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I always see people commenting about the negative visual impact of a windmill. I feel like I'm the only one who thinks they are beautiful to look at. Obviously we shouldn't be plopping them down directly in front of houses, but wind farms are pretty hypnotic to see.

What's amazing is that only five wind mills are capable of providing power to 17,000 homes per this article. That's 3400 per windmill. Doing the math on 124,000,000 homes in the US. That's only 36,470 total windmills. Something can't be right here if that's ALL it takes.

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One small quibble - wind turbines produce electricity, wind mills mill grain. I know it's pedantic, but people in the industry get really irked when the machines are referred to as windmills. I don't know why exactly, maybe due to the marketing difficulties of "mills" versus "turbines" or because engineers like precise terminology.

I guess the avout of Arbre would refer to the distinction as"bulshytt" though, so take from it what you will.

edit: Ah, I see this was discussed below under another parent. Apologies if anyone takes umbrage to the distinction discussion.

Windmills mill down gears/bearings into metal/ceramic powder. They produce toxic electricity as waste which is transported elsewhere for disposal.

You're just being pedantic at that point. Wind turbine / mill is used interchangeably in the populace, and they are the ones you need to convince that these projects are viable.

People in the industry should realize that by windmill, we mean that big rotating thing. What it does with the rotation is not visible to us for us to need to make a distinction, and for the majority of their existence, those big rotating things were just windmills.

Fact check on those numbers:

(1) This is a 30megawatt plant. An average household consumes 2500watts (including heating). 30,000,000 / 2500 = 12,000 homes ... it's in the same ballpark. But only when the wind farm is operating at 100% capacity. That may be only 25% of the time, with lesser being the norm and zero being a thing at some times.

(2) Homes are not the only energy consumers. US electricity consumption per person = 13,246.27kwh / 2088 hours per year = 6300watts per person. 30,000,000/6300 = 4750. ... These five mills can produce enough power for around 4750 people. But that is only the electricity and doesn't include non-electrical energy such as hydrocarbons burnt for transport/heat. If we all start driving teslas, or switch to electric heat, those five turbines will cover far less than 4750 people.

But let's say this plant does cover 5000 people. 320,000,000/5000 = we need 64000 of these plants, or 320,000 turbines[1]. And again, only when running at capacity. The real number is perhaps triple.

[1]Thanks to dmoy for correcting my decimal error.

This sort of calculation is missing the forest for the trees. Right now, wind is providing 5% of the US power supply. Plants are becoming substantially less expensive as technology improves and economies of scale come to the fore. That's mostly Midwestern ground power. Sea-based wind plants are more efficient due to more consistent wind.

Nuclear power provides about 20% of the US consumption, and there's no need to shut down existing nuclear plants as wind comes online. So just increasing wind output by 15x would more or less cover America's needs. With lots of untapped shoreline and lots of untapped Midwestern plains (not to mention new tech making previously unviable locations viable), it doesn't seem outrageous.

The missing key here is energy storage, not energy generation. Storage is how you optimize utilization. When plants produce excess power, capture and store, and release when the wind isn't blowing. Even with thermal losses, this gets us in the ballpark of 100% utilization. And there's a ton of investment in this field right now.

As for this plant, it wasn't built to make money on electricity. It was built to learn how to build offshore wind in the US, to deal with the technology and political pressures. The goal is to be able to build a thousand times this capacity, or more.

>> When plants produce excess power, capture and store ... this gets us in the ballpark of 100% utilization.

No. That is getting to 100% by changing the measurements. I was talking about utilization of the turbines, total power production, not how the plant regulated its power output. A plant with storage will still generate more or less power as the wind changes. That they use storage to regulate their output doesn't alter the fact that the turbines are not running at capacity 100% of the time. So the math as to how many turbines are needed to generate a specific amount of power holds.

And how is this fundamentally different from partial dial-down of coal or nuclear plants for routine maintenance?

Your math is wrong, because you assume a household consumes 2500 watts 24/7. That's a pretty insane figure. The only things running constantly in our house are the fridge and the modem. Even if you add computer, laptop, lights it's still an order of magnitude less than 2500w.

In vast swaths of the US electricity is used for climate control on a 24/7 basis, and in these locations it is often the largest single energy usage point in the home or office building.

Even triple, that seems like nothing in the grand scheme of something as large as power generation.

Citations requested for:

* "2500watts (including heating)"

* "That may be only 25% of the time, with the lesser being the norm"

* "US electricity consumption per person = 13,246.27kwh"

* "The real number is perhaps triple."

