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It's a pretty solarpunk fact that small, distributed wind turbines use steel more efficiently than big centralised ones (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)

submitted 3 months ago by frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml to c/energy@slrpnk.net

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The most steel-intensive power source – by far – is the modern wind turbine. The steel intensity of a wind turbine depends on its size. A single, large wind turbine requires significantly more steel per megawatt of installed power than two smaller wind turbines.

The link is from the-most-solarpunk-website and is mostly about steel in general, but I wanted to pull out that one fact.

Wind and solar energy are not "good for the environment"; they pollute; it's just that we hope they pollute less than the alternative. One major reason they pollute is because they require a lot of steel to build. But the household-scale or village-scale ones use less

de Decker is citing: Topham, Eva, et al. “Recycling offshore wind farms at decommissioning stage.” Energy policy 129 (2019): 698-709.

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[–] hof@natur.23.nu 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That‘s interesting. My understanding was that wind speed/force rises exponentially with heigth and so a 150 high turbine is much more powerful than a 50 m high turbine - and not only 3 times as powerful, as one expects.

[–] frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

The exponential relationship is between speed and energy, rather than height and speed.