Coming weeks the largest windturbine in the world will be installed in Rotterdam for a 4 year test phase on land. It will be 260 meters high with 107 meter long blades, and be capable of providing 16000 homes' worth of electricity to the grid per year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu0RqylJdQo


Just thought it would be interesting to share.

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That is cool and I hope it ends up working out. Part of me though is skeptical with wind technology. Some of the research I've seen on it suggests they aren't as good for the enviorment as they were initially pitched to be. I'm not a big fan of millions of dead birds.

I wish someone would get fusion working already. That would be sort of the holy grail of energy sources. Perhaps thorium for the shorter term solution.

Morphy wrote on Aug 16^th, 2019 at 3:35pm:

That is cool and I hope it ends up working out. Part of me though is skeptical with wind technology. Some of the research I've seen on it suggests they aren't as good for the enviorment as they were initially pitched to be. I'm not a big fan of millions of dead birds. I wish someone would get fusion working already. That would be sort of the holy grail of energy sources. Perhaps thorium for the shorter term solution.

Hundreds of millions of birds if not billions are killed globally by car traffic, in numbers that far exceed anything windturbines will ever reach. For example, windturbines kill about 40000 to 50000 birds a year in the Netherlands alone. Dutch car traffic kills about 2 to 8 million birds a year alone.


We have fusion working for us already. God did so for us, in the sun  :) Our personal nuclear reactor, on a safe distance.

Imagine all of the Windmill Cancer it will cause.

AncientCraftwork wrote on Aug 16^th, 2019 at 3:47pm:

Morphy wrote on Aug 16th, 2019 at 3:35pm: That is cool and I hope it ends up working out. Part of me though is skeptical with wind technology. Some of the research I've seen on it suggests they aren't as good for the enviorment as they were initially pitched to be. I'm not a big fan of millions of dead birds. I wish someone would get fusion working already. That would be sort of the holy grail of energy sources. Perhaps thorium for the shorter term solution. Hundreds of millions of birds if not billions are killed globally by car traffic, in numbers that far exceed anything windturbines will ever reach. For example, windturbines kill about 40000 to 50000 birds a year in the Netherlands alone. Dutch car traffic kills about 2 to 8 million birds a year alone. We have fusion working for us already. God did so for us, in the sun  :) Our personal nuclear reactor, on a safe distance.

Right. I get that. And I'm all for renewable energy. Nature is one of my *favorite"* things. I am far from advocating coal or oil. But saying just because one thing kills more than another does not automatically mean we should accept it without looking at the costs. We can weigh all the pros and cons right? No harm in that?

There's a YouTube channel called Thoughty2 that does some interesting videos on this subject.

An interesting one to me would be tidal power. It's very predictable so it would not suffer as many of the problems solar and wind.

the problem with the giant windturbines is that cost and matertials against electricity generated - they just don't balance out.

The smaller vertical ones with the vertical blades are actually more efficient and cost effective.

That said, from an aesthetic point of view I LOVE the huge wind turbines !
They just make no sense economically. :-(

Morphy wrote on Aug 16^th, 2019 at 6:23pm:

An interesting one to me would be tidal power. It's very predictable so it would not suffer as many of the problems solar and wind.

   Tidal power is a viable source of practically unlimited, pollution free energy that's been almost completely ignored.

Curious Aardvark wrote on Aug 17^th, 2019 at 7:46am:

the problem with the giant windturbines is that cost and matertials against electricity generated - they just don't balance out. The smaller vertical ones with the vertical blades are actually more efficient and cost effective. That said, from an aesthetic point of view I LOVE the huge wind turbines ! They just make no sense economically. :-(

Would the energy used to construct, maintain and decommission a 12 mW turbine be more than 1340 GWh of electricity? Because that would be its gross 20 year energy production.

Rat Man wrote on Aug 17^th, 2019 at 1:01pm:

Morphy wrote on Aug 16th, 2019 at 6:23pm: An interesting one to me would be tidal power. It's very predictable so it would not suffer as many of the problems solar and wind.    Tidal power is a viable source of practically unlimited, pollution free energy that's been almost completely ignored.

Yes! Thank you! And unlike wind it's predictable and consistent. And many major cities are located on coasts. And it would seem so much easier to cage off a large section for a tidal plant to keep sea life out than to find a way to stop killing large amounts of large migratory raptors and other species that die to turbines.

I do like wind turbines in theory I just think until battery technology and the destruction of wildlife is figured out it's not my favorite solution to the problem. There's hope in our future though as we are at least making the effort to get away from fossil fuels.

@Jauke - Speaking of fusion, I believe there's some rather large fusion reactors in the process of being built. As in, really large. Hopefully we can get the problems surrounding that fixed and have our own mini sun's here on Earth.