People Are Okay With Wind & Solar Installations In Their Neighborhoods, Studies Say::More neighborhoods than ever are accepting the role of solar and wind power installations near their homes and towns.
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!
I belive nuclear and some day fusion is the real way forward.
Then you have been misled. The oil and gas industries have a long history of spreading misinformation and creating doubt in order to prolong their profits.
Nuclear helps them do that because it prevents funding from going towards renewables. Anything that does that is not helping.
Nuclear could be useful in future but we need renewables NOW. Any and all funding and resources that can be used to accelerate renewable energy generation, must be directed that way. Otherwise it is detrimental, to renewables, to the environment and ultimately to all of us.
We need renewable energy now. Don’t accept delays, fight for the right of humanity to have a future.
Nuclear fission is at a dead end. Long history of going overbudget and overschedule. SMRs are several years away from being proven, if they fullfill their promise at all; fission is littered with The Next Big Thing that ended up being a fart in the wind.
Fortunately, it’s also unnecessary at this point. Getting to 95% solar/wind/storage is a very achievable goal compared to getting to 100%, and that would be huge.
getting to 100% nuclear would be huge too
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.
You do understand that huge swathes of ‘residential’ area aren’t in cities, right? Like rural areas still exist…
Yes, and I still believe that if something is dense enough to be considered residential (be it suburbs or not) shouldn’t have wind turbines.
Truly rural areas are different and should be treated differently. But when referencing “residential” the default is still somewhat densely packed, even if it’s not fully urban.
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.
Totally unrelated, but which theoretical field would the science of knowing where the shadow falls be? As in, if you can only hire one scholar to do the plans?
I would say astronomy or geography, but I guess a scholar of photon physics might work?
The sun’s position is astronomy the rest is engineering. I guess if you want to go really fancy you could involve horology.
I love driving by a wind farm. The wind turbines make me feel really peaceful.
Until populism gets a beef with it and begins appealing to the crazies, who will happily egg and throw paint bombs solar panels. But at least we haven’t reached that point in the timeline yet.
please don’t give them ideas
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…
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Fuck people. Fuck it all. We don’t get to be ok as the world burns so some ass clown gets a mega yacht
