of solar doesn't show up on the figures as it reduces demand, rather than showing up in supply.
( ie if you have panels on your roof you typically use it first before sending any excess to grid ) so the effect is largely reduced demand not measured increased production.
Please look at a chart of per-MWhr generation costs. Wind and solar are a fraction of the cost of nuclear (with solar plunging by the day, almost) and nuclear is only getting more expensive as time goes on despite being a decade or two away from being a 100 year old technology.
In the US nuclear plants are being phased out and wind/solar projects are replacing them at a ratio of roughly 6:1...with huge savings for grid operators and customers. It's so cheap, even with storage system costs it's still cheaper.
That's where utilities are focused: expanding energy storage and better transmission grid infrastructure. Those, and renewable energy, increase grid reliability.
If you just measure generation costs then you are missing the other key element of a nation grid - it always working - and that characteristic costs as well, not just the electrons provided.
So those improved transmission and storage investments need to be put on the renewables total costs.
Nuclear also has significant decommissioning costs.
However the biggest cost here is probably that required to adapt to the effects of climate change if we don't take steps.
As pointed out, the cost is only a fraction if you ignore the lack of batteries. Solar & Wind today can only be used economically for peak load. Baseload requires batteries and nuclear & fossil fuels remain more economical.
Yes kinda, although even very large wind farms are small compared to:
1) the total height of the atmosphere and
2) other natural obstructions like cliffs and hills
What happens in surface level winds (which is where windmills operate) are actually controlled by the upper level winds. Obstructing surface level winds has local effects (these are also called "terrain effects" since this is usually caused by geography).
Theoretically, if you were to cover the earth in windmills, this would have a serious effect on surface level winds, where they would generally be blocked by a nearby windmill. This would be especially noticeable at sea where you otherwise don't get terrain effects. The vast majority of the atmosphere (everything above a few hundred feet) would continue to be unaffected, though, and would continue to be driven by ground and sea surface temperatures and the Coriolis effect, mostly.
Then again, in terms of direct threats to birds, ignoring climate change, things like powerlines (25 million birds a year in the US), and more significantly air pollution (200-2000 million), windows (2000 million) and cats (1000-4000 million) even very high estimates of 2 million a year including things like habitat destruction and extra powerlines (more direct estimates from collisions are around the 500k mark) from wind turbines make them in turn seem like the lesser of the problems.
Which is not to say it's not an important factor, especially as they affect very specific kind of birds disproportionately, but it's not like wind turbines are primarily bird-killing devices, and it's even possible they may be net benefits to birdkind by, say, reducing air pollution.
I believe bird strikes went down when they made the windmills much bigger, and the angular velocity of the blades much lower. Not building them on open truss towers encouraging birds building nests under them also helped.
That's what I was wondering -- couldn't this have some long-term effects on the climate of the area? In its current form, there is probably very little impact. But I imagine as wind farms become more common and dot the country-side... what does this do?
Modern SMR nuclear reactors use precious generation spent fuel rods as their own fuel, and by design, are impossible to cause a meltdown.
I have 21.1kW of solar panels on my barn, and nuclear is still the cleanest energy at scale, but a lot. Also, solar panels can’t be realistically recycled and when the panels are done, they’re destined to landfills. At least they’re finding ways to recycle wind farm rotor blades.
> Something that's mostly aluminium, glass, silicon and silver can't be recycled?
There's no point in engaging him, he already is moving the goalpost of the discussion however it fits for his opinion.
I mean, we're talking about solar panels that are made of standard materials vs. uranium-enriched fuel rods that have to be stored at least a 100 years in salt mines in the middle of nowhere, without any possibility to recycle them anyhow. Let alone leaving what happens with those power plants after they've been shut down.
Modern SMRs (small nuclear reactors) can literally use spent fuel rods from legacy nuclear reactors as their primary fuel. This isn’t conjecture but simple fact. The engineering has dramatically improved even if public sentiment hasn’t. Modern nuclear reactors can not melt down in same way the reactor at Chernobyl did.
The new “fast reactors” are explicitly designed to take spent fuel rods as fuel to lessen the requirement of creating more enriched uranium.
I downvoted it because only a couple of small modular reactors have been constructed so far, and neither of them use spent fuel rods from older reactors as fuel:
If you were referring to a theoretical SMR design, I will believe it after a demonstration unit is built and operating. Most reactor designs never enter industrial use, just like most designs for new kinds of batteries or solar cells.
The book Mine is relevant here. It’s about how people argue over what belongs to whom, especially when ownership is unclear.
When one wind farm is upwind, its turbines slow the wind for farms behind it, cutting their energy. In a way, it’s “stealing” some of the wind.
The book explains why these kinds of fights over shared resources happen and why we need better rules for such situations.
Other examples: upstream hydropower reducing downstream potential energy; a tree in your yard casting shadows on your neighbor’s property, thereby “stealing” sunlight and potential solar power.
Mine, by Kim Faulk, 2022
Synopsis: “ Family is everything...
I always knew my father was a cold, heartless bastard.
But the moment he took Elle Castlemaine and her pathetic daughter into our home, barely a month after our mom died, he unleashed something savage inside me.”
Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Heller and Salzman. The authors are professors of (real estate and environmental, resp.) law.
“He unleashed something savage inside me. I built an upwind, windmill fight and our family and the worlds view on wind rights was never the same again”
We have been here before with the waterwheels that powered the mills at the start of the Industrial Revolution, allegedly.
Allegedly this was a problem in the Cotswolds, UK, when the woollen industry was where the big money was. I only know this from school history classes, not from Google, hence my use of the word 'allegedly'. Allegedly, mills placed upstream slowed the flow to existing mills downstream, leading to disputes.
