Gigants in the woods.

in #life5 years ago (edited)

Visiting a windmill park in the south east of Norway.

Lift crane for construction of wind turbines. You can really se the dimension in the third picture. The maximum hight on the windmills are 250m. Behind the first step of a tower.

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I am involved in the construction of windmills. I see, I listening and I have questions. The say green energy, but I think there is a big BUT. Is the energy really as green as we are told about?. How is the total co2 accounts. If somebody knows about that Im interesting for comments.

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*Best regards *
Jan

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amazing photography my brother,really great construction @karja

Thanks @love-peace for comment. :)

I think there exists research on it, and in the context of CO2 equivalents per kilowatthour, wind power is one of the "greenest" there is. The CO2-cost of nuclear power is much higher, as far as I remember.

There are other environmental costs though ...

  • The area directly by the wind mills are probably more or less "destroyed". Sometimes there are also access restrictions around windmill parks ... at least I've been sailing detours outside Copenhagen as a rather big area is closed due to windmills. How is it in the Norwegian mountains?
  • Construction of access roads. I believe it's not a big deal if they are made as modest as possible and very rarely used (closed for other motorized traffic, that is).
  • According to the Norwegian legal definition, a large area of "wilderness" is lost. However, I believe this is mostly a "statistical loss".
  • Birdstrike is a big problem as far as I've understood it
  • Noise
  • Many people don't like them because they are ugly. However, I'd say that's mostly about aesthetics and not so much of an environmental cost. The wildlife most likely won't suffer due to the change of view.
  • I remember to have read something in the news about a reindeer owner that was complaining loudly that the windmills was a direct threat against her way of living, as it would block the migration path of her reindeer (the only possible migration path). When reading the article, it was easy to sympathize with the lady, but now that I'm writing this I'm wondering why some few towers can be a real obstruction for reindeer.

So everything considered, windmills are probably one of the "greenest" source of power we have available today. However, it's required with a lot of windmills to sustain modern living, and while "some few" windmills probably can be said to be harmless wrg of the "destruction of nature"-argument, "a lot" of windmills probably can't be said to be harmless.

It's definitively better to have Teslas driving around in the city centers compared to dirty diesel cars, but it's no silver bullet. I do believe we need to consume less energy.

Thanks for comment and information. Yes I still believe windmill energy is green. But the information we got depends on who make the reports and statistics. A big part of the money to windmill projects come from dirty coal power plants south in Europe. If calculating with this solutions; I'm not so sure :)

Oh, why not just googling it :-)

Wikipedia has a good article, Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions by energy source.

The conclusion is ... that whatever the numbers are, they are very uncertain, but wind definitively comes out as one of the "cheapest" sources of energy, and it's probably better than nuclear power.

We have lots of windturbines near where I live in northern California. Lawrence Livermore lab is nearby where alot of research has been done on turbines. Some of the old ones have been up since the 1970's. There are definitely negatives - mostly birds and aesthetics . Here they were put up on rolling hills that are mostly grassy. Cows still graze under them.

Yes there are some negative sides wit windmills, hopefully in total it is good for the environment :)

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