Hacker News Reader

Comment by internet_points | Hacker News Reader

does that number take into account the area of nature paved to create roads for transporting those huge masts?

Because they require so little, infrequent, maintenance it makes very little sense to pave asphalt roads to wind tower locations.

For the vast majority of wind farms, dirt or gravel roads connect masts to pre-existing infrastructure.

The largest wind farm in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rPjUGSTN979dfUoDA

The largest wind farm in Europe is the Markbygden Wind Farm: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ETVeMXpf1uPieTct8

Dirt and gravel roads.

I'm not saying that there have never been roads paved to create wind farms.

I am saying that the number of roads that have paved is so small that it is irrelevant.

Can't speak for the US, but that is not the case in Norway.

There have been massive protests due to the amount of nature destroyed. There are some before-after sliders on

https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/dokumentar/her-er-norges-s...

(scroll around for "wind") that give an indication, although the most striking difference is experience by the people who used to go for hikes in remote places where there are now immense wind parks. The wind companies love building them up in the previously-untouched mountain regions since I guess height = more power, also less NIMBY neighbours.

https://www.google.no/maps/place/Buheii/@58.6554134,6.887061... had zero roads a decade ago, now it's all roads. And with roads come traffic and people and cabins and tourism and more roads.

Now they're saying we need more wind parks for AI data centers (a few years ago it was for crypto). We're tearing down nature so we can keep growing our energy use while staying "green".

looking at the wind farm from a certain elevation reminds me of west texas where each of the dots is a gas well instead of a turbine. then my brain went hard left and imagined the wind turbines being used to pump gas in some insane reason

As weird as it may sound, but it is more efficient to refine crude oil with renewable energy, because it means that you get more usable gasoline, diesel, etc as the end product. The reason is that the refinery output is easier to store.

Why should it? We already have all those roads as they were built for all our other transport needs and have plenty of spare capacity for the few wind turbines (1 every 5 minutes is not much use on a modern road) we are building.

Unless you are talking about the last 100 meters - but as the other reply pointed out, those are not roads. Most of the ones I've seen are grass - the roads are used so little we don't need gravel and they don't even turn into dirt.

In Europe roads can be very narrow and windy. You need to transport very large blades, towers, cranes which can require modification to the roads and large tracks. And large schemes can have massive transformers which are heavy and require long vehicles to transport. You might have to drive a thirty mile circuitous route avoiding weak bridges from a barge moored at a river or harbour. And whilst you could scrub out the tracks once built developers probably don't want to. It makes it easier to bring in equipment and parts if necessary. And provides easy access to the cables that will probably be run under the tracks.

There was some plan to build an airplane that could deliver parts. Probably useless in Europe but could work in less dense places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com