In time, mills were built with big chimneys, meaning coal. But why would you go for expensive coal that had to be transported when you had 'free' power from the river? It has been hypothesised that drought may have played a part in this, not the over use of waterwheels.
It's quite obvious if you look at how a watermill is built. Upstream, there's a wier which diverts water along a culvert into a pond at the level of the weir. The watermill is then driven by water falling from the pond to the level of the river at that point. Depending on the gradient of the river, this can be some distance from the weir. If the weir diverts on average a substantial portion of the flow, anyone wanting to use the river between the weir and the mill will find there's much less water for the purpose. Many British rivers in areas where there were (literal) cottage industries like little mesters are not that big (only a few metres across and under a metre deep) so you can see where conflicts could arise. And also they do dry up to almost trickles in dry weather.
Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over wake losses. Let's get some figures:
* From their own study: the cumulative wake loss impact of four new wind farms in the Irish Sea on Orsted's existing estate is 3.28% [0]
* "Wind turbines are found to lose 1.6±0.2% of their output per year." [1]
So, wake losses turn a brand new wind farm into a 2-year-old wind farm. Given the yuuuuuge lifespan of wind farms, it seems kinda trivial.
Most climate change advocates naively believe that because an energy resource in renewable it must be infinite too. Simple energy balance over a given area will show how much extraction of wind energy will reduce available energy downstream.
Moreover, the economics of offshore wind farms is often commingled with state enterprises and various subsidy schemes, which makes them uneconomical even in the best of times, so a 2% capacity reduction coupled with inevitable maintenance and repair costs escalations might make many wind farms uneconomical.
Onshore wind farms are much more economical but the best locations such as Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico already have been developed.
I don’t know what a climate change advocate is: someone who believes in physics? But in general nobody believes that resources are infinite. We just have a lot of offshore wind area, onshore wind area, and space to fit solar panels. Not infinite, but enough to massively increase humanity’s access to energy sources and put us back on the growth path we were on before fossil fuels caused us to stagnate.
Yeah, this sounds like someone who doesn't realize that climate change is a real effect driven by CO2 emissions, regardless of the precise economics of renewable energy.
An Advocate/activist is someone who puts politics and policy ahead of science and economics, and it isn't limited to climate change either.
For example, it was gay advocacy/activists not heath sciences professionals who made sure more money was spent on Aids/HIV than all childhood diseases combined.
Their assumptions are worse than that. They assume constant global rate of renewable energy production but average global wind speeds aren't constant, they appear to be slowing down. This is called "global stilling". It is often blamed on climate change, which (it is now claimed) both speeds up and slows down the wind simultaneously, although the rapid construction of wind farms and urban buildings might also be related.
This is exactly it. Especially for the UK offshore projects where sites were auctioned off: All bidders knew that a competitive bid had to aim for an ROI only slightly above market rates, given that risk was very low.
This means that 1 percent on production will easily turn into 10 or 20 percent on profit.
Source: worked on CAPEX and yield estimates for major player operating in this sector for a decade.
Did they factor in the risk that a site upwind of them could be auctioned later basically turning their project unprofitable? If you bid higher ignoring this risk and later lose money, maybe they should have bid a little less
Are you doing a Jordan Peterson bit? The one where someone asks him "Do you believe in" and he says "Well what is the meaning of do, and what do you mean by you? And what is believe?"
I really am insulted by the analogy. All I said is that painting a 3% drop as trivial and not worth thinking about is completely ignoring that that could be the entire profit margin for the wind mill installation in the first place and thus the financing and capital investment math could have been done incorrectly and push the profitability negative. Pretty sure I presented a clear description of what my issue with such a glib dismissal is.
The difference between a wind farm being barely barely profitable and barely barely losing money doesn't really matter when we're building these in bulk.
No, I'm saying that lots of different projects will have different levels of profitability and if one or two flip over that magic line it doesn't really matter. The difference between 83 wind farms built in a year being profitable and 87 being profitable, with the 4 that changed being basically breakeven either way, is not very meaningful.
Especially because a more realistic answer is it'll be profitable either way but it'll change whether the return is higher than AAA bonds or not. It's not important. It only affects very marginal projects.
Lol, you'll money on every MW, but make it up on volume.
I find people who advocate for renewable energy projects are almost always the same people who argue in favor of energy subsidies, too. Perhaps they know something about energy economics, the rest of us don't...
In the capitalist environment it does. At least if we do not want state intervention. In general money does not get invested in known unprofitable ventures. There might be bets on profitability. But profit is always expected.
A couple farms that barely make profit are already going to be unattractive to investors. It really doesn't make much difference to future investment. There's not a massive sea change between 1% profit and 2% loss, they both suck. Investors are going to focus on the higher profit farms no matter what, ones that would still be positive if they lose 3%.
Other things can go right or wrong and change the numbers by a couple percent. That risk is pretty normal. It's not something wild.
And any farm that's already running or even half-built is still going to be finished and maintained and make as much power as it can. Once you already spent a big percent of the budget you're not getting it back, and the ROI on the remaining spending is very high.
The challenge is that your neighbor building a wind farm next to you changes your profitability. That uncertainty isn't priced in. I think you're really assuming someone here is saying "stop building wind farms" vs "this is a problem investors in the space will need to account for as this scales up more"
I don't disagree with your description of the problem in this comment. But the OP was perfectly fine if it's just something "to account for" on the scale of 3%.
Your strong dismissal of OP, and talking about how it "could be the entire profit margin", made it sound a lot more serious than it is, and that's why I disagreed with how you were commenting earlier and posted a counterargument.
