Posted by Bignuncio at 6:10pm Sep 12 '11This will probably end up sounding like some conservative bullcrap attacking a good, viable, green, technology. So I'll explain my position. I am not the type of person to discount a technology for political reasons and I consider that among the worst part of the republican party these days (it seems they used to be more science correct). I personally had high hopes for wind turbines and I discounted the current high cost and the bird strikes as fairly minor details that would be worked out through future improvements. However as I learn more and more about them they are looking worse and worse and the high cost comes along with more pollution and ecological damage than ever before.
I'm not talking about land usage because that is fairly minor, though certainly it does take up more space than any power plant.
I'm also not talking about bird strikes because it's not that many birds and it's only killing the stupid ones anyway :p
It certainly seems (I haven't finished my research yet) that there are problems associated with them that mean they actually cause more CO2 to be produced instead of less, for example.
Then there is the high cost of maintainability which of course requires a guy in a truck coming all the way out there to fix it and thus burning more fossil fuel.
Also some 65% of wind turbines are in areas where icing is possible they sometimes have to be sprayed with that deicing liquid which is toxic which isn't good if the land below is being used for grazing.
They also use up an awful lot of material which could be put to other use, for example each [private] on a large wind turbine weighs 24,000 lbs and is made of lightweight composite materials.
This brings us to the cost which of course is quite high. Compare wind at around $150 per megawatt, offshore wind at about $195, nuclear power at $120, advanced coal (cleaner) $110, coal $100, and advanced natural gas at $80.
Finally I said I wasn't talking about bird strikes but I will talk about bat strikes since bats are far more vulnerable to wind turbines. Though research is still ongoing it seems thus far that turbines are killing bats faster than they can reproduce with around a hundred thousand bats killed just in the mid-Atlantic highlands(that comes from a TIME magazine blogger so probably bullcrap but does indicate a very significant possible problem).
For any of the above I will be willing to go into further detail upon request of course. But as of now I am calling this technology very bad and any government funding of it to be even worse which I guess puts me squarely in line with the standard conservative person, though I am fairly sure that I've put more effort into understanding the problems than 98% of conservative people.
Now I'm sort of hoping that much of this can be solved by fairly simple things and the market will figure it out pretty soon. The problem is that in the area of green energy the market is not allowed to function because of governments throwing money at it which only encourages bad design and poor management. We have known the effects of government funding since the idiotic government funding of the railroads in 1860. It seems more evidence crops up every day as evidenced by the three major solar power companies going under recently, one of which had been granted $527 million in federal loans, which were called a flat out gift by at least some annalists.
I'm not talking about land usage because that is fairly minor, though certainly it does take up more space than any power plant.
I'm also not talking about bird strikes because it's not that many birds and it's only killing the stupid ones anyway :p
It certainly seems (I haven't finished my research yet) that there are problems associated with them that mean they actually cause more CO2 to be produced instead of less, for example.
Then there is the high cost of maintainability which of course requires a guy in a truck coming all the way out there to fix it and thus burning more fossil fuel.
Also some 65% of wind turbines are in areas where icing is possible they sometimes have to be sprayed with that deicing liquid which is toxic which isn't good if the land below is being used for grazing.
They also use up an awful lot of material which could be put to other use, for example each [private] on a large wind turbine weighs 24,000 lbs and is made of lightweight composite materials.
This brings us to the cost which of course is quite high. Compare wind at around $150 per megawatt, offshore wind at about $195, nuclear power at $120, advanced coal (cleaner) $110, coal $100, and advanced natural gas at $80.
Finally I said I wasn't talking about bird strikes but I will talk about bat strikes since bats are far more vulnerable to wind turbines. Though research is still ongoing it seems thus far that turbines are killing bats faster than they can reproduce with around a hundred thousand bats killed just in the mid-Atlantic highlands(that comes from a TIME magazine blogger so probably bullcrap but does indicate a very significant possible problem).
For any of the above I will be willing to go into further detail upon request of course. But as of now I am calling this technology very bad and any government funding of it to be even worse which I guess puts me squarely in line with the standard conservative person, though I am fairly sure that I've put more effort into understanding the problems than 98% of conservative people.
Now I'm sort of hoping that much of this can be solved by fairly simple things and the market will figure it out pretty soon. The problem is that in the area of green energy the market is not allowed to function because of governments throwing money at it which only encourages bad design and poor management. We have known the effects of government funding since the idiotic government funding of the railroads in 1860. It seems more evidence crops up every day as evidenced by the three major solar power companies going under recently, one of which had been granted $527 million in federal loans, which were called a flat out gift by at least some annalists.
Bad things about wind-farms - Bignuncio