The Cost of Turning Down Wind Turbines in Britain
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The UK wastes significant amounts of wind energy due to grid constraints, prompting discussions on potential solutions such as grid upgrades, energy storage, and innovative uses for excess energy.
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They would probably object to battery installation next to the generators as well
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
The NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything because, obviously, any development makes their jobs more difficult. It serves little purpose besides fodder for the NIMBYs.
I've never seen any of those organisations raising objections - I don't think they are even consulted on the planning applications I have seen? Planning applications for housing developments usually have a huge number of objections from nearby residents but the few organisations consulted seem to usually say that they've reviewed the plans and they look sensible.
Edit: I was looking at a local residential planning application hoping it would pass as it would replace some disused farm buildings that are currently a bit of an eyesore.
Not heard of NHS objections and the police can get stuffed as they have very weird ideas about public order and whose responsibility it is.
Mind you - the responses I did see seemed pretty sensible - water & sewers, drainage, roads etc.
I forget which of the various huge documents contains the local organisational consultations, but one of them does. The planning application itself (DC/24/137871) contains 340 documents. News quotes, for example, Greenwich council:
> While the scheme would appear as part of a tall building cluster, it risks harming the open character of Blackheath and the setting of heritage assets. The report requests additional winter views to fully assess visibility and potential harm.
(bit of an odd objection considering you can see Canary Wharf from there and there's a heavy traffic road running through the middle of it...)
I'm not suggesting that, for example, things like NHS concerns that there aren't enough local hospital beds or whatever aren't important, but I guess my view is that they shouldn't really be part of an individual planning decision.
Environment Agency, Natural England, Forestry Commission, Canal and River Trust, Historic England, The Gardens Trust, Health and Safety Executive, Office for Nuclear Regulation, Highways Authority, Parish Councils, Rail Infrastructure Managers, Coal Authority, Sport England, Theatres Trust, Water and sewerage undertakers, Local Planning Authorities, National Parks Authorities, Greater London Authority
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secured_by_Design
> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.
> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”
> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”
> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.
These people are absolute buffoons.
https://oxfordclarion.uk/clarion-weekly-12-september-2025/
Are these the same people who refused to let Clarkson open a pub because - and I quote - "it would be too popular"?
> A spokesperson for Cotswold District Council said: "We absolutely refute that any of the officers or councillors involved in working with Jeremy to realise his vision for the Coach and Horses had 'absolutely nothing positive to say' or were awkward."
> They added: "There were in fact several positive meetings between Jeremy and his team, and willing officers and councillors at Cotswold District Council.
> "These discussions explored how challenges to renovating this pub could be overcome, as part of the pre-application stage of this project. A planning application was never submitted.
> "Upon deciding not to pursue purchase of the pub, Jeremy sent an email via his planning agent thanking the council for being 'so open and supportive', and for trying to find solutions to some of the hurdles needed to overcome renovation of the pub. He stated that 'the march of time and the feasibility of getting this done within a window that works for television' had been the project's undoing."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3ql38yk11o
Clarkeson is an entertainer whose goal is to tell a compelling story; often one that bears little resemblance to the truth.
For any new project it seems we have have years discussing whether we should have a discussion about whether to start a new project.
Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.
There is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines.
However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper.
The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust.
Which seems bureaucratic?
I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation.
(not an Electrical engineer)
So currently it is illegal to, for instance, sell your excess wind or solar electricity to your neighbour. You have to sell it to the grid and it goes into the "common pool".
If you can store the energy, your energy cost goes down (but storage is not free of course, though getting cheaper).
Amortizing the fixed cost will mean the 'fossil' power is more expensive per kWh indeed, making it more and more attractive to buy storage as to bridge the gap between windy/sunny periods that do have cheaper electricity.
Some electricity markets have or a re looking at capacity mechanisms, they pay simply to have the capacity to generate power at any given time, even if not generating, eg. to be a backup. Eventually, that will be the business case for any fuel-powered power plant I suppose
If I put up a lot of solar panels I'm not even allowed to give my electricity to my neighbors, they have to buy it from the grid which I am allowed to sell it to at a stupendous discount. The so called free energy market has mostly failed, it isn't fair to consumers and commercial grid operators have taken over resources paid for by those very same consumers and are milking them for every penny while slow-walking the required investments so they get more subsidies.
I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electrical store, how far would they go, and who would _they_ even be?
Realistically, no-one's going to care about running a cable to your neighbour. If you start running cables to multiple neighbours, or connecting the cable directly into the mains supply of the other properties, you may attract attention.
Mostly for the potential of microgrids to upset the delicate balance of power-delivery and frequency-stability of the wider grid. There are a few initiatives around peer-to-peer power sharing and microgrids, but nothing particularly mainstream in the UK yet.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/29/section/4
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/29/section/27O
That would be a stupendously bad idea.
It's just that often in many places law lagged in ways of dealing with islanded operation, and semi-islanded cases (where you invest in serious gear to separate your local micro grid from external grid preventing the issues that cause technicians to show up and report you)
> I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation
Getting the right amount of power on in a stable fashion is not a trivial problem. Poor control systems can cause things like the Spanish blackouts.
I found this article helpful: https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/octopus-energ...
It would be interesting to see how this looks on a map.
Electricity exports (/prices) is a MASSIVE controversy in Norwegian politics, so it would be pretty funny if Norwegian power is replacing the curtailed wind power.
Correct?
See Fig 2 here[1] for just how spiky the market became after the price hike.
Also bear in mind that Norway does most of its residential heating with resitive heating, precisely because electricity has historically been so cheap. Heat pumps are getting more popular, and burning firewood got very popular during the price hike, but basically no-one heats with gas, as there's no infrastructure to support it.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
The anger is completely out of proportion, IMO, as the net effect is probably very positive. 1. Hydro is typically state owned and taxed at a very high rate 2. 50% of the price difference between markets is pocketed by the public grid operator (reducing grid fees) 3. We also import power when needed and typically at a net profit.
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
If the transmission capacity is limited you need to expose that signal to the market, not attempt to hide it.
How much energy gets wasted putting energy into and out of storage, how much on solvable transmission inefficiencies, etc. Is this the lowest hanging fruit?
Which claims curtailment is about 10%
That's not nothing, but could also just be the cost of doing business. If you stop building when curtailment occurs at peak wind, you'll have less cheap energy when wind isn't at peak.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46756
So maybe storage can make some sense.
But before you go expand the grid or add batteries, it's probably fine to over build or curtail some more :)
Okay, I honestly don't know. Because this comes down to the numbers -- it's really just an economics exercise.
I guess my point is: scary absolute number of money spent on curtailment, makes a great headline, but doesn't mean anything.
See https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
I think people have also suggested paying for electricity based on the location in the UK but the grid financial system is already so insanely complicated due to Thatcher's energy privatisation that making it even more complicated is kind of insane. Just not paying is actually a simplification.
Though this figure includes paying for gas generators to replace the wasted wind which costs 3x more than the curtailment payments. Still, those payments feel less morally galling.
It's even more dramatic between countries, I saw in my previous job that for e.g. a country like India with monsoon season typically curtails it's turbines for a large part of the year.
e.g.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/European-Offshore-Wind-A...
From wiki:
> Northern Ireland, Wales and western parts of England and Scotland are generally the mildest, wettest, and windiest regions of the UK, being closest to the Atlantic Ocean, and temperature ranges there are seldom extreme. Eastern areas are drier and less windy
But it being very windy isn't really conducive to building wind farms. You want (a) shallow seas (b) stable and continuous wind. That's why if you look at the map of where wind farms are situated they big offshore farms are concentrated on the east coast of England and Scotland, mostly from Norforlk upwards: https://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/wind-farm-rare-earth-magnets/
It's not that you can't build them on the west, it's just easier.
https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml
16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore
To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United States used to build ~2700 liberty ships during the Second World War.
We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.
IIRC his point was basically that you could make a concerted effort to start building nuclear now, and in 10-15 years you'd be there on having non-CO2 emitting power generation, and that if you even let one part of the renewables equation slip (e.g. banning onshore wind which was the case from 2010 onwards), then you still wouldn't have enough to meet total demand. And that in addition, the cost in terms of producing the actual mechanism to generate the power in both money and in materials in concrete + steel was vastly larger in doing it with wind/solar than with nuclear, with a lot more engineering challenges too.
Except you can't because there's a law saying the price of electricity has to be the same everywhere in the country. You can be right next to a wind turbine that's turned off, and they're not allowed to sell to you for less than the price they'd sell to the other end of the country, even though they're also not allowed to sell to the other end of the country.
Of course, this law was probably a reaction to a previous time where the price differences were excessively huge. A law like this doesn't exist for no reason. There is a balancing act, as both extremes were already found to have problems. It can be that the "stupid can't sell law" is actually considered good because it makes investors build new supply at the other end of the country or to build more transmission lines, instead of building where you are and trying to sell to you locally.
That requires splitting the market into two zones along the bottleneck. Like for example Sweden has done. Then those wind turbines won't be bid into the market when the cross zone transmission capacity is maxed out.
You can imagine how palatable the politicians finds' it to split off Scotland to be its own market zone with vastly cheaper electricity.
Crypto minimg hardware costs a lot of momey upfront, getting outdated fast and to make profit it must run 24/7 which is obviously impossible when there is no energy excess.
This also doesn't change if you consume all the energy at the place where it is produced, since you still need to supplement the normal load with gas. There's only two ways out of this: split the markets, or build transmission.
Oh well.
Essentially the "electricity market" is putting out orders for increasing or decreasing production (plus various auxilliary services, like frequency stabilisation), and production companies use often pretty complex mechanisms to both bid and trade them dynamically. It goes from somewhat large portions traded day ahead, to even minute by minute adjustments, and the actual pricing/trading etc. involves details like "how fast can you deliver/reduce the energy".
Some double-fed generator turbines carefully manage waveforms generated into excitation coils to very dynamically adjust power flows, some use permanent magnets and pretty beefy inverters. Some can even provide dynamic reactive sinks in case of big load falling off the grid.
It's also not "aggressively" subsidised at all. It's actually about 0.3 cents per kWh actually produced, which is basically nothing compared to fossil power subsidies (8.6 cents per kWh using gas, or 20 cents per kWh using coal), and let's not even start talking about nuclear power (34 cents per kWh)
Wind power is so cheap compared to fossil and even a bit cheaper than solar, so maybe Germany should start expand it agrresively.
> then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies
If true, it means that because wind in those regions is infeasible, they have to subsidise it.
Initial (multi-decade) subsidies to kicks things off makes sense because the plan is to get them to pay off eventually. But increasing subsidies in regions where it's _never_ going to work is disingenuous and a waste.
In this case, there is no "increased subsidies for less feasible regions". And if you know anything about the region, it's very implausible. Southern states are generally not forerunners for wind power, with Bavaria's governing party being downright hostile. They are not increasing subsidies, that's for sure.
My best guess is that this refers to either differences in subsidies between the states - Lower Saxony has lower to no subsidies because building wind turbines is popular and profitable there without additional funding. Bavaria meanwhile probably lacks experts and has to bring them down from Lower Saxony or NRW, increasing building costs even at locations just as suitable as in Lower Saxony. So yeah, they might still have state subsidies, but not because they want wind power where it's infeasible. You wouldn't find an operator for that.
Another guess is that maybe this about the process for bidding on subsidies. This is a method where for large-scale projects operators can bid on executing projects not just with money but also by the amount of subsidies. For off-shore power, that subsidy often goes negative now, i.e. it's practically a license cost now. That does indeed mean that less desirable projects, which are probably less ideal for power generation, receive more subsidies, but that's a far cry from building wind power in "infeasible" locations.
https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red...
> The price actually paid is the bid price, which is adjusted up or down by a correction factor. This is higher in low-wind locations and lower in high-wind locations. Put simply, this means that where there is a lot of wind and yields are high, there is slightly less money per kilowatt hour fed into the grid. Where the wind is weaker, the subsidy increases.
Now why do they do this? Because the goal is to do _everything_ with renewables. Which means: Since it's not so easy to route electricity from the north to the south, the south needs it's own plants, even if they are unprofitable.
There's no malicious encouragement to build wind power where it does not make sense.