I think the point is that with thin margins and capital costs, 1.6% (compounded over decades) could be a large chunk of your profit.
TFA discusses this:
> To justify their investment and make a profit, "it's very important for a developer to be able to project that the wind farm will produce a given amount of electricity for 25 or 30 years", the typical lifespan of a wind farm, he says. Even a relatively small, unexpected reduction in that energy output can upset this investment calculation and make the wind farm not financially viable, Finserås says.
If wakes losses have been known for years as asserted by the piece, I'd argue it's the fault of the operator and investors building a farm downwind (or potentially) of another. The only thing I can think of is if regulatory or zoning changes caused underlying assumptions of wake loss to change.
It's like setting up a low margin Italian restaurant with none nearby and a few months later another Italian restaurant sets up taking your revenue, tough luck then
This isn't a Best Buy. Offshore wind is very expensive compared to land-based wind and operators can struggle to turn a profit. 3.28% is indeed likely very significant.
I do not understand HN's pathological obsession with trying to "gotcha" news media titles for being "clickbait" especially given the "Software (version number)" posts and edgy titles to corporate and personal blogs that are everywhere here.
This made me think of a cool sci Fi post apocalyptic idea.
A colony that has its base in the middle of violent tornado or storm country but it has a huge array of wind machines that harvest the storm for energy. On the leeward side of the array, where the colony lives, the air is calm, robbed of its energy.
Sounds like an idea that is technically sound but economically a dead end. Like harvesting lightening for electricity. It might not seem it locally but the energy is too defuse at a large scale.
From TFA the wake can stretch 100km from a windfarm and reduce output of another by 10%. Interesting so it sounds like an optimization at country scale, how to place windfarms to maximize overall output when accounting for these effects.
People seem to love finding faults with wind farms, even if the contents of the article are purely factual, we need them ,we need to keep experimenting with them and developing better solutions.
We can't let wind turbines be like "nuclear"; the dirty word which could've saved our civilization.
The argument I've seen a lot recently that seems the most disingenuous is that the blades aren't recyclable. Completely inert fiberglass blades that are useful in generating GWH of energy over their multi-decade lifespan and people are pretending to be mad we're going to bury them in the same landfills that we bury millions of tons of other trash?
A close second is some dramatic image of a turbine with a gearbox issue that leaked gearbox oil all down the side about how much oil they use, "100 liters per turbine" or some such bullshit that ignores that all of that is fully recycled so you might 'consume' 100 liters in a development in a year but even that's not turned into CO2, it's just leaked into the environment.
Here the victims of "wind theft" by wind farms are other wind farms. The point of this article is that by not accounting for the problem, the efficiency of wind power around the world may decrease and also discourage investors.
I kind of wondered about this since I got a big windfarm near me in all the fields. It seems like ideally they would be spread out over a much larger area across the state. Of course there are probably also advantages to having all that electrical infrastructure in one area.
That really is only a problem if the direction of the wind never changes. But if the direction of the wind turns around the farm stealing the wind and the farm being robbed of wind switch roles.
Also, isn't it really stupid to treat the wind the same way we do with rivers or with electrical current (which is actually flowing the opposite way to electrons, so not like the river/wind at all)?
E.g. country A is saying that country B is stealing their incoming (upstream) wind, but there's currently a zone of negative pressure (based on the mountains/shore/passing by cyclone/whatever) on the country A's territory which actually allows for the pressure gradient to form through both countries A and B - so there's more energy potential available to tap into on country A's territory?
Thinking of wind direction. I would imagine that wind farms in general are build in areas where there is tendency for prevalent winds. That is known to have certain direction and speed. As these are most sensible places for most production.
Areas with more changing wind patterns are likely less desirable.
I would like to see this effect compared to other obstructions, like regular buildings. I understand that wind farms are built in areas that are mostly otherwise flat, so the effects matter, but I just don’t feel like my scale is calibrated. I would think an individual tall building would have more effect than an individual wind turbine, but what about a typical small town center vs a wind farm?
Unpopular opinion: I don't like wind farms ruining natural landscapes. They pollute natural beauty and put industrial infrastructure where it would have never been otherwise. I'm 100% onboard with alternative energy as it's essential to prevent changing our atmosphere. However, as I look across the Kansas plains, I'm saddened by the industrialization and further human encroachment into areas previously untouched.
That's amazing, it's remarkable that we can harvest energy from the environment so effectively.
Is global warming expected to increase or decrease wind farm output? Apparently warm air is less dense than colder air, warm, moist air is even less dense, but it would seem like with global warming you have more energy in the system overall.
> Wind farms produce energy, and that energy is extracted from the air. And the extraction of energy from the air comes with a reduction of the wind speed," says Peter Baas, a research scientist
Sorry, but this is something that any 8th grade primary school student could say. It's the energy conservation principle.
As you say it obviously reduces the wind speed. But what is not obvious is whether the reduction is negligible or not, and what problems it could lead to. How much fields hamper each other. Whether it messes with bird ability to glide on updrafts, sailing, water aeration.
Fortunately it seems to be fine from these perspectives.
If wind has kinetic energy - E, the amount that can be harvested is < E, and that was kinda obvious from the start. Turbines stop the wind, hence one country can stop wind blowing towards another country if they put many fields on the "track". And apparently it hasn't been taken into account when making those optimistic statements regarding zero emission energy. Also this IS ecology altering, and might have an effect in global weather, but not sure how much (wind mainly blows at high altitudes).
Everyone with a functional understanding of thermodynamics knows that you cannot extract energy from a system and expect there to be the same energy in the source after the extraction.
