This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Let's do personal wind and solar as well, it doesn't have to be the huge utilities doing it.
Widespread personal installations won't be sustainable in most situations. Instead, we should be working to create microgrids for higher resiliency and more efficient electricity transmission. While we're at it, geothermal heat pumps should be installed in a similar microgrid method for more efficient energy consumption
Widespread personal installations won’t be sustainable in most situations.
Why do you think that?
As I understand it, the efficiency of a wind turbine increases with blade size, so multiple smaller personal wind turbines are less efficient than fewer, larger turbines that serve a neighbourhood, as well as costing much more and using more overall resources.
It makes grid planing an absolut nightmare. We need to overbuild by a lot so a few days with less wind and sun doesn't lead to blackouts. Big windparks can be turned off reliably if there is too much energy produced, but the same can't be said for personal installations.
While it's possible to disconnect personal solar cells from the grid by increasing the frequency a bit, you can't just do that if the village is still connected to the entire grid. You first have to switch the whole village manually into island mode. Not to mention that a lot of times they don't restart automatically.
You can store energy, it's not a use it and lose it situation. EVs do this. On your second point, things that are absolutely necessary like you're refrigerator, could be on the grid but everything else isn't or it's a mix or hybrid.
Also, why is everyone only talking about what's on the market? Americans are extremely inventive, there are ways to add personal power in that could be hybrid and smart so you could control all that. You wouldn't have to make it an island but readjust your wiring to handle both. How are Europeans doing it?
I find both solar panels and wind turbines to be quite beautiful and aesthetic when done at least half well. However turbines do have its issues with noise and shadows so I definitely wouldn't want one close by.
My in-laws had a neighbor with a turbine for years and it could get really loud on a windy day. That said if I have to choose between coal and a little noise, I’d still choose the noise.
I'm shocked people are fine with clean windmills and solar panels near their home and not dirty coal plants. If anything seeing clean energy just makes you think of a rich neighborhood just like a Tesla would.
Solar Plants were always the most expensive option in Sim City. Coal was the cheapest. It's been engrained in us since our childhood.
I'm amazed anybody is against solar at all, it's the least obtrusive energy regardless of anything else. I'm genuinely happy to see wind power but I also respect people who feel it's a necessary eyesore, as that's basically taste, but who has ever seen a solar panel and been unhappy without the person being a crazy radicalised person who isn't taken seriously anyway.
Also Sim City is old, maybe those costs were more true back then? Either way I think people are generally learning that green energy can be more cost effective now.
But solar energy sucks up the sun! /s
People in the USA* pretty big detail to leave out of the title, this isn't a global study.
I'm not from there but I wouldn't have any problem with such installations as long as they're done tastefully, so as to not affect the beauty of the land any more than what's essential. Renewables are the way forward after all!
HOAs still place restrictions unfortunately. Perhaps not an outright ban in most places, but limited installations and possibly in not the best place on the house for solar production.
HOAs existing should be illegal
They make sense in communities with shared facilities (pool, playgrounds, walls, roofs, or whatever) and common areas so that everyone helps maintain things. The list of what they get away with should be really, super limited though.
in concept they make sense but 99.999999% of the time people use them as a way to power trip
it's like what happened with communism
seems like it'd work in concept but the people fuck it up
that's why it will never work
HOA officers and board members should be given the option of abdication or guillotine.
This means little. People always say they are okay with it, in the abstract. Then when it's time to get specific and build an actual wind or solar farm near them, suddenly it's a big nuisance, harmful to the local ecology, etc.
A solar farm tried to go up near my S/O's grandpa. I never realized how some people turn into such awful NIMBYs as soon as you try to do something near their property.
Exactly. Every time a new windmill goes up in a residential area around here, there are protests and complaints about the noise, the repetitive shadow, the view, etc.
Those sound like legitimate complaints. I’d be pissed if the house that I bought ended up a much, much less pleasant place to live because of a 3rd party.
Windmills don’t belong in residential areas, just as coal power plants don’t, and solar farms in residential areas just seems like a waste of space.
See there's something interesting in this and every time an article like this comes up it always makes me think about this.
