You must log in or # to comment.
Offshore turbine farms are beautiful imo, very real yet alien-feeling
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone else talk about the Tripod series
It’s mentioned in Freeman’s Mind, when he first sees a strider in HL2.
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.
I think you’ve hit on something there with your comment. They are sorta alien and a little weird… Everything that terrifies people that think in absolutes and orthodoxies and their puppeteers know this and have been playing them for absolute fools.
The irony is, that their blindness to their manipulators doesn’t make them immune to it; they’re just a s fucked as everyone else except they’re cheering for it.
They’re like a perfect setting for a liminal space game, endless water all around and a bunch of menacing, all-white and smooth man-made structures where our monkey brains don’t expect them
Like something out of the video game "control“
I was thinking more like backrooms lost tape pt2, they have my favorite water lever with wind turbines in the distance and gorgeous architecture to walk around
edit: this part in particular
Crap. Now I gotta gonbuy a game. Thanks though, this looks sweet.
Cue montage of anime/visual novels that have the pretty protagonists relaxing on a hill with 5 wind turbines in the background behind them.
deleted by creator
Fuck you and your
sour grapestulips, Dutchman!Signed,
A jealous Estonian
Man, I miss summer.
Don’t worry, it will come back.
Source: trust me bro
Oversaturated
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
It is, it’s in the thousands, but that is magnitudes less than domestic cats kill.
NABU Germany believes that about 100k birdes die annually to wind turbines, compared to 60 million to cats, 70 million to cars and trains and 108 million to window panes
The problem is its actual history.
Windmills did kill way too many birds
- when they first built at Altamont pass, a natural constriction on a major migratory bird route
- when they used open lattice towers, which present tons of tempting roosting spots
- seems like at least one more major factor.
But this was in like the 1970s and they paid attention. Since then, wind turbines kill effectively zero birds, but it’s a huge problem when there’s an actual grain of truth that conservatives can grab onto and never let go
Edit: apparently still in production despite the poor site, but it looks like they cut bird fatalities in half and are looking at newer turbine designs to be safer. I guess the real lesson is don’t build in a mountain pass constricting a major Migratory bird route
I don’t honestly know.
They probably “destroy family” because the children of the idiot boomers that put the sign up no longer speak to them over politics
“Wind turbines are the minions of Baelzebuub, they rot your teeth and steal your children at night. BOooOoOooO!”
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.
Are you trying to say that visible emissions (of any kind) are not related to aesthetics?
No, I’m saying that both water vapor and more harmful emissions are similar from an aesthetic perspective - which is why some laymen are under the impression that nuclear plants have harmful emissions.
So… very climatically active.
I enjoy seeing wind turbines along a landscape. Feel this this is some boomer shit
Maybe check the image again. Got a feeling you got WHOOSH’d here.
So the image in the post communicates sarcasm for sure, but the post text itself doesn’t communicate sarcasm to me. Could just be dense.
Either way, the underlying concern is that boomers are old and don’t like change. Younger people enjoy seeing wind turbines, so this whole issue is getting smaller and smaller year over year.
It’s at a nuclear power plant.
The joke works because people do use the argument. And to play the devil’s advocate: Wind energy takes up a lot more space than conventional energy. So for every coal power plant that destroys one landscape, replacing it with wind energy will “destroy” many more.
That said, I like the view of wind wheels. I don’t think they destroy the landscape. But we shouldn’t silence all criticism. While we need to get to 100% renewable, we also need to reduce what 100% means. Too often, renewable energy is used as an excuse to use even more energy.
And I especially like seeing the counter argument to that, those cases where small farmers can stay in business by leasing out a tiny parcel of their land and continuing to use the rest. I don’t know how common that may be in reality but the synergy gives me the chills.
Next bring me a story about a sheep farm on a solar farm and I’m in heaven
More wind turbines, less oil rigs on the horizon please.
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!
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.
deleted by creator
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).
Not going to lie. That picture is pretty awesome. I wish they all looked that cool in real life. They usually kind of boring
We need to construct additional pylons.
A few miles west of here are two wind generation fields, bout 60 miles in the other direction is a petroleum processor. The windmills are infinitely less of an eyesore.
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.
We are talking about dozens of millennia of uranium supply on Earth. Other fuel types and nuclear technologies look to extend that into billions of years. For all functional purposes, it’s infinite. Just as solar energy is functionally infinite.
a supply of energy that is practically inexhaustible on the timescale of human civilisation (what people mean when they say renewable)
As I said: Nuclear is Renewable, in the exact same way everyone uses the term.
That timespan is only calculating current usage. If we scale up to using it to completely replace fossil fuel usage, we would cut that time several orders of magnitude.
Fusion and fission are two different processes.
I think the point he’s trying to make is that the sun technically has a finite lifetime, albeit in that case one that’s long enough to be functionally irrelevant from the perspective of human time scales.
deleted by creator
Radioactive decay is not the same as fission. It’s not entirely unrelated, but definitely a different process.
Different rates of decay vs the natural state.
Has anyone ever tried using the heat from those chemical refineries to supplement a power grid? We convert fossil fuels into electricity by boiling water to turn turbines, so pretty much anything that creates adequate heat could be a potential energy source, right?
deleted by creator
solar isn’t renewable bc eventually the sun will explode
And if you have to always evaporate a lot of water to cool your power station you will have a problem in a drought, you will either have to turn off the power station or use a lot of water for it when you already don’t have enough.
It’s another advantage of wind turbines and solar panels since they don’t need to be cooled like that.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
Have you ever spent any time in or close to a large wind farm? Honestly, it’s relaxing if you haven’t been told to be mad about them existing- they’re quiet, sustainable, and once they’re built the cost of each new unit of energy they deliver doesn’t come with the unit cost and environmental cost of acquiring and burning yet more fuel-- so in that sense, the marginal cost of each new bit of power from them really does approach zero.
Of course, this (that the resulting energy is so cheap) is why the coal/oil/gas folks are mad- they know they won’t be able to compete once a grid with sufficient edge-caching/power storage is built out
The only issue I see with offshore wind power is the risk to national security if you become dependent on it.
Offshore wind farms opens up a big weakspot where an enemy can just take a sub and torpedo the plants themselves or the underwater cable connecting the windfarm to the gird.
I have never understood why people think that they are ugly, they are actually a bit cyberpunk/sci-fi when you see the advanced modern, sleek structures among the nature.
Unlike the totally un-bombable tanker ships and pipelines we use now.
The difference is how exposed they are.
It is kinda like, would you rather build a powerplant on the border of Russia, or far more centrally.
Both can be destroyed, but one invites destruction faster