I do wonder if - in 20 to 50 years - we find out that we somehow screwed up the ecosphere with renewable energy production in a subtle and catastrophic way, much like we did with coal-powered or nuclear plants.
The wind and solar energy would've merely heated up the earth, then get radiated back out. Us capturing some of it, using it, and then re-radiate it back out (at a later date) won't have made any difference.
Unless/until the day we paved the entire earth with solar panels and capture the entire atmosphere of their wind, this will continue to be the case. Hopefully, we reach a dyson swarm before that occurs...
I am old enough to remember when similar statements were made about other - now out of favour - energy production methods. NPPs had a "Once in a thousand years" failure rate. Gas was fossil, sure, but the CO2 would be absorbed into the ecosphere (to make plants grow).
In the end, all energy eventually dissipates again. That does not mean that we do not have immediate or near-immediate phenomena to consider (like: global warming).
Let's take solar ... we now have begun to replace agricultural areas with solar farms. For example: How does this affect biodiversity in that area (the things look not green, but gravel under it)? I'm not even saying it is necessarily a bad thing - just a change.
And we should be careful to change running systems, especially considering the stakes. Instead, what I see is proponents of one tech over the other happily shouting down any attempt at critical consideration.
The word "rights" surprisingly didn't come in that piece. By analogy to "water rights" [1], "wind rights" are a thing, both in the basic sense of permission to extract wind power from some chunk of land [2] and the messier sense of that article: conflicts between upstream and downstream users of the wind [3] (recent article and fascinating read)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riparian_water_rights
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_rights
[3] https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/wind-wakes-and-the-right-to-win...
Wind rights, as presently constructed, are more analogous to air rights than water rights. They convey the right to use a space versus resource.
Thanks for posting this. Water rights and who gets priority was the first thing that came to mind. The thought of “wind augmentation plans” is fun to think about.
From the article:
"you can't steal something that can't be owned - and nobody owns the wind"
Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I'm so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's the straw, you see? Watch it.
Now my straw reaches acroooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake. I drink your milkshake!
I presume this is a quote from a film, but which one? Or, if not where from?
There Will Be Blood
Exactly ++1
There’s a fun study from ten years ago modeling out what this looks like with hurricanes. Not particularly likely to ever happen but it’s a fun read. One of the things that surprised me is the authors assert that you don’t have to worry about building especially strong turbines because they progressively sap the energy of the storm as it approaches meaning the eyewall wouldn’t be as bad.
Study: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120
Article: https://www1.udel.edu/udaily/2014/feb/hurricanes-wind-turbin...
How about hurricane-chasing drone ships full of turbines?
Kill two bird with one stone! Sap hurricane energy and turn it into renewable energy.
To move forward in wind/hurricane the propellers/turbine wings need to move faster than they currently are with the wind. Basically more energy is required to chase the wind. Unless the ship drops and settles inside the hurricane, it won't work.
You might be able to anchor. But the whole concept sounds wildly impractical.
And a vehicle charged by a turbine can travel straight towards the wind. There are physical models of such. Quite counter intuitive. I wonder of it is theoretically impossible if the vehicle is in the air?
By "hurricane chasing" I just meant constant repositioning to capture wind energy that's currently favorable.
Where does the energy go in this case? The ships would have to be pretty large to have any kind of impact. Should they extract CO2 from the air using the generated power?
Yeah that sounds good. How about making natural gas using the electricity, as I understand that Terraformer is doing using solar power?
The ships will get plenty large if the operation is profitable :-)
If windfarms reduce overall wind speed around them and if there are enough of them built, wouldn't this measurably reduce the wind speed in the environment?
And if the wind speed of the environment is measurably reduced, wouldn't this affect the environment itself?
What are the negative effects of this on birds, climate, insect population, etc...? Do positive effects significantly outweigh negatives?
The amount we can extract is tiny compared to the volume of energy put into the air every day by the sun. At a certain scale it could definitely become an issue and change the local environment and reduce wind speeds, we have seen that with some of the biggest solar farms where the air temperature is changed and the shade increases vegetation and wildlife so presumably wind speed reductions will have some effect. But compared to the CO2e it saves from being emitted its absolutely worth it currently.
> The amount we can extract is tiny compared to the volume of energy put into the air every day by the sun.
Here's a study in how much wind power you can extract before adding more wind turbines doesn't produce more power overall.
At the 100m mark (as opposed to the whole atmosphere up to the jet streams), they calculate 250TW.
Total human electricity generation is well under 5TW (30PWh/yr, out of around 180PWh/yr of total energy), so we could supply all electricity from wind and still leave 98% of the "extractable" global wind potential in the air, which is itself less than all wind energy because of the Betz limit.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1208993109
> But compared to the CO2e it saves from being emitted its absolutely worth it currently.
Funny. That’s a huge part of the argument made to justify that burning fossil fuels is OK. The problem with letting small problems linger while you scale is that suddenly you have a huge problem you can’t do anything meaningfully about because suddenly it’s a critical part of your economy.
"It reduces CO2 emissions" is being used to justify burning fossil fuels? And is "a huge part" of the argument? I think you explained yourself wrong.
No, it’s being used to say that ignoring the problems with Wind farms scaling to a huge scale (and fossil fuels is massive and wind has made less than a noticeable dent) means that you’ve solved one set of problems for another and hopes the second set isn’t as bad. I didn’t say the only alternative is to go back to fossil fuels. I personally think that nuclear has much better and cleaner scaling properties with fewer issues than wind and solar (for example it still remains generally true that the only countries that have meaningfully reduced CO2 emissions are those that have offset it using nuclear while solar and wind have a very poor record) .
> wind has made less than a noticeable dent
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/how-mu...