But why are there subsidies anyway? Well, all forms of power are subsidised, nuclear power the most, and renewables and coal about to the same tune (in Germany). Also, the electricity price is very low in Germany. Often lower as in France. You know, neither coal plant operators nor wind power operators profit from the extremely high consumer price point. So even though wind power is the cheapest form of energy to produce (in Germany), even it can't break even all the times, which is a scary prospect for investors.
German household prices are highest in EU https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... And industrial ones in top 5. All this despite EEG subsidies. Without them the price would be about 6ct/kwh higher
> Wind power is so cheap
Germany has the highest energy costs in the world. The alledged price points for wind and solar do not account for the total cost: Negative electricity prices when there is too much demand, increased costs managing the grid (redispatch), the need for a double-infrastructure (because when there is no wind or solar produced, someone else has to produce)
France has lower electricity prices than Germany, while emitting only 16% (!!!!!) Co2 compared to Germany. Conclusion: Germanies "clean energy" way is a total failure. Electric cars in Germany are "dirtier" than gasoline cars due to the energy mix.
> France has lower electricity prices
France has incredibly high subsidies for nuclear power, and it's still not enough. And their newest power plant cost 20 billion just in construction for a paltry 1.6GW, and to even begin new ones they need to subsidy them with 100€ per MWh (which is about thirty-three times the subsidies wind power recieves in Germany).
If anything, France is a nice example of how it's maybe nice to /have/ a fleet of nukes, but Germany does not have them nor do they have the time to build up reactors. Even if there were politicians interested in paying for them (because the free market sure isn't).
When you say Germany can't just build nuclear plants now you are right. But the solution can't be to expand solar and wind, while destroying coal and nuclear plants - which is what they do. The last minister for these matters had the unironical idea to shutdown industry when the renewables don't produce. The idea was to move from a demand driven industry, to a supply driven industry. Total madness. The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.
You're also mixing the status quo with your (unclear) desire of how the world should be. Germany spent the last 80 years to build up an energy grid built on coal – nuclear peaked at 30%!. Of course they emit more CO2 today compared to the French!
But if anything, that's an argument for why Germany should start agressively building out renewables (aggression there was abandoned 20 years ago by the Merkel admin).
> 3 trillion or more till 2045
Looking at decades is a surefire way to get big numbers. But depending on your starting points (I guess 1999 during SPD/Greens coalition), that's just €60 billion per year. A lot of money but not exactly shocking.
> The idea to produce wind in the south of Germany is part of such madness.
Even the state of Bavaria - not exactly known to be mad for wind power - classifies more than half of its area as containing locations suitable for wind power. Of course that's nothing compared to Lower Saxony, but that's why they aim for total installed capacity of just 6 GW by 2050 (source for all that is the Bayrischer Windatlas issued by the, again, very sceptical of wind power, CSU government of Bavaria).
You're really just decade old fud against renewables. Do you really think that in the whole of 70 thousand square kilometres of Bavaria there are no points where the wind is strong enough 150 m above ground to produce power profitably? Because that's just not true. And 6 GW, by the way, are just one to four thousand modern turbines. Across the largest state of Germany. There's nothing mad about that at all.
In 20y since EEG creation, Germany achieved much poorer decarbonization vs France during Messmer
You can check out today how nicely is that investment performing https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
So Germany did both spend more and achieved poorer results which can be seen literally today or in yearly average. All this while it has highest household prices in EU per eurostat (last year, this year it'll probably be topped by Romania)
You could consider nationalization a subsidy(albeit it wasn't) but that was a one off 9bn payment. Germany spent double of that last year alone on EEG ren subsidies and still had highest household prices in EU.
German wind gets about 70€/MWh.
New french nuclear CFDs aren't clear. Fla3 doesn't have cfd and has a prod cost of 90-120€/MWh. But that's a failed project which got delayd and had supply chain issues. If EPR2 will have the same problems - yes, it'll cost similarly. Otherwise it'll be cheaper, like eg building a unit in 10y instead of 20
Or alternatively merit order data https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
And this includes everything. No subsidies were given per bundestag. In fact if subsidies were so high as some claim, govt would have just needed to cancel them instead of banning. The only ones that are trying to picture a different reality are some orgs like FOS/Greenpeace.
