Conquer Club

Discuss.

Holy shit you serious PS?

Thats your angle on Wind generation?

I can give you a million far better ones if you like.

(seriously bird strike is both very rare and easily mitigatable).

My angle is that wind generation sounds good, but we have to burn a lot of coal to convert into electricity to power them. I was surprised when I first learned how much electricity they take to run, I thought the wind was supposed to do most of the work.

I'm sure there are advancements being made and wind energy will become more and more efficient, and I'm glad that renewables are accounting for a bigger and bigger percentage of our energy consumption portfolio. I don't like what happens to the birds though.

My pictures were only semi-serious, just playing a pic thing with Mets (if he doesn't have me foed )

Wind generation technology is actually pretty mature. They dont take any power to keep going, what they take is a lot of upfront steel, and steel takes energy to make. They are highly capitalised investment, meaning that they cost a shitload to get em in the ground, but once they are going they produce electricity at nearly zero cost.

The main issue with wind generation is they are not currently economically competitive with other forms of generation (for most of the world, fun fact: New Zealand is a windy shithole and thus we have wind farms that are independently economically viable). So to get wind farms installed governments all around the world have been subsiding investment into wind generation on the basis of being renewable (done via what is called feed in tariffs; the government pays the wind farm owner a nice little fee for every MWh they send into the grid).

This subsidisation is one of the lesser issues contributing to the faltering European economy (still dont know how Germany hasnt gone bust on its energy subsidisation - their windfarms literally stand still most of the time).

In principle I think the subsidies are a good idea as I do believe there are some externalities that are not being considered adequately by generation companies. However I also think most juristrictions have gone waaaay overboard...

WHOOPS! Gee, good luck getting rid of those subsidies too. TOO MANY JOBS ARE AT RISK.


Anyway!

My favourite is the distributed generation subsidies in the UK (like solar panels on your roof n shit). Theres a whole industry dedicated to milking that beast.

Lootifer wrote:My favourite is the distributed generation subsidies in the UK (like solar panels on your roof n shit). Theres a whole industry dedicated to milking that beast.

My other favorite was when China was subsidizing its solar panel industry, which was selling solar panels to American households. A couple of years later, the US government hit the American buyers with a retroactive tariff (tax) of around... something ridiculous, like 25% or so.

I mean, if we want cleaner energy, yet the USG puts up tariffs against sources of cleaner (and cheaper) energy, then... sigh. Governments, nationalism, and idiots can really be counter-productive.