There is a wind farm going to be constructed near where I live, they send out a bunch of letters telling everybody that we were going to build the wind farm and then that was it. There's been no public consultation if you had an objection you could email them but I'm not sure what that would do. Perhaps they would hold a consultation if anybody had objected, but nobody has.
This is the way to do it, public consultations are ridiculous, they just allow NIMBY idiots the opportunity to mess things up for everyone else. If it's got the proper permits, and the proper environmental investigations have already been conducted, why is it any business of the locals, it's not like it's going to cause more traffic.
Interesting. In my country nobody wants to live next to windmills (I'm from the Netherlands). The sound and even the constant shadows falling over your house is said to be causing mental health issues.
Mind you, The Netherlands is a very densly populated country.
I'd say about 30% has solar on their roof though.
E: here's a research that had been done by our government: It seems mostly in English, for those that want to read it.
https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/2020-0150.pdf
Conclusion seems to be that it cannot be said for certain that the sound of windmills are the sole reason for sleeplessness and mental health problems.
There's been a German study and please don't ask me to find the pdf but the basic comparison was between comparable installations in the north and in the east, major difference between those categories being whether they were owned by a local citizen coop or a big company from whoknowswhere.
Long story short: If the blade swooshing sounds like "cha-ching" it actually lulls people to sleep, while easterners have rather negative experience with companies from whoknowswhere coming in and suddenly owning stuff. The average is propbably somewhere in the middle, "eh not as nice like a river but way better than a highway in the distance", focussing only on the sound, not associations with it.
As to shadowing though yes that can definitely be nasty. Luckily we have the science necessary to predict where the sun will be and can build the windmills such that moving shadow don't hit homes at all, or only for a minute a couple of days a year or such.
I love driving by a wind farm. The wind turbines make me feel really peaceful.
Not sure if I wanna live next to a wind farm, but solar is 100% okay
I came across a company called Flower Turbines, they sell tulip-shaped wind turbines. They look nice and hopefully would do well on the energy front. They claim that their turbines start producing energy with just a touch over 1 mph winds.
It looks like it would be a cute way to generate clean energy.
All the Hicks out here in upstate NY defeated two of them.. one was a wind turbine, the other was a grid battery facility.. Which they justified by saying it would start a fire.. These were Lithium iron phosphate..
Wouldn't want a solar farm anywhere I wouldn't want a giant warehouse either. You probably wouldn't put a warehouse in the middle of residential neighborhood anyways so I don't think that's an issue. Plenty of places to put those where people don't need to be inconvenienced by them.
Windmills on the other hand I think are cool as fuck. I've never actually stood right next to one but people say they're a bit noisy, so while I might not want one on my yard I sure wouldn't mind seeing them from the window.
I don't see why anyone would care about a solar farm. Maybe they have a raging dislike of the aesthetic or something, but whatever.
Wind turbines, on the other hand, have at least two significant non-aesthetic issues:
Noise. This one doesn't matter if it's far enough away, but I could see it being a problem if you're on top of them.
Flashing. This was not something that I'd thought about until I read an article that was quoting people who were really upset about it, but it's actually an interesting problem. You tend to put wind turbines on ridgelines. The problem is that this also means that they cast enormous shadows when the sun is coming up/down. And the shadows that they cast are moving and flash at a rate determined by the rotational speed of the turbine. It's apparently extremely obnoxious if you're in the path of the shadow.
I'd be interested to know how many people who say nope to Wind and Solar are just fine with wood burning and chimneys. Which cause the usual problems of breathing burning things, such as death.
That's kind of moot for wind though, since most residential neighbourhoods are apparently pretty shit for that. Something to do with the wind being more turbulent because of all the buildings.
Wind power is best at sea, or maybe in the open countryside (where it's ugly, but no worse than the massive coal power station I've been able to see since I was born).
Solar? Well some of us lucky enough to live in the right places, or have a roof slanting in the right direction already have that. (Not sure why we're still building houses facing all sorts of directions with a traditional pointed roof, when we can face them all the same way with a larger, south/north facing section for optimal solar panel placement)
I doubt a solar farm would bother that many people, they're low to the ground and have no moving parts. Yeah, ugly I guess, but so are farmer's fields.
