Amazon backs large-scale wind farm | Hacker News Reader

Amazon backs large-scale wind farm

newsobserver.com

62 pointsprostoalex14 comments

(speaking as a local) This is hugely important good news for renewable energy in North Carolina. Not so much for the technology itself -- as stated, this is a Spanish developer contracted to install the farm -- but in that it further cements NC as a leader in renewable power generation projects and the media coverage is directly translating into consumer interest. Just last week I found a flyer in my mailbox advertising a free viability assessment by NC Solar Now (http://www.ncsolarnow.com). This isn't novel in California, but it is extraordinary in the Southeast. I, for one, and psyched, and I hope this wind farm succeeds.

It truly is a continuation of the momentum we've already seen here over the past few years, as both Apple & Google build data centers in the state, and both of them power them predominantly using solar farms.

"The $400 million energy project will be built by Spanish wind farm developer Iberdrola Renewables"

I'm not familiar with the market but it's telling that a European company was selected.

"conflicts that have sunk proposed wind farms in the past: widespread opposition in tourist areas, interference with military flight paths and the potential for bird kills in seasonal migration routes."

The bird-kill issue is a concern. I'm sure military flight path issues are hard to avoid in North Carolina. But the tourism thing I don't really understand.

I live in a region with a lot of wind farms, and compared to similar farmland in the region not being used for wind power production, driving through areas filled with windmills is actually quite beautiful and very visually interesting, as your perspective gradually changes against the slowly rotating turbines.

One would think, though, that the obvious solution to most of these concerns, as well as for round-the-clock productivity, would lead us to build a ton of off-shore wind farms. And yet IIRC, we haven't built any in the US (correct me if I'm wrong about that), despite having one of the longest coastlines of any country.

I am still waiting for someone to avoid building a normal building from bird kill concerns. Until then, it really seems like FUD.

Edit: And yes glass buildings do actually kill millions of birds / year. It's just not considered an issue as there are a lot of birds out there.

I can't find the source, but my understand is that building offshore is much more expensive and difficult than on shore.

If that's true (seems like it would be), I'd think the long-term advantage off an offshore wind farm is still advantageous. In addition to the other reasons mentioned above, am I making this up or is there generally much greater wind activity over uninterrupted water (i.e. offshore) than on land? Perhaps the benefits would outweigh the costs in the long run.

Cats, tall buildings, cars, and fracking kill far more birds than windmills do. And I don't understand the military radar objection. If your radar can't tell the difference between a windmill farm and an approaching squadron of hostiles, the problem is in the radar, not the windmill.

Off-shore is indeed much more expensive than on-shore, but also more reliable.

It's really an issue of capital cost and ramp-up time.

When you say more reliable are you talking about the capacity factor?

I would think maintenance costs would be higher in the sea air.

Construction costs are much higher. Maintenance costs can be minimised with conservative design. But if something goes wrong, but it always costs more to get a crane on a boat a few miles off the coast than it does to drive a crane to an onshore location.

The capacity factor for offshore is more likely to be in the 45-55% range than in the 25-40% range for onshore - partly because the turbines can be bigger, and partly because it's windier offshore.

To some extent capacity factor is a design decision that trades off maintenance and capital costs against output.

But funding models for wind are often quite conservative, so it's not so unusual for farms to overperform.

Number of birds killed per year by wind farms: 368 000

Number of birds killed/year in the USA by cats: 3 700 000 000

Four orders of magnitude.

> Number of birds killed/year in the USA by cats: 3 700 000 000

If there are 74MM cats[1] in the United States, that figures out to about 50 birds per cat every year. Seems high to me.

BUT, if you add in the 50MM feral cats[2] as well, then the per-cat number is 30. Still seems high, but would make more sense if feral cats are disproportionately doing the killing (e.g. if feral cats kill 60 birds per year, and domestic cats kill 9)

The source for 3.7B[3] seems to actually be a range (1.4 - 3.7), and also estimates a cat population somewhere between 114MM and 164MM.

And at the end of all this verification, your point still stands, and it's still four orders of magnitude more. It also makes me happy that my past cats didn't decide to make a "present" out of every single kill.

[1] https://www.avma.org/KB/Resources/Statistics/Pages/Market-re...

[2] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/6/us-is-overru...

[3] http://phys.org/news/2013-01-cats-billions-birds-mammals.htm...

Still a dumb FUD, too say windmills are killing birds? What about these monstrounous Buildings with lots of Windows? I mean some buildings gets some pictures at their windows so that birds think that there are bigger birds which could kill them, so they don't fly near that. Still lots of birds die at those windows.

I wonder if spot instance pricing could be tied to excess power availability? Could be a good way to increase power usage when their is high wind resource and low usage.

Of course supply and demand determine the price on any electricity market.

Amazon, the utility?

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