balancr Loc: VA

Central Virginia, Lake Anna has a compact nuke site and keeps lake warm. Just have to keep power lines out of shots.

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

They kill a ton of eagles and other types of birds each year. The wind companies get a pass from the greenies. There's no free lunch.

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

I would prefer the newest types of nuclear.

Toby

Or smoke stacks?

Nalu Loc: Southern Arizona

You just discovered one of the cons of renewables, they are not reliable.

I love the California deserts and other open spaces, but many parts because of the political renewable attitude in California are becoming visually polluted IMO. Not only by the generation facilities but the need for new transmission from remote facilities. Renewables are just too inefficient from a land use perspective. Compare the same sized generating unit of a new gas facility vs. the same sized renewable. The gas unit would be 1/50th of the size.

If you are worried about the emissions from conventional generation, go nuclear. The disposal of spent fuel issue is another political football.

Plieku69 Loc: The Gopher State, south end

Stan, I am not sure that is a good solution either. In Iowa, Alliant Energy is the major power provider and they have invested heavily in wind power with a goal of being 100% wind capable. They are somewhere around 75% currently. Another point is the maintenance requirements and replacement costs given the projected 18 year life span of a turbine. Too that tune Alliant announced last year that they were replacing the turbines in 465 units. I had wondered what would happen cost wise when this became necessary. Looks like they are picking up the cost themselves. A good many of the units being replaced are not wore out but suffer from excessive down time. Alliant does not make it easy to find information on what type of turbine the new ones are.

I recently moved to southern Minnesota and solar is a big thing here. The typical solar "farm" covers about 5 acres of good, rich farm land. They are not so noticeable from the road. How efficient they are I don't know, probably not any more efficient than a wind turbine.

From the Green perspective wind and solar are popular, but they cannot replace carbon based power on a full time bases.

We can do better.
Ken

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Actually, just north of Mojave and in Palmdale, there are thousands of acres of photovoltaic panels abouty 300 Mw of clean and renewable energy.
So, I prefer both.

PH CIB

Stabilizing Human Overpopulation and Over Consumption in a Finite World would help more.......

SteveR Loc: Michigan

I'm not following. Were you doing videos or photographs? Why would you need wind to do photographs, unless you were going to blur the motion of the fan blades.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

380,000 birds are killed by wind turbines yearly. Between 365 and 988 MILLION die each year from collisions with Windows. Even PETA doesn't care about that.

SteveR Loc: Michigan

The east coast, fortunately, has Niagara Falls. I don't believe it kills any birds.

Fredrick Loc: Former NYC, now San Francisco Bay Area

A Green VC tech firm here in Silicon Valley told me about 10 years ago that they wouldn’t invest in wind turbines because the cost to maintain them outweighed the revenue in electricity they produced. These companies were getting by with government subsidies.

Perhaps that’s no longer the case.

rcdovala

Wind turbines are designed to feather their blades in high winds to prevent this very thing from happening. Obviously, this turbine forgot the rules.

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

But they're only clean when installed and working. The mining of the rare earth metals needed to produce them is an environmental nightmare. They have a limited lifespan, so then you have to dispose of them. That's not clean, either, in any sense of the word.

So in use, we see them as clean, but the damage is always done in somebody else's back yard. And the damage is severe.

CatMarley Loc: North Carolina

Wind turbines are "landscape"???. The Mojave desert is a magnificent landscape and the windmills are a desecration of landscape. I grew up in the Mojave, and my heart always yearns for those wide open spaces, the carpet of yellow and pink flowers in the spring, the dark starry skies at night and the sunsets over the Sierras.