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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

Just some context so people understand this better: This is not an indication of some "back to coal" trend.

Wind has overtaken coal for the first time last year. Now for a few months the situation is back to coal as the most important source. These things obviously fluctuate and thus it's not a linear trend, but the overall trend is still that renewables are growing and coal is in decline.

(And to be sure I'm not misunderstood: That doesn't change the fact that the high coal use in Germany is a big problem and the wind buildout is far too slow.)

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There is also the problem that regulation for building wind turbines got much stricter. In a lot of places where wind turbines were previously built, it is no longer permitted to do so.

Those turbines usually get replaced after 20 years when subsidies run out and it's no longer economical to operate them. The new regulations will lead to a net negative in wind installations in the upcoming years.

I'm confused. I thought wind turbines are relatively cheap to operate. You have an initial investment to build them and then some amount of maintainance, but certainly on land that's not very expensive.

With subsidies, it can make sense to replace wind turbines early and collect new subsidies for a new one.

However, I don't understand why you would take existing ones down is the subsidie stops? That suggests that they operating at a loss even when the wind turbines is already written off.

Transmission or no transmission is a huge difference in maintenance cost. And land locations south of Hannover are poor conditions for wind turbines generally, with few exceptions. In those cases, earnings can be scarce and things can get uneconomical.

We're talking about 20 year old wind turbines. That's the stone age of wind turbine development.

But many of these would even be able to produce electricity that could be sold, but the bureaucracy of doing so is complicated. There was some discussion about creating solutions for those and make it easier for them to sell their electricity, but it didn't happen.

But in any case: It would be better to replace those old turbines with modern ones, though this is often not allowed...

You still have to maintain the existing turbines.

Maintaining 20 year old hardware that's exposed to the forces of nature quickly costs more than building something new in the same place. In particular when the 20 year old hardware has been from the beginning of a time of extensive R&D, so that new parts for these old models might be hard and expensive to get because all the cost-efficient producers are already on to the new stuff.

Try maintaining a 10 year old server (10 years instead of 20 to account for significantly more physical wear out in the open) without replacing the mainboard, CPU, RAM and disks with newer models. Same issue: industrial production moved on. The main difference is that nobody cares if you replace a 1U server with a newer 1U server.

Ah, it seems that most many wind turbines have a design lifetime of 20 years.

I guess that living in a country with many wind mills that are hundreds of years old, made me assume that a wind turbine would also have a technical life of more than two decades.

Depends on what you want the wind mill to do for you: slow and steady pumping water up a dike exerts somewhat less force on all the materials than trying to maximize electric output you get out of each rotation.

Also, there's no several 100% efficiency increase in upgrading a wind mill, so the parts are probably still compatible...

If you feel a whole wind mill like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Gekroonde_Poelenburg shake when it is in operation, then that is very far from a slow and steady operation. In fact, most wind turbines feel far more 'slow and steady'. This one is not very old, only 150 years.

This one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Otter,_Amsterdam) is almost 400 years old. But I have not been in it.

I assumed that with a 20 year old wind turbine, the money you make from the electricity it produces would be more than maintainance costs. Even if better turbines exist, if you can't build a new one in the same place, it might make sense to keep it running.

Of course, if the maintainance costs are indeed high enough that you don't make any money, then it make sense to take it down.

No it won't. These will easily be compensated by offshore wind parks. It makes no sense to build wind turbines near people's homes who then will be affected by noise and the strobo effect.

There simply isn't enough space in the German parts of the north and baltic sea to build enough wind energy. Germany will definitely need both on- and offshore.

Turbines (any distance) are _much_ quieter than living within 30km of an airport. Didn't stop https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Verkehrsflugh%C3%A4f... from happening. Priorities...

But they create a constant low frequency noise, which travels very long distances. They emit noise even during nighttime, when airports in Germany are closed.

There also is a reason why single frequency noise is considered more of a disturbance than random white noise with the same sound pressure.

In terms of quantity and considerations that is taken when building an air port vs building an wind farm, the two are not very comparable. If I wanted to find a guideline in how much noise is acceptable I would look towards highways and road noise. We know the negative health impact of high ways and road, and the required work needed to dampen the noise down to acceptable levels through noise walls and building materials. The same noise regulations should be applied to wind farms.

> noise walls and building materials

That's why I brought up airports: noise walls work for ground level noise emission, airports and wind turbines are higher than that.

> The same noise regulations should be applied to wind farms

Good news: A newer wind turbine is usually quieter than older models. Let's upgrade existing turbines to models of the same size that produce more energy and less noise, and are vendor supported. win-win-win!

Bad news: Distance regulations don't care.

These regulations are a political hit job.

No, the overall trend is : wind farms will build back (destroyed) and it is harder to build new ones, thanks to new laws.

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