Almost 30% is not nothing.
And it's important to understand a lot of solar doesn't show up on the figures as it reduces demand, rather than showing up in supply.
( ie if you have panels on your roof you typically use it first before sending any excess to grid ) so the effect is largely reduced demand not measured increased production.
Please look at a chart of per-MWhr generation costs. Wind and solar are a fraction of the cost of nuclear (with solar plunging by the day, almost) and nuclear is only getting more expensive as time goes on despite being a decade or two away from being a 100 year old technology.
In the US nuclear plants are being phased out and wind/solar projects are replacing them at a ratio of roughly 6:1...with huge savings for grid operators and customers. It's so cheap, even with storage system costs it's still cheaper.
That's where utilities are focused: expanding energy storage and better transmission grid infrastructure. Those, and renewable energy, increase grid reliability.
Of course it does depend on how you measure cost.
If you just measure generation costs then you are missing the other key element of a nation grid - it always working - and that characteristic costs as well, not just the electrons provided.
So those improved transmission and storage investments need to be put on the renewables total costs.
Nuclear also has significant decommissioning costs.
However the biggest cost here is probably that required to adapt to the effects of climate change if we don't take steps.
As pointed out, the cost is only a fraction if you ignore the lack of batteries. Solar & Wind today can only be used economically for peak load. Baseload requires batteries and nuclear & fossil fuels remain more economical.
If the only similarity is ignoring some problem somewhere then those two are massively different and it's not "funny" in the way you're implying.
Yes kinda, although even very large wind farms are small compared to:
1) the total height of the atmosphere and
2) other natural obstructions like cliffs and hills
What happens in surface level winds (which is where windmills operate) are actually controlled by the upper level winds. Obstructing surface level winds has local effects (these are also called "terrain effects" since this is usually caused by geography).
Theoretically, if you were to cover the earth in windmills, this would have a serious effect on surface level winds, where they would generally be blocked by a nearby windmill. This would be especially noticeable at sea where you otherwise don't get terrain effects. The vast majority of the atmosphere (everything above a few hundred feet) would continue to be unaffected, though, and would continue to be driven by ground and sea surface temperatures and the Coriolis effect, mostly.
In terms of negative effects of wind farms on birds... reduced wind speed is truly the least of their concerns.
Wind farms do have meteorological impacts (e.g. onshore ones slightly dry the soil behind them). It is measurable but insignificant.
Then again, in terms of direct threats to birds, ignoring climate change, things like powerlines (25 million birds a year in the US), and more significantly air pollution (200-2000 million), windows (2000 million) and cats (1000-4000 million) even very high estimates of 2 million a year including things like habitat destruction and extra powerlines (more direct estimates from collisions are around the 500k mark) from wind turbines make them in turn seem like the lesser of the problems.
Which is not to say it's not an important factor, especially as they affect very specific kind of birds disproportionately, but it's not like wind turbines are primarily bird-killing devices, and it's even possible they may be net benefits to birdkind by, say, reducing air pollution.
There was a study a few years back that saw radical reduction in bird strikes simply by painting a single blade a contrasting color.
I believe bird strikes went down when they made the windmills much bigger, and the angular velocity of the blades much lower. Not building them on open truss towers encouraging birds building nests under them also helped.
If you’re interested, here is some info about the study I mentioned:
https://group.vattenfall.com/press-and-media/newsroom/2022/b...
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds
That's what I was wondering -- couldn't this have some long-term effects on the climate of the area? In its current form, there is probably very little impact. But I imagine as wind farms become more common and dot the country-side... what does this do?
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Modern SMR nuclear reactors use precious generation spent fuel rods as their own fuel, and by design, are impossible to cause a meltdown.
I have 21.1kW of solar panels on my barn, and nuclear is still the cleanest energy at scale, but a lot. Also, solar panels can’t be realistically recycled and when the panels are done, they’re destined to landfills. At least they’re finding ways to recycle wind farm rotor blades.
> solar panels can’t be realistically recycled
Something that's mostly aluminium, glass, silicon and silver can't be recycled? You going to tell these guys? https://solarrecyclingsolutions.co.uk/solar-panel-recycling/...
Perhaps I should have clarified. Solar panels can not be recycled profitably, so in practice they go to landfills.
Sure there are niche recycling firms that lose money doing so, but they’re the extreme rarity vs the norm.
Here’s a nice article about it from MIT: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/can-solar-panels-be-recycled
> Something that's mostly aluminium, glass, silicon and silver can't be recycled?
There's no point in engaging him, he already is moving the goalpost of the discussion however it fits for his opinion.
I mean, we're talking about solar panels that are made of standard materials vs. uranium-enriched fuel rods that have to be stored at least a 100 years in salt mines in the middle of nowhere, without any possibility to recycle them anyhow. Let alone leaving what happens with those power plants after they've been shut down.
Modern SMRs (small nuclear reactors) can literally use spent fuel rods from legacy nuclear reactors as their primary fuel. This isn’t conjecture but simple fact. The engineering has dramatically improved even if public sentiment hasn’t. Modern nuclear reactors can not melt down in same way the reactor at Chernobyl did.
The new “fast reactors” are explicitly designed to take spent fuel rods as fuel to lessen the requirement of creating more enriched uranium.
I love the part where you all are downvoting factual replies because they don’t fit your narrative. Stay salty friends :)
I downvoted it because only a couple of small modular reactors have been constructed so far, and neither of them use spent fuel rods from older reactors as fuel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
If you were referring to a theoretical SMR design, I will believe it after a demonstration unit is built and operating. Most reactor designs never enter industrial use, just like most designs for new kinds of batteries or solar cells.
