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

I read the article but it's still unclear what argument the anti-wind groups use to say _why_ "wind is bad for environment/our children/the economy/greater good"?

Ruins the view, kills birds, noisy is the usual trifecta. Or to quote one site I won't deign to link to, "Protecting the marine environment and ecosystems from the industrialisation of our oceans."

Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.

Those are the weaker arguments. In the UK, I've heard many more convincing arguments against wind power.

e.g.

- Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.

- Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.

I won't pretend to know enough to state whether they are valid arguments or not. But they are potentially much stronger arguments against wind power than the others frequently made.

Offshore wind is indeed expensive and requires high CFD's. For onshore it's still manageable (yet). The reason is solar eats part of their profits and payoff becomes too long

Firming argument is valid, but UK deploys nuclear/gas anyway. You can start feeling real challenges past ~70% ren generation - firming becomes more expensive due to opex but you still need it and gas opex is smaller vs nuclear in this low utilization area. So now you are in a moral dilema- ditch nuclear and build gas firming or reorganize capacity market so that nuclear has some CFD or is compensated for firming&grid stabilization (not all nuclear can operate in island mode so that's another factor)

Germany choose the path of gas expansion if you read Fraunhofer. UK is still in a mix. Nordics are lucky with hydro so they can expand basically all low carbon tech

Nordics (Sweden, Finland) are expanding nuclear as well. Their energy ministers are very pro-nuclear, for some funny reason.

The reason is peak demand. If your demand is say 5GW and hydro can provide max 3GW, unless you overbuild ren, it's 'easier' to have some more firm power while ren will act as water savers for hydro (especially considering droughts).

For now they have sufficient power, but considering nuclear timelines, you better start now

Enhanced geothermal could play a role here, but for now it's debatable.

They have lots potential for wind (~20%) and hydro. Peak demand is increasing, but lasts for very specific amounts of time during a day, it doesn’t justify the increases in base load. These peaks could be certainly fulfilled by smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification before new building new power plants. Yet, many of these will be needed despite nuclear, but since nuclear is the elephant in the room, they are going with it first, while stalling everything else. They are even trying to convince Germany to do the same.

"smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification" - electrification increases the demand, maybe you meant efficiency?

Demand response is basically - please don't use power because we don't have enough or because it's expensive. That's not an appealing option.

Smart grid management is good but it'll take years to reach good condition - you need to expand/upgrade transmission and distribution systems with proper equipment.

Germany has it's own path that's more or less stable for a long time- coal+gas firming, tons of ren and major transmission expenses, to the point govt will start subsidizing them

(I) Electrification displaces energy demand. Efficiency controls growth of demand. Various limits have been reached with efficiency. (II) Demand response is not about “do not use power because we don’t have enough.”, it is about “here is some money so you shift demand to a later point in time when saturation is lower.” (III) It doesn’t take years to find better ways to manage the grid as is. Do you think there won’t be a need to upgrade large portions of the grid to handle new nuclear plants?

THE UK gets 30% of its electricity from wind and another 5% from solar; Denmark gets 70% from renewables, mostly wind. Iowa gets 65% of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind; California, whose economy is larger than that of most countries, gets 38%, mainly from solar.

But some lobbyists are trying to kill momentum, especially those who see nuclear as a silver bullet. It is not.

Electrification doesn't displace demand. It adds more demand.

what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it

Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements

> Electrification doesn't displace demand. It adds more demand.

Take cars, for instance. When someone buys an EV rather than ICE, do you think the EV uses the same amount of energy than the ICE car?

> what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it

Sure, what do you think that needs to be done when there is a limited resource such as electricity? Yes, more production, but until then, what should the grid do if the demand is growing?

> Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements

It is two different models, one is centralized (nuclear) and the other is distributed (solar). The planning is essentially different.