re: What must it be like to grow up surrounded by a wind farm in the Midwest?

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He's laughing because it takes a truly simple minded individual to be so concerned with 250k dead birds

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Hay, about those snail darters...

You lefties never cease to amaze me with your very situational logic.

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impact to wildlife avoided by not having to dig up and burn the 150 million tons of coal that those wind turbines offset.

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Build nuclear. Stop messing around with this political shite, tell the environmentalists to shut the frick up and make it happen.

Or cleaner natural gas. I don't know why you think its either wind or coal.

Hydro
Wave tech

Seems to be more than one alternative. Weird.

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Ah yes, nuclear has never negatively impacted the environment.

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Everything does. Nuclear is safer than coal, if you believe the climate change alarmists.

Sure beats a bunch of shitty windmills destroying the horizon with 20 year cycles.

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Ah yes, nuclear has never negatively impacted the environment.

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Everything does.

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That's what I tried to tell you earlier, and you scolded me for choosing to do that.

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no one wants windmills on our lands

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No large developer would ever want to build a large site in Alaska anyway.

I've done work on Eva Creek near Healy by the Denali NP. The terrain in the wind-heavy parts of Alaska are more than likely too rugged to make it feasible for a developer to want to undertake. Not to mention the T-Line issues trying to get it to POI or wherever offtake would occur. Too much sugar for a dime IMO. I'll take Kansas

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Comes with smell-a-vision

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Hell, I can smell that picture.

I'll bite. What power generation are you going to use during peak load times?

How are you going to regulate the power generation and system load from solar and wind?

Do you know the acre to MW output of solar and wind to other power generation?

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what is the carbon footprint really considering manufacture, transportation, and maintenance?

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If you've ever seen one in transport you'd know it is immense. Each BLADE has to be on an oversized trailer with flag vehicles in front & back. So x3 plus the turbine plus the pole plus everything going into the wiring. If they're going to do it they should be like Australia/Europe and have them out in the ocean.

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They get eaten by some other animal.

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Which likely explains the repeated anecdote about ‘not seeing any dead birds around the turbines’.

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I'll bite.

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On what?

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What power generation are you going to use during peak load times?

How are you going to regulate the power generation and system load from solar and wind?

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Oh, another one misunderstood the point of that post. I was absolutely NOT trying to suggest that we should go 100% wind, or even 100% mix of solar/wind. I scaled wind up to 100% to show just how few birds wind turbines kill relative to other ways we kill birds. It's a small number.

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Do you know the acre to MW output of solar and wind to other power generation?

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I've seen lots of calculations and estimates, but the point shouldn't be to maximize output per acre IMO. Rather, the point should be to diversify our energy sources (which has the effect of stabilizing the market) and lean on energy sources with zero fuel costs as much as we can (which puts downward pressure on prices long term).

In the case of solar, I don't particularly care for large installations on fresh land. I'm a right-tool-for-the-job kind of guy, and solar should go on roofs so it doesn't take up any additional acreage. Similarly, hydro should go where it makes sense, wind turbines should go where it's windy (the plains, offshore, etc), tidal should go where there are tides (and as it happens a lot of people live near the coasts), geothermal where accessible, etc.

And again, I have no problem with nuclear, and I really don't even have a problem with coal or gas. I simply think it doesn't make much sense to rely so heavily on power that depends on volatile markets for fuel when we can offload much of it to sources with free "fuel".

I also think it wise to invest in energy storage. Sometimes wind and solar produce more than we are using, and the production is wasted. Batteries are great for point-of-use storage, but if we bump up to grid-scale there are many options. They don't even have to be all that efficient if we are storing free energy, better to salvage a fraction of it than waste it all. In addition to the various types of cheap battery tech being developed, we can store energy in a lot of ways. Spin up a flywheel, melt salts, split water, etc.

It will take a combination of a lot of different tech to stabilize energy in the long-term. We can even decentralize and democratize energy production and storage. In true American spirit, an individual can be energy-independent with renewables.

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And once again, your climate religion says the end justifies any means.

The willing ignorance regarding the unintended negative consequences to our environment from your ‘green’ options is staggering.

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Bro, you are the one who started this thread ignorant to the inconsequential number of birds killed by wind turbines. You'd be better off just arguing that they're ugly. At least if you did that you wouldn't look stupid.