The book Mine is relevant here. It’s about how people argue over what belongs to whom, especially when ownership is unclear.
When one wind farm is upwind, its turbines slow the wind for farms behind it, cutting their energy. In a way, it’s “stealing” some of the wind.
The book explains why these kinds of fights over shared resources happen and why we need better rules for such situations.
Other examples: upstream hydropower reducing downstream potential energy; a tree in your yard casting shadows on your neighbor’s property, thereby “stealing” sunlight and potential solar power.
That book title is not easily googleable!
Mine, by Kim Faulk, 2022 Synopsis: “ Family is everything... I always knew my father was a cold, heartless bastard.
But the moment he took Elle Castlemaine and her pathetic daughter into our home, barely a month after our mom died, he unleashed something savage inside me.”
I’m guessing it’s not that one!
I was still interested by the synopsis!
Until I look out and found that it's a romance book... No thanks!
And if anyone is still looking for the real book, it's this one, by James Salzman & Michael Heller https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/fd8d48d8-f8e0-4693-a064-...
Sorry, the book's full title is
Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Heller and Salzman. The authors are professors of (real estate and environmental, resp.) law.
It would be a heck of a plot twist for that premise to turn into a fight over solar and wind rights.
“He unleashed something savage inside me. I built an upwind, windmill fight and our family and the worlds view on wind rights was never the same again”
We have been here before with the waterwheels that powered the mills at the start of the Industrial Revolution, allegedly.
Allegedly this was a problem in the Cotswolds, UK, when the woollen industry was where the big money was. I only know this from school history classes, not from Google, hence my use of the word 'allegedly'. Allegedly, mills placed upstream slowed the flow to existing mills downstream, leading to disputes.
In time, mills were built with big chimneys, meaning coal. But why would you go for expensive coal that had to be transported when you had 'free' power from the river? It has been hypothesised that drought may have played a part in this, not the over use of waterwheels.
It's quite obvious if you look at how a watermill is built. Upstream, there's a wier which diverts water along a culvert into a pond at the level of the weir. The watermill is then driven by water falling from the pond to the level of the river at that point. Depending on the gradient of the river, this can be some distance from the weir. If the weir diverts on average a substantial portion of the flow, anyone wanting to use the river between the weir and the mill will find there's much less water for the purpose. Many British rivers in areas where there were (literal) cottage industries like little mesters are not that big (only a few metres across and under a metre deep) so you can see where conflicts could arise. And also they do dry up to almost trickles in dry weather.
Classical example is rivers crossing two countries, and the country upstream installing dams...
Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over wake losses. Let's get some figures:
* From their own study: the cumulative wake loss impact of four new wind farms in the Irish Sea on Orsted's existing estate is 3.28% [0] * "Wind turbines are found to lose 1.6±0.2% of their output per year." [1]
So, wake losses turn a brand new wind farm into a 2-year-old wind farm. Given the yuuuuuge lifespan of wind farms, it seems kinda trivial.
[0] https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/-catastrophic-wake-losses-...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811...
Most climate change advocates naively believe that because an energy resource in renewable it must be infinite too. Simple energy balance over a given area will show how much extraction of wind energy will reduce available energy downstream.
Moreover, the economics of offshore wind farms is often commingled with state enterprises and various subsidy schemes, which makes them uneconomical even in the best of times, so a 2% capacity reduction coupled with inevitable maintenance and repair costs escalations might make many wind farms uneconomical.
Onshore wind farms are much more economical but the best locations such as Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico already have been developed.
I don’t know what a climate change advocate is: someone who believes in physics? But in general nobody believes that resources are infinite. We just have a lot of offshore wind area, onshore wind area, and space to fit solar panels. Not infinite, but enough to massively increase humanity’s access to energy sources and put us back on the growth path we were on before fossil fuels caused us to stagnate.
You're right, solar energy isn't infinite, there's merely orders of magnitudes more available than necessary to power the globe.
"climate change advocate", in contrast to some "climate change opponent"?
Yeah, this sounds like someone who doesn't realize that climate change is a real effect driven by CO2 emissions, regardless of the precise economics of renewable energy.
An Advocate/activist is someone who puts politics and policy ahead of science and economics, and it isn't limited to climate change either.
For example, it was gay advocacy/activists not heath sciences professionals who made sure more money was spent on Aids/HIV than all childhood diseases combined.
Their assumptions are worse than that. They assume constant global rate of renewable energy production but average global wind speeds aren't constant, they appear to be slowing down. This is called "global stilling". It is often blamed on climate change, which (it is now claimed) both speeds up and slows down the wind simultaneously, although the rapid construction of wind farms and urban buildings might also be related.
https://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/hor...
I think that’s a glib dismissal without any analysis of the financials that motivate the investment being profitable in the first place.
This is exactly it. Especially for the UK offshore projects where sites were auctioned off: All bidders knew that a competitive bid had to aim for an ROI only slightly above market rates, given that risk was very low. This means that 1 percent on production will easily turn into 10 or 20 percent on profit.
Source: worked on CAPEX and yield estimates for major player operating in this sector for a decade.
Did they factor in the risk that a site upwind of them could be auctioned later basically turning their project unprofitable? If you bid higher ignoring this risk and later lose money, maybe they should have bid a little less
You're not crazy. I think sometimes software people forget that perfectly happy industries sometimes have single digit operating margin.
Are you doing a Jordan Peterson bit? The one where someone asks him "Do you believe in" and he says "Well what is the meaning of do, and what do you mean by you? And what is believe?"
