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542 points xbmcuser | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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qwertox ◴[] No.45037882[source]
A country can commit to 300 years of wind energy, temporarily harming a bit of nature.

Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.

We have no issues with stealing a couple of square miles of nature in order to pave it for our cities or to use it for farming.

Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal: production of the turbines, used area and generated noise, minimal pollution of the area, the troubles of recycling them. That's mostly it.

You don't have this with oil, nor with current-age nuclear.

Also, we've already accepted the noise of cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes.

So I really don't get what they are protesting about, specially in Germany.

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belorn ◴[] No.45039338[source]
The opposition to the construction of wind farms are mostly silly except in a very specific situation. We should not construct those in nature reservation. If a place is worth designating as a nature reserve then we have decided that such place is worth protecting even if the area could be later freed (common reason is keeping certain species from going extinct, which makes the threat nontemporarily). Ocean based wind farms has a tendency to want to be built in the shallows, which happens to correlate where we tend to designate as nature reservations.

Wind power is however not comparable to fossil fuels or nuclear power. Denmark is a prime example of a country that did commit fully to wind power in a very strong and consistent way, and do produce more total energy through wind that they consume. That energy however is not produced when people want to consume it, so as a practical matter, they import around 50% of their energy that they do consume, energy which is not wind since when the wind blow they export the excess energy. They could produce 500% or even 1000% more wind energy, and they would still need to import a large portion of their consumption from non-wind power. Producing that much excess power would mostly just effect exports and not in a good way for the producers since overproduction mostly just lead to lower prices. 50% consumption seems to be around the maximum of what you can do with wind (for now), and when the wind do not blow you still need 100% of the capacity from other sources in order to fill in the gap. Overproduction of nuclear or thermal energy does not have this issue, but rather carries completely different problems.

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1. ViewTrick1002 ◴[] No.45068756[source]
One thing to keep in mind with the Danish figure is that they to be correct import 37.6% but have enough thermal capacity to run the entire country at peak demand without renewables or imports.

What they do is essentially being the energy trading market for Northern Europe. Buying the cheapest available from UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

As storage gets built out they will be able to arbitrage this positions and their better, likely allowing them to start phasing out thermal capacity as long as the stability of the grid is ensured through empirical evidence.

Attempting to fit nuclear power with its extremely high CAPEX and acceptable OPEX in our zero marginal cost renewable and near zero marginal cost storage future is a near impossible task.