Wind in southern Germany is unprofitable because of solar(solar is almost always universally cheaper vs wind) and transmission cost, as well as nimby from all parties incl greens. You get much less output vs north while solar is cheaper and eats your share. This is why despite higher incentives not much is built. Currently the bid ceiling is in 7ct/kwh range. But final price is determined by other factors too, like how often you pay this guarantee or curtailment. EEG is projected to rise despite most expensive contracts being over, because it's paid more frequently.
Offshore is in a worse situation since it's even more expensive to deploy there- recent tender got 0 bids, just like in DK and UK in the past. That's also why UK rised compensation in AR6/AR7
New nuclear for Germany is pointless to discuss. Nobody except maybe afd wants it. The CDU promised to do a research about restarting some older units during elections - guess what- nothing got done.
Germany is currently paying about 18bn/y for transmission, 18bn/y for eeg and 2-3bn/y on curtailment and 18bn/y on distribution. All except maybe distribution network are depending on renewables expansion - the more you deploy - the more you pay, at the tradeoff that merit order will be cheaper when wind blows and sun shines. If they don't, like today https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... merit order gets super expensive - partly because fossils are expensive, partly because firm power is asking more to compensate periods when wind/solar are strong, partly due to co2 tax. And per bnetza/Fraunhofer ISE gas needs expansion to have sufficient firming
And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
Germany, like the UK, has dynamic national electricity pricing, which makes no sense when the interconnections are not powerful enough to actually make it a single electricity market.
So you see, the market was supposed to correct that.
But profit laid with cheap gas turbines to backstop wind and buying from france ;)
The mandatory EDI platform to interact on German market is also a bit annoying, though it's in details theory is theoretically /s solid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
It's frustratingly hard to get friends and neighbours to understand when they're part of the problem, that their "special" situation isn't special after all.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
> As a foreign influence
I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o
There are others much closer, which I also rather like seeing (closest is about 2km) but you can't see them from where we live.
The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically extinct now.
I am somewhat sympathetic to, in the case of wind, low-frequency noise complaints, but I strongly suspect most of them are just tacked on for good measure.
They're awful.
I live in the country for the peace and quiet and dark at night.
Now with a wind farm, there is a constant background hum that reminds me of living near a highway in the city, and a swishing noise that's louder than the cicadas and other night time bugs. Also, the red blinking safety lights do actually keep me up at night, but I might just be very sensitive to light.
I fully supported and still support the wind farm, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to host a turbine (and therefore benefit at all from these things). But, I really, really, really don't like the side effects at all.
Is that NIMBYism?
No. You recognize the drawbacks and still support the project for the good of others. That's the opposite of NIMBY, it's a high level of emotional maturity.
Yes directly underneath them there is some gentle swooshing noises but I think beyond 500m it's basically imperceptible. Nothing I'd call offensive, car traffic is easily 10x worse.
The young folks that I've talked to locally, overwhelming share the same perspective.
The opposition has to come from folks who cannot see the bigger picture and just view them as some kind of excessive ugly infrastructure. Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I kind of find it interesting that a lot of historical landscape art from northern Europe featured windmills. Nobody viewed them as a blight back then.
>>Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I think we should devote every single spare inch of land to wind turbines and harness as much of wind energy as possible. But I won't pretend like the bloody things are not keeping me up at night when I can hear them.
It’s like we can only accomplish anything as a society if if the fact that it is going to piss people off is baked in.
Existential threats always seem to have an interesting way of unlocking progress.
Just look at how quickly Germany was able to build the north sea LNG terminals in the face of the russian gas crisis [1].
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7u4rhjVJoI
I thought I was strange for feeling this when I brought my US-raised kids back to Northern Ireland this spring. Some would have been visible from my childhood home had they been built earlier. It made me think that maybe these people can get something right for the future.
Times are tumultuous but potential exists all around us.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g80av4zlDco
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUVoWxvvJ5Y
Meanwhile the older folks are still freaked out from when they watched "The Tripods" in the 80's and can't abide big mechanical monsters looming nearby.
Scum.
Lovely turn of phrase. I'm going to work it into my next tech talk.
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/streit-um-stromtrassen-k...
[2] https://www.wochenblatt-dlv.de/feld-stall/betriebsfuehrung/e...
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
https://energynetworks.substack.com/p/why-dont-we-just-put-e...
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