I really am insulted by the analogy. All I said is that painting a 3% drop as trivial and not worth thinking about is completely ignoring that that could be the entire profit margin for the wind mill installation in the first place and thus the financing and capital investment math could have been done incorrectly and push the profitability negative. Pretty sure I presented a clear description of what my issue with such a glib dismissal is.
The difference between a wind farm being barely barely profitable and barely barely losing money doesn't really matter when we're building these in bulk.
So you make up the losses on volume? That’s not how math works.
No, I'm saying that lots of different projects will have different levels of profitability and if one or two flip over that magic line it doesn't really matter. The difference between 83 wind farms built in a year being profitable and 87 being profitable, with the 4 that changed being basically breakeven either way, is not very meaningful.
Especially because a more realistic answer is it'll be profitable either way but it'll change whether the return is higher than AAA bonds or not. It's not important. It only affects very marginal projects.
Lol, you'll money on every MW, but make it up on volume.
I find people who advocate for renewable energy projects are almost always the same people who argue in favor of energy subsidies, too. Perhaps they know something about energy economics, the rest of us don't...
In the capitalist environment it does. At least if we do not want state intervention. In general money does not get invested in known unprofitable ventures. There might be bets on profitability. But profit is always expected.
A couple farms that barely make profit are already going to be unattractive to investors. It really doesn't make much difference to future investment. There's not a massive sea change between 1% profit and 2% loss, they both suck. Investors are going to focus on the higher profit farms no matter what, ones that would still be positive if they lose 3%.
Other things can go right or wrong and change the numbers by a couple percent. That risk is pretty normal. It's not something wild.
And any farm that's already running or even half-built is still going to be finished and maintained and make as much power as it can. Once you already spent a big percent of the budget you're not getting it back, and the ROI on the remaining spending is very high.
The challenge is that your neighbor building a wind farm next to you changes your profitability. That uncertainty isn't priced in. I think you're really assuming someone here is saying "stop building wind farms" vs "this is a problem investors in the space will need to account for as this scales up more"
I don't disagree with your description of the problem in this comment. But the OP was perfectly fine if it's just something "to account for" on the scale of 3%.
Your strong dismissal of OP, and talking about how it "could be the entire profit margin", made it sound a lot more serious than it is, and that's why I disagreed with how you were commenting earlier and posted a counterargument.
I think the point is that with thin margins and capital costs, 1.6% (compounded over decades) could be a large chunk of your profit.
TFA discusses this:
> To justify their investment and make a profit, "it's very important for a developer to be able to project that the wind farm will produce a given amount of electricity for 25 or 30 years", the typical lifespan of a wind farm, he says. Even a relatively small, unexpected reduction in that energy output can upset this investment calculation and make the wind farm not financially viable, Finserås says.
If wakes losses have been known for years as asserted by the piece, I'd argue it's the fault of the operator and investors building a farm downwind (or potentially) of another. The only thing I can think of is if regulatory or zoning changes caused underlying assumptions of wake loss to change.
It's like setting up a low margin Italian restaurant with none nearby and a few months later another Italian restaurant sets up taking your revenue, tough luck then
> 1.6% (compounded over decades) could be a large chunk of your profit.
I don't understand what you're saying here. The 1.6% compounding was part of the plan from the first rough draft. The 3% is not compounding.
This isn't a Best Buy. Offshore wind is very expensive compared to land-based wind and operators can struggle to turn a profit. 3.28% is indeed likely very significant.
I do not understand HN's pathological obsession with trying to "gotcha" news media titles for being "clickbait" especially given the "Software (version number)" posts and edgy titles to corporate and personal blogs that are everywhere here.
This made me think of a cool sci Fi post apocalyptic idea. A colony that has its base in the middle of violent tornado or storm country but it has a huge array of wind machines that harvest the storm for energy. On the leeward side of the array, where the colony lives, the air is calm, robbed of its energy.
This has in the past been scientifically proposed as a legitimate way to cure the US of tornadoes while yielding significant energy in the process.
Sounds like an idea that is technically sound but economically a dead end. Like harvesting lightening for electricity. It might not seem it locally but the energy is too defuse at a large scale.
This sounds a lot like the plot of The Horde of Counterwind by Alain Damasio
A Valley Without Wind 2…
From TFA the wake can stretch 100km from a windfarm and reduce output of another by 10%. Interesting so it sounds like an optimization at country scale, how to place windfarms to maximize overall output when accounting for these effects.
Some level at 100km OR 10% if very close, but not both at the same time.
People seem to love finding faults with wind farms, even if the contents of the article are purely factual, we need them ,we need to keep experimenting with them and developing better solutions.
We can't let wind turbines be like "nuclear"; the dirty word which could've saved our civilization.
Pretty much. For all the faults we can find with wind farms, they are still pretty dang useful.
The problems with wind farms seem trivial in comparison to the wave of fallout which disrupted agriculture all across Europe.
Wind has been common in the U.K. for decades, I remember driving past them as a kid in the 90s on holiday
It’s only recently that the right wing has become particularly against them
That's my point, there is some sort of anti-wind religious crusade going on, and it's bullshit.
There are people who spend money to make more pollution in their local neighbourhoods
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
It’s unsurprising that nimbys don’t want wind in their back yard despite acknowledging the benefits.
The argument I've seen a lot recently that seems the most disingenuous is that the blades aren't recyclable. Completely inert fiberglass blades that are useful in generating GWH of energy over their multi-decade lifespan and people are pretending to be mad we're going to bury them in the same landfills that we bury millions of tons of other trash?
A close second is some dramatic image of a turbine with a gearbox issue that leaked gearbox oil all down the side about how much oil they use, "100 liters per turbine" or some such bullshit that ignores that all of that is fully recycled so you might 'consume' 100 liters in a development in a year but even that's not turned into CO2, it's just leaked into the environment.