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_energy_consumption (2) Google "US electricity consumption per person" (3) My personal knowledge of wind, that it doesn't blow 24/7. (I've done several off-grid houses and each time have rejected wind in favour of spending the money on more solar panels.) (4) See 3.

...but the Wikipedia article you site says 2kW, not 2.5kW, and adding heating seems irrelevant, because the vast majority of homes in New England do not use electricity for heating. The 17,000 homes figure that you're fact-checking is referring to 17,000 homes with today's actual electrical use, not energy use in general.

If you add up the numbers in the wikipedia chart, it's actually 2310, which I round up to 2500 to simplify the math. Either way, these are "household" numbers more dependant on the definition of household. I'd stick to the more solid numbers per capita for the entire country.

Is it reasonable to expect that on-shore wind turbine efficiency is identical to off-shore wind turbine efficiency?

Not even remotely, off shore turbines are much, much more efficient. Newer turbines already have capacity factors of over 40%, newer off shore turbines can exceed 50%.

http://rameznaam.com/2015/08/30/how-steady-can-the-wind-blow...

320,000 not 32,000?

I'm with you on this one. What I find ugly is that we've already crisscrossed an enormous amount of the countryside with power lines.

Depends on where they are.

They don't belong in Yosemite, or peppered on & around Mt Shasta. They'd be pretty awful if they carpeted the entire Great Plains.

But, in isolated groups, I agree they can look pretty cool when set against a barren landscape.

They're also a source of light pollution at night, an army of distant flashing red lights. Definitely put a damper on the Perseid shower when I went out into the Plains for skygazing.

> They'd be pretty awful if they carpeted the entire Great Plains.

They pretty much do in many areas.

And yes, the lights are the worst part. I think the risk of striking a windmill in the Great Plains is low enough that they could probably remove the lights in many areas.

Some better options than brilliant lights shining into the sky in all directions:

1. Use aircraft transponders to turn on lights selectively. 2. Establish a minimum flight level in wind farms, and provide pilots with locations of the towers in the event of an emergency descent. 3. Install reflectors to ensure that the lights are only visible from very far away on the ground. This doesn't solve the light pollution problem, and it's only really useful for pilots above the lights who don't need to worry. 4. Install reflectors to ensure that the lights are only visible below the level of the tower. This would improve the light pollution situation with regards to astronomy, but probably make it worse for viewers. 5. Network the lights so they fade in and out synchronously, rather than random noisy blinking.

>5. Network the lights so they fade in and out synchronously, rather than random noisy blinking.

or so that they would follow some "visual symphony" or make some other nice image or may be spell some marketing phrase visible from distance/space/planes

You aren't the only one. I'm glad the same NIMBY sentiment didn't prevail when they were putting up lighthouses.

At a minimum, it's much better to have a wind farm near a beach than a set of high buildings.

I have the same feeling, about both windmills and motorways: they can be very beautiful engineering constructs.

Perhaps it's just that enough is enough, or rather, too much is too much.

Funny that your username is "overcast," since my main argument for wind as a lesser of energy evils is that I would rather see the hills lined with turbines than the valleys choked with smog.

Would you feel they were beautiful if you paid $700K for an oceanfront property?

This: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Mystic_G...

This is the Mystic Generating Station in Everett, MA.

It is inside Boston Harbor, and receives liquified natural gas to generate electricity.

The arrival of gas ships in Everett is a big security event, and is greeted with a general closure of shipping lanes, chopper patrols over the harbor, and patrol cars at every point in the harbor that are close to the ship. Because each of those ships is a floating fuel-air bomb able to take out the whole city.

Every wind turbine, every solar panel, and every bicycle dynamo hooked to a hamster wheel in New England, lengthens to time between visits from these ships.

So yes, I do feel they are beautiful.

As I said, plopping them in front of your face, probably not a great idea. But let's be realistic here, the US has A TON of space, and a lot of smart people. I'm sure we can figure it out.

Of course. Hell, I'd pay extra for a view of Deer Island here in Boston. Yes it's a sewage treatment plant, but it is an exceedingly beautiful one.

First of all if I could get oceanfront property for $700K in this area (Block Island or Cape Cod) I'd think that was a bargain.

And anyway, yes, I would still feel that they're beautiful. There's something deeply satisfying for me when natural resources are harnessed in this sensible and attractive way.

Given that the Netherlands uses its windmills as a tourist icon to attract people and their dollars, it does seem weird that wind turbines are considered such an eyesore by some.

Yes, I look at them and see we're collecting power from our environment in such a simple and direct way in comparison to other fossil fuel paths.

The struggle is real.

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