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Offshore turbine farms are beautiful imo, very real yet alien-feeling
I’m uite the same on land ones. I admire the ingenuity of the view. Seeing wind turbines and solar farms on the landscape is nice; cool, even.
People that don’t like them, I just don’t know why. Maybe they had a traumatic interaction with a desk fan as a kid.
The sentiment against renewable energy is about as rational as the sentiment against vaccines. Yet here we are.
Honestly I think that any community that objects to wind farms or solar panels just on irrational bases like that should get an oil derek built in the centre of town, even if it’s just for show. Just to make the point.
A lot of it is NIMBYism, it’s not that they don’t want wind farms it’s that they don’t want wind farms here. Because they think that if you don’t build a wind farm in their community you’ll also not build a cold burning power station in their community. Often this is correct because what is a good location for wind farm is a bad location for a power station.
NIMBYism is certainly a factor but a lot of it is also just general Trumpery.
“I want nothing to change, ever, and I want to enjoy all my luxuries without accepting any kind of personal burden or to compromise on anything as long as I live. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR??”
This should be so unnecessary. Both wind farms and solar farms are less obtrusive than neighbors!
Yeah, there’s a whole group of them that buy bigger less efficient vehicles because they think it patriotic to burn oil.
At this point, it’s economically irresponsible not to transition to renewables, even from a conservative, market-focused perspective. Fossil fuel power plants require ongoing fuel purchases to operate. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar do not.
Once installed, renewables generate electricity without the continuous cost of buying and burning fuel. That difference fundamentally changes the economics. When you factor in the long-term savings from not having to purchase a resource that must be consumed to produce power, the financial case for renewables becomes difficult to ignore.
Renewables also have the potential to change how we think about energy forever. We’d never have to have a conservation mindset concerning energy use. Can you imagine what could be possible if you didn’t have to worry about the cost or ammonunt of energy you need to perform a task?
Absolutely god damned right. What we are fighting is a century and trillions of dollars sunk into behemoth infrastructure and a web of industries that is based on a dying model, and the people who own that infrastructure and industry will fight tooth and nail to keep the world hooked into them, they are very literally investing heavy money into propaganda and mass manipulation to keep it that way.
Humanity is being brainwashed on scale, and it’s working, but cracks are showing. Can’t fool all the people all the time, and the writing is on the wall when it comes to fossil fuel.
I think that works in most of the world but the US has too many people who make money from fossil fuels. While we’re not self-sufficient, we’re a very large exporter so on average ……
But I have always wonder why nuclear folks can make an “abundant energy” argument but not renewables.
I agree so much. Harvesting free energy with clever engineering makes me happy. This is the world I want to live in. But some people are stubborn and sluggish. It’s hard to not get impatient or angry.
I agree! They seem graceful and elegant.
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 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.
Cue montage of anime/visual novels that have the pretty protagonists relaxing on a hill with 5 wind turbines in the background behind them.
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
Crap. Now I gotta gonbuy a game. Thanks though, this looks sweet.
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.
This thread has been the first time I’ve ever jeard this nuclear gas nonsense, even though I am German and my mother has been anti-nuclear her entire life. But mostly for the reason of waste and knowing that people, government and companies alike, will cut corners and always find a way to create nuclear hazards.
Rather than that, it’s a veiled NIMBY argument.
It’s entirely a narrative from capital forces being seeded into populations who would not have cared otherwise.
There is so, so much money still in fossil fuel power generation, things like solar and wind challenge that monopoly, so certain politicians are paid to make a huge stink about it and seed the public with blatant lies and appeals to fake majority “Everyone hates the windmills folks, nobody likes 'em, they kill a TRILLION birds a year…” etc. etc.
All that said, it works fantastically on the general public and it’s why we don’t have better alternatives like nuclear being used more widespread. (A nuclear plant oddly being framed in the same picture here too.)
See nuclear is one point I can never really wrap my head around who pushes for this, because the only profiting parties are nuclear fuel producers (well the big one is Russia, so maybe?). Nuclear doesn’t work well to stabilize the energy grid. It’s particularily bad in summer, when droughts drastically lower the level of the rivers (as seen in France).
Yes nuclear fuel os relatively sustainable, but factoring production cost of the plant and the mining and refinery and the picture looks worse (better than other plants, but not that much).
It’s however exorbantly more expensive and fosters a different dependance, one that cannot be substituted easily as there are few countries that have sufficient uranium, the EU for one has none.
Nuclear power plants circulate their water they don’t just dump it into the river so droughts don’t have an effect on them.
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
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 see how they could kill birds anymore than trees do. Birds have pretty good eyesight in many cases better than humans I can’t reasonably see why wind turbines would be any more of a threat than any other structure natural or organic.
The blades move a lot faster than trees or branches do, especially at the tips. I would guess that is mostly a miscalculation on the birds part, as in “oh this is open air, I’ll fly right through” and the blade comes and hits them
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.
Well they’re not zombies, since they actively hate the concept of brains.
But it’s not like zombies seek out brains to use them.
“Wind turbines are the minions of Baelzebuub, they rot your teeth and steal your children at night. BOooOoOooO!”
Fuck you and your
sour grapestulips, Dutchman!Signed,
A jealous Estonian
Man, I miss summer.
Oversaturated
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. What he said is that whatever is spewing out of those eyesores is unrelated to the fact that they’re fucking eyesores.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 whale blowholes, causing problems for the shipping industry. Damn you, liberals!
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
The image wasn’t to show something cool, but instead to prove how “ugly” they are, right?
Haha, I honestly cannot tell either. I think they were trying to say “look how ugly this is” but I think it looks cool as fuck
Same!
right?
Wrong, and I can’t imagine how you reached that conclusion based on my first comment, let alone the second one where I say the exact opposite of this. I guess it’s easier to fill in the blanks by assuming whatever you want to be true than by reading.
It’s always on the other person if they’re confused, also what kind of asshole comments before reading every single other comment?
It’s always on the other person if they’re confused
You read me say “I, for one, much prefer the turbines” (or at least I hope you did; maybe one whole comment is expecting too much), didn’t read the single other comment I made that was right there in case you were actually confused, made a snarky remark insincerely framed as a question accusing me of doing the opposite of what I actually was, and then got defensive and called that “being confused” when called out.
Buddy, I don’t know if you’re professing confusion about this specific discussion, human conversation, intellectual honesty, the English language… but none of them are your fault, and help is out there.
What an awful way to be
Please don’t tell MAGAs that wind turbines can be knocked down with a chainsaw.
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.
That would be an electrifying adventure for them
Wind turbines aint ugly, you can simply fix the picture by just moving your mom out of frame