100 liters of oil for megawatts of electricity is nothing. But it's all feeding the gotcha game that is social media and "news" reporting.
Here the victims of "wind theft" by wind farms are other wind farms. The point of this article is that by not accounting for the problem, the efficiency of wind power around the world may decrease and also discourage investors.
I kind of wondered about this since I got a big windfarm near me in all the fields. It seems like ideally they would be spread out over a much larger area across the state. Of course there are probably also advantages to having all that electrical infrastructure in one area.
The first photo in the article (turbines with a sailboat) is very well chosen!
Stealing others’ wind (or making it “dirty”) is a well-known and well-used tactic in sailboat racing. It is very effective.
One explanation of tactics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh9Hz0TDFxE
That really is only a problem if the direction of the wind never changes. But if the direction of the wind turns around the farm stealing the wind and the farm being robbed of wind switch roles.
Also, isn't it really stupid to treat the wind the same way we do with rivers or with electrical current (which is actually flowing the opposite way to electrons, so not like the river/wind at all)?
E.g. country A is saying that country B is stealing their incoming (upstream) wind, but there's currently a zone of negative pressure (based on the mountains/shore/passing by cyclone/whatever) on the country A's territory which actually allows for the pressure gradient to form through both countries A and B - so there's more energy potential available to tap into on country A's territory?
Thinking of wind direction. I would imagine that wind farms in general are build in areas where there is tendency for prevalent winds. That is known to have certain direction and speed. As these are most sensible places for most production.
Areas with more changing wind patterns are likely less desirable.
I would like to see this effect compared to other obstructions, like regular buildings. I understand that wind farms are built in areas that are mostly otherwise flat, so the effects matter, but I just don’t feel like my scale is calibrated. I would think an individual tall building would have more effect than an individual wind turbine, but what about a typical small town center vs a wind farm?
Unpopular opinion: I don't like wind farms ruining natural landscapes. They pollute natural beauty and put industrial infrastructure where it would have never been otherwise. I'm 100% onboard with alternative energy as it's essential to prevent changing our atmosphere. However, as I look across the Kansas plains, I'm saddened by the industrialization and further human encroachment into areas previously untouched.
That's amazing, it's remarkable that we can harvest energy from the environment so effectively.
Is global warming expected to increase or decrease wind farm output? Apparently warm air is less dense than colder air, warm, moist air is even less dense, but it would seem like with global warming you have more energy in the system overall.
That is a good question. Warm moist air is a known issue at some airports due to the loss in lift but that doesn't take into account wind speed.
With wind turbines, I suspect additional wind speed due to additional energy would cancel out the drop in density.
What if wind drops below seed requirements?
> The wake effect: As wind farms expand, some can ‘steal’ each others’ wind
Next: solar farms who can ‘steal’ each others' sun.
> Wind farms produce energy, and that energy is extracted from the air. And the extraction of energy from the air comes with a reduction of the wind speed," says Peter Baas, a research scientist
Sorry, but this is something that any 8th grade primary school student could say. It's the energy conservation principle.
As you say it obviously reduces the wind speed. But what is not obvious is whether the reduction is negligible or not, and what problems it could lead to. How much fields hamper each other. Whether it messes with bird ability to glide on updrafts, sailing, water aeration.
Fortunately it seems to be fine from these perspectives.
If wind has kinetic energy - E, the amount that can be harvested is < E, and that was kinda obvious from the start. Turbines stop the wind, hence one country can stop wind blowing towards another country if they put many fields on the "track". And apparently it hasn't been taken into account when making those optimistic statements regarding zero emission energy. Also this IS ecology altering, and might have an effect in global weather, but not sure how much (wind mainly blows at high altitudes).
> If wind has kinetic energy - E, the amount that can be harvested is < E, and that was kinda obvious from the start.
Yes.
> Turbines stop the wind
No.
> And apparently it hasn't been taken into account
No.
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> The mysterious effect plaguing wind farms
"mysterious" "plaguing" - zero examples...... very mysterious.
The dumb shit the BBC feeds HN Doomers, there is no solution other than big pharma's fluoxetine to the CO2 devil.
Other wind farms will cut into their profits..... always a good idea to get the competition shut down.
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Everyone with a functional understanding of thermodynamics knows that you cannot extract energy from a system and expect there to be the same energy in the source after the extraction.
I do wonder if - in 20 to 50 years - we find out that we somehow screwed up the ecosphere with renewable energy production in a subtle and catastrophic way, much like we did with coal-powered or nuclear plants.
The wind and solar energy would've merely heated up the earth, then get radiated back out. Us capturing some of it, using it, and then re-radiate it back out (at a later date) won't have made any difference.
Unless/until the day we paved the entire earth with solar panels and capture the entire atmosphere of their wind, this will continue to be the case. Hopefully, we reach a dyson swarm before that occurs...
I am old enough to remember when similar statements were made about other - now out of favour - energy production methods. NPPs had a "Once in a thousand years" failure rate. Gas was fossil, sure, but the CO2 would be absorbed into the ecosphere (to make plants grow).
In the end, all energy eventually dissipates again. That does not mean that we do not have immediate or near-immediate phenomena to consider (like: global warming).
Let's take solar ... we now have begun to replace agricultural areas with solar farms. For example: How does this affect biodiversity in that area (the things look not green, but gravel under it)? I'm not even saying it is necessarily a bad thing - just a change.
And we should be careful to change running systems, especially considering the stakes. Instead, what I see is proponents of one tech over the other happily shouting down any attempt at critical consideration.