Why the Dutch oppose windmills

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21656730-wind-energy-once-powered-netherlands-not-anymore-dutch-quixote?fsrc=nlw%7Chig%7C2-07-2015%7CNA

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

22 57 11 years ago

economist.com

paublyrne2• 11 years ago

I often (maybe once a month) buy the Economist in print, because it is a good read, whether or not you agree with all their opinions, and is genuinely global in its scope. I once had a print subscription but didn't have time read an issue each week.

I don't have an online subscription now, which makes Hacker News submissions for Economist articles are a little problematic.

I wouldn't mind knowing why the Dutch oppose windmills.

nederdirk• 11 years ago

Bottom line (according to the article): The Netherlands is quite densely populated, so every wind turbine is bound to be in someone's backyard. Last paragraph explains that more than 70% of the population is in favor of more wind energy, but many people don't like the face of large windmill parks.

creshal• 11 years ago

The area is also quite flat, so they're visible from miles away and stick out like sore thumbs. Personally I don't mind – I grew up near the Dutch border, our village was surrounded with windmills in the early 00s, can't say it ever bothered me, even though they were constantly in view (and while not in our backyard, some were quite close).

paublyrne2• 11 years ago

Thanks.

tikumo• 11 years ago

As a dutch guy, i can agree with this. Lots of people complain about the flickering you get from windmills for example. Only one province is full of windmills, because it is mainly agriculture, cows and flowers, it is called Flevoland and it is the piece of land we gained from "poldering", the old South "sea" (it was named Zuiderzee) we've made into land..

krzyk2• 11 years ago

Strange, that they call it densely populated, it's quite average for a European country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europea...

stinos2• 11 years ago

Sure it is densely populated, but doesn't the major part of that density reside in cities and villages, while once you get outside of those there are vast amounts of land with only some farms?? As such, are they really always in one's backyard (if you don't consider a farmer's land far far away from the actual farm as a backyard)?

Actually I think wobbleblob's reason (because they scare birds and pollute the horizon) is a more prominent reason, I find the Netherlands always quite pretty in comparision with surrounding countries so I'd understand people are reluctant to change that much. Nicer, more colourful buildings, nicer gardens, ... then again it's also a bit boring to me due to being quite flat.

dimitar2• 11 years ago

Just Google the headline, results from search engines bypass the pay-wall.

tedks• 11 years ago

Paywalls are often done with cookies, so right clicking and opening in private browsing mode will get past them. It worked for me.

shiggerino3• 11 years ago

The wind turbine scam is not that much better than the solar roadways scam. It's a huge nuisance, expense and environmental impact for very little power.

The only reasonable choice is nuclear power.

masklinn3• 11 years ago

Nuclear has great power density and is a much better option than gas or coal as far as I'm concerned, but it remains a temporary patch, it is not a renewable resource.

And it's not like a nuclear plant is cheap (oh boy is it not), nuisance-free (you can still use an onshore windfarm's land for e.g. pasture) or without environmental impact (ignoring seashore nukes which have their own extra risks, rivershore plants need regulation to avoid overheating downriver and they make the land they're on unusable long after their removal, and obviously because of the amount of cooling the average-sized nuclear plant requires you can't just plop them anywhere you want).

SMRs might be an improvement to some of the drawbacks, but they don't currently exist and we don't have >half a century of experience with them and they're not quite maintenance free (most designs seem to plan refueling every 1 to 5 years). Also "small" is relative, though it helps that you can partially bury the assembly.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

I disagree with all that. Having millennia of Thorium available is essentially renewable, at least for this civilization. The cost history of nuclear could change completely with new reactors that don't suffer from meltdown etc. Nuclear can definitely be nuisance-free- build in underground silos where they're needed, and not serviced for decades. The existing windmills were fiction a decade ago. Its all in where you put the development money.

sjtrny• 11 years ago

Yeh they are such a nuisance. What with being located on farms or out at sea with no one around.

Get a grip.

shiggerino3• 11 years ago

Pro tip: there are people both on farms and at sea.

Also birds and bats that collide with the blades, many of which are endangered.

jacquesm8• 11 years ago

Why do you call wind turbines a scam? They work, they produce significant power, are clean and the machines built since 2000 have spectacular reliability.

The expense is lower per KWh produced over the lifetime of the machine than most other sources of power so I'm not sure where your 'huge expense' comes from (yes, they're expensive but you should not look at the up-front expense without looking at the total power produced over the lifetime of the machine multipled by the average price of a KWh over that time and then each and every windmill installed so far except for a very few that broke catastrophically and a lot of lessons were learned from those instances). The environmental impact is mostly in people's heads rather than something measurable (I should know, I have windmills within spitting distance from my house). Nuisance is a term that would require some explanation as well.

And each windmill may make 'little power' (though we now have machines capable of 8MW!), but in the aggregate they produce significant power.

If you feel the only reasonable choice is nuclear power then you've already made up your mind about this but as a windmill proponent I see a place for both, nuclear (pebble bed, not old style rod reactors) or natural gas for baseline, wind and solar for when it's available.

shiggerino3• 11 years ago

8MW sounds nice, but a nuclear power plant will easily have 4 orders of magnitude more power output for the same visual impact, and that's around the clock, whether the wind blows or not.

I wouldn't dismiss rod reactors outright, but developing new technology to improve safety and fuel efficiency should of course be a priority. Especially since weapons plutonium production isn't a priority as it was when conventional reactors were designed.

masklinn3• 11 years ago

And each windmill may make 'little power' (though we now have machines capable of 8MW!), but in the aggregate they produce significant power.

Sway and AMSC have 10MW turbines (respectively ST10 and SeaTitan)

Still, you've got to compare that with a modern nuclear reactor producing ~1400MWe, and account for nuclear plants having multiple reactors. While hydro beats all in power per plant you still need quite a lot of turbines to produce as much as a nuke (especially when you account for wind variations, so you generally need to overbuild on wind capacity to get the same annual generation).

Alta in Kern County (California) has 440 turbines and while its nameplate capacity rivals a single reactor (1360MWe) its capacity factor (ratio of actual production to nameplate capacity) is under 20% that of an average nuclear plant (at about 15%, Alta running at full capacity all year could theoretically produce ~11500 GWh, it effectively produces ~1700GWh; by comparison Palo Verde has a theoretical capacity of 34531GWh and according to wikipedia an effective yearly generation of 29250 GWh, an 85% capacity factor)

dev-da0• 11 years ago

Strawman fallacy without evidence and denial of pragmatic holistic mix of power generation sources. There is no perfect panacea power generation; each has its tradeoffs. Solar, