Offshore turbine farms are beautiful imo, very real yet alien-feeling
I agree! They seem graceful and elegant.
I dont mind the ones near me so much during the day, but at night, the blinking red lights are kind of imposing. Sitting on the beach kind of feels like some massive ship or skyscraper is going to crash into you.
The argument that they mess up landscapes was always made in bad faith. Grasping at straws.
Rather than that, it's a veiled NIMBY argument. They don't care that nuclear, gas or coal power plants look uglier - they would if they would stand in their backyard.
They similarily don't really care about the optics of wind turbines, but they are afraid of javing them in their backyard, which is much more likely than a power plant if you don't live near a river
Let's leave nuclear out of this, they look magnificent! In our area, the nuclear power plant is a photo point / trip destination. The surrounding nature is very healthy thanks to the strict regulations.
I remember passing a nuclear plant with cooling towers with my parents while traveling as a child, they pointed to the billowing steam coming out and said something about how the government is installing these plants to pump that radioactive gas into the air and "control" us.
I grew up, looked back at it, realized how dumb they were.... but also realized how common that level of ignorance and contradictory thinking actually is, particularly in the US.
When I bought my house one of the things that I was warned about was that they were going to make the nearby wind farm larger. Some of the locals got up in arms about them building a new wind farm until they pointed out that they are just enlarging the current wind farm.
None of the residents could tell me where the current wind farm was, because you literally cannot see it, it's behind a hill. If they hadn't told anyone they were enlarging it I don't think anyone would have noticed. Even if you go around the hill so you can actually see it, it just blends into the background. I do wonder why they don't just paint them blue though.
Im guessing they want them to stand out for safety for pilots
Fuck you and your ~~sour grapes~~ tulips, Dutchman!
Signed,
A jealous Estonian
Yesterday I had to go on a long drive. During that drive, I passed a yard in which someone had placed an obviously homemade billboard with the words "wind turbines destroy family, environment and quality of life."
I was flatly stunned to see it. I've heard that stuff about them killing birds but I've never heard they were otherwise contentious. In fact, everyone I know personally loves to go look at them given the opportunity.
Isn't even the bird thing wildly overstated?
Speaking in German numbers:
Wind Energy kills arround 100.000 Birds a year. Lovely furrballs arround 20.000.000 (likely more) Glass plates like windshields, Windows etc. Arround 100.000.000 So yeah pretty minor.
That wind turbines kill birds is entirely sensationalized and overstated, absolutely.
Birds die from way more sources, like feral cats and flying into glass windows. Looks like someone else posted the source.
Things have gotten better since we noticed that birds recognize the turbine blades more easily if 1 of 3 of the blade are painted a non-white color.
Don't think we've really done anything with cats and windows to mitigate those issues
They probably "destroy family" because the children of the idiot boomers that put the sign up no longer speak to them over politics
What you witnessed was a zombie homestead. Trump could easily convince his zombie cultists that the earth is flat.
See, stuff like this is why we need photographers and photo journalists. They're not just documenting things, they're making a point. They're making art.
Cooling towers... So that's just water vapor... aka steam. Hence why it's white.
This isn't a discussion of emissions, it's a discussion of aesthetics.
So.... very climatically active.
I enjoy seeing wind turbines along a landscape. Feel this this is some boomer shit
More wind turbines, less oil rigs on the horizon please.
So close to a not-stupid comparison. Onshore wind turbines, at most, produce around 7 MW of electricity (probably much less for this one, but same order of magnitude). I'm assuming at a glance that this is a coal-fired power station; if so, at this size it probably has a capacity over a GW. If we populated the image with hundreds of the pictured wind turbine, it would be a clusterfuck. The major difference isn't that wind turbines are inherently prettier per MW; it's that wind turbines are usually dispersed offshore and in mostly barren rural areas, and what few smaller ones are in urban areas are unobtrusive.
All you had to do is show multiple wind turbines out in the country or offshore and place that side-by-side with the plant, but instead it has to be a pithy "gotcha" instead of an actual comparison. I, for one, much prefer the turbines.
Beautiful, IMO. And look at all that sunny ground, could have a big solar field there too.
And the solar field could foster a good shade-plant field that would grow and anchor the sandy ground with their roots, holding groundwater, also providing cover for small wildlife.
Yeah but some rando on the internet thinks it's ugly, so ewe better keep burning the planet instead.
The wind farms I've seen are not quite so crowded, though...🤷♂️
I think that photo might have been taken with a relatively long lens, so it appears that they are closer together than they really are.
Correct. This is just the perspective. If you build them too close together, efficiency will suffer.
Yes, often on farmland, they're larger and more dispersed.
I am, to clarify, intentionally choosing what I think are pretty images of wind farms. I actually like the way they look and wish the OP used an example like this (even though the wind capacity in this second image is still comparatively small, it's much more representative than the OP of what typical landscapes with wind turbines look like).
We need to construct additional pylons.
And think of the birbs! Would someone please think of the bribs! They get confused by the propeller blades, and start migrating under water, where they get stuck in deep sea vents, causing blockages for ocean currents and costing the shipping industry billions. Damn you, liberals!
okay but also, those are nuclear cooling towers in the foreground, right? that's another renewable energy source. like, id be fine with the stuff coming out of the cooling towers bc it's water. don't care if it ruins the skyline.
Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
Also, cooling towers are not seen exclusively with nuclear power plants. Many chemical refineries need lots of process heat and need to get rid of that as well. Evaporating water to steam is a great way to disperse excess heat.
Any kind of heat power plant also needs some way to expel excess steam, so oil and gas plants have them as well, just usually different designs.
Nuclear fission is not renewable. It relies on mined uranium, which is rather limited.
The uranium is gonna continue to undergo fission, whether we mine it or not, whether we enrich/refine it or not. At that point it's like collecting energy from our surroundings, really functionally no different than harvesting geothermal, wind, solar, hydro, etc.
Exactly, nuclear is no less renewable than solar. Where does everyone think solar energy comes from? Nuclear.
We might as well capture the uranium decay, as you said, it will release the energy whether we collect it or not.
That's such a disingenuous presentation of the facts. Of course there is no such thing as truly renewable energy, but there is a difference in kind between a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable) and energy produced from a limited fuel supply on earth (non renewable).
Solar (and its byproduct energies wind, hydro, biomass), tidal, geothermal are not in the same category as fission of rare heavy metals.
I say all this as someone pro-nuclear who agrees that we should use it while it is still fissionable.
Radioactive decay is not the same as fission. It's not entirely unrelated, but definitely a different process.
I think they're beautiful. A sign of social and technological progress, hope for the future, human well-being and ingenuity.
specifically this. also, if youre close, theyre a good marker for direction.
Please don't tell MAGAs that wind turbines can be knocked down with a chainsaw.
That would be an electrifying adventure for them
The towers are about 15-30 feet across at the base (depending on the model) and made of steel. That's well into angle grinder territory. No one's felling turbines like trees any time soon.
I've seen one of those bases on a truck, too—using an angle grinder on it would be quite impressive. They're made of very thick metal, at least anywhere a human can reach.
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