Wyoming and federal officials formally kicked off construction Tuesday of a massive transmission line project to export wind power from Wyoming to southern California
Theory of #RenewableEnergy is that it’s very low surface power density, and the practice is that because of this, it occupies vast amounts of one non-renewable resource that everyone forgets about: land surface. In terms of surface power density PV outputs 6.63 W/m2, wind power 1.84 W/m2. Nuclear - 240.81 W/m2. That means for one 1 W of power you need to allocate 120x more land for wind than nuclear, and that is not only for the space occupied by the actual plant but everything: mining, manufacturing, operations, decommissioning.
Some people will argue that utility-scale renewables are not good indeed, but we should stick to decentralised rooftop or wall PV installations. Except that decentralisation requires vast redundancy of infrastructure (cabling, inverters), much lower efficiency, which results in 4x higher production cost (LCOE) per kWh, thus nullifying the claimed lower cost of renewables.
Engineers have been trying to get that message to the broad public long ago: a PV farm or wind turbine look really nice at distance. But an utility-scale renewables power plant is what any other power plant is: a huge, industrial compound, installed on steel and concrete foundation interfering with the land it occupies.
Wind farm is not just the towers. The towers need to be built, which requires first making roads good enough for heavy equipment. Each tower is a massive construction made of concrete and steel 1st picture of tower foot alone). It’s also a huge machine that needs to be serviced, for example replacing 400 liters of gearbox oil (2nd photo of a collapsed gearbox with oil spilled in the field), so the roads need to be maintained (3rd photo gives you an idea of the road network density).
They also need to be connected by high-voltage cabling. An additional complication is that wind farms make sense where well, it’s windy, so usually elevated places such as hills.
This creates a very tangible competition between nature conservation and wind farms, which was one of the major factors preventing on-shore wind expansion in German, France, Norway and UK. Once of the most notable examples was cutting 14 millions of trees to make space for a wind farm in Scotland a few years ago:
It is so incredibly, irritatingly windy in #Kitchener especially in the concrete canyons downtown (you don't get a pass either #Waterloo :/) Given the whole innovation spiel we love to tell ourselves so much, why aren't we some hub of in-city wind-based technology? Let's at least put this frigging annoyance to work for us.
Build begins on Wyoming-to-California power line amid growing wind power concern (abcnews.go.com)
Wyoming and federal officials formally kicked off construction Tuesday of a massive transmission line project to export wind power from Wyoming to southern California