Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> meeting current U.S. electricity needs alone would require wind farms to cover fully 12 percent of the U.S. land area.

> low-density wind turbines operating over the windiest one-third of the continental U.S. to generate enough power to meet current U.S. electricity demand — a plausible scenario for wind-power use in the late 21st century.

Covering that big a chunk of the continental US with wind turbines is considered plausible?!?!?!

The Eisenhower Interstate System is roughly 48,000 miles long. If we assume that all interstates are about 1/10 of a mile wide (176 yards--a little less that 2 football fields or roughly 25 lanes wide), then the Interstate System is about 4,800 square miles in area.

The US is 3,796,742 square miles in area.

So, the Eisenhower Interstate System is approximately .15% of the total US land area.

And the paper is proposing to cover almost 100 TIMES! the land area of the interstate system with wind farms.

My bullshit sensors are going off in a big way.

> And the paper is proposing to cover almost 100 TIMES! the land area of the interstate system with wind farms.

That wasn't a proposal, it was a "what if" scenario. Plausible in the sense that it would be highly implausible to see even more wind installations than that.

By the way, it does not seem quite as daunting if you factor in the very different densities of highway systems and wind farms: individual turbines are typically spaced about 10 rotor diameters apart (some studies say 15 would be most efficient), and with rotor diameters having passed 100m long ago, creeping up to a 1/10th mile, that leaves us with about a mile between turbines (assuming that rotor sizes increase is slowing down). With your generous 1/10th mile wide highway width assumption, area equivalence would be at one turbine each ten miles, 100 times area equivalence would be one turbine for every 1/10th mile of interstate. That would be definitely huge and nothing you could build in a singular focused effort, but it sounds far less inconceivable than the initial "100 times the interstate".

Actually the places where wind is the strongest, (New Mexico, parts of West Texas, and everything directly above that in middle America) there is significant land space and not much else. Population density is all less than 10 people per sq mile and large chunks 0 people per sq mile. The people who own the ranches there absolutely love wind because it’s an additional revenue stream and the local towns are being reinvigorated due to additional revenue from the energy companies and more jobs. We need around 25% from Wind and 3% of America where there’s really not much else not even farms works out well.

For solar, the best place in North America is the Mojave Desert which also has wide open space and no population.

No human population does not imply no wildlife. Wind and solar farms represent significant intrusions into wildland, that should be studied. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few positives and negatives of desert energy development. But it shouldnt be the same way we treat fossil fuels, that out of sight is out of mind.

Wind farm area is inflated due to all that empty space that is required between turbines.

And being far from trees and buildings.

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