Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him

It isn't sudden, it was always there. 15 years ago I drove from iowa to minnesota. In iowa there were wind turbines eveywhere, in mn billboards saying wind is not the answer. Today iowa des moines is 100% wind powered (i can only find press releases stating that, official numbers for the whole state are around 50%)

Likely explanation for those numbers is that if it's windy 100% of the power needs are fulfilled by wind and statistically the local wind turbines make enough power that if somehow Des Moines could store that and sip from it, they could run all the time on pure wind power. But in practice what happens is when it's windy Des Moines exports power and gets money, and when it's calm Des Moines buys power that wasn't from a wind turbine.

One political idea in the UK is to give people locality based energy pricing, so, if there's a wind turbine right near your community, sure, that's a bit annoying (they're loud because that wind is moving huge spinning blades, and maybe you like horizons, which are horizontal, the wind farm breaks that up) but hey, your electricity is super cheap. The idea being that's a direct incentive to welcome on-shore turbines and it's an effective subsidy to move electrical load nearer to production.

Today with national pricing that Wind Farm wants to be on the Scottish coast where it's windy, and the Energy Intensive industry wants to be in England where there are loads of people already, and then you have to move all that power across half a country to make it work, which is further expense and delay. Why not just move the industrial users, and to nudge them offer lower prices ?

I recently had a dumb argument with actually a bunch of folks on Nextdoor who claimed unironically that coal power plants were more eco friendly than wind and solar farms.

I ran the numbers like a good nerd. It is mind-bogglingly inane how wrong that idea is. I also learned new things about how ridiculously polluting coal plants are.

These bad ideas come from somewhere (presumably cable news). Or they were bots.

For coal, a good example of how bad it is, is the recommendation that pregnant women limit tuna consumption because of its mercury content.

There is no farmed tuna, its all wild caught from the big blue oceans. Why does tuna have mercury? Because it eats things that have mercury in them. Where did they get the mercury from? Rain. Where did the rain get it? Coal emissions! Coal has mercury and when you burn coal, it goes into the atmosphere and then, eventually, into the ocean. So much mercury has been released by coal burning that the ALL THE OCEANS are contaminated to the point where predator fish have levels in their flesh high enough to warrant health warnings.

I feel you, I've had similar 'discourses" on local news sites in the comments. I assume the accounts are regular people, but they genuinely just believe whatever bad thing they hear about renewable energy and look no further.

There's always of course the bad faith accounts that spit out cherry picked facts and half truths, but they also don't seem interested in doing any actual discussion other than arguing.

I have tried this tack. All fish everywhere are tainted by mercury to some extent. They seem not to care.

The thing which seemed to make them shut up was doing the math showing that the total weight of just coal ash from a coal plant running for a year is comparable to the entire weight of materials for a similar capacity wind farm (which is rated for ~20 years of use). I assume similar or less for solar (numbers harder to find).

> These bad ideas come from somewhere (presumably cable news).

The featured article states where they come from - the oil lobby (unsurprisingly).

Likely - and it has been reported we supply wind power to Chicago. However I've never seen it officially stated what is happening and so the truth could be something neither of us have thought of.

>and it has been reported we supply wind power to Chicago.

Which is funny, given its moniker

Japan had dolphin meat in their kids lunches. That didn't end well as the dolphin's are contaminated with high levels of mercury as well. I guess being right next to China, and most of their power comes from coal, and the wind generally flows from west to east did it. Some kids actually got sick from the high Mercury levels.

I have a lake home in Central MN. There are shit tons of wind turbines near my home.

The recent moves by the feds to limit wind makes no sense. If a farmer wants to lease some small plots of likely unusable planting property to a company that generates electricity via wind who the fuck cares? While the feds can stop land use options as they see fit, the way it’s worded makes it seem as if it’s not a good thing for farmers to use their land as they see fit—something that’s likely intentional.

The oil companies do.

I assume that's why it gets specifically called out, same if you're shipping apples to the entire US East Coast headline writers will pick up on the fact they're going to New York City.

It wouldn't actually make sense to put turbines in Chicago because it's a city, the wind force is disrupted by the human structures littered everywhere in a city - but obviously you'd expect a windy area to have a lot of turbines outside the city and not ordinarily need to import wind energy from hundreds of miles away.

They like the wind so much they pay Iowa for extra helpings!

A lot of farmers LOVE solar because it's way less work than farming and makes consistent money.

I know a bunch of farmers who have started installing solar in their fields..

The farmers don't matter here - this is about the small towns and suburbs which gain nothing and so can be mades to care about something that isn't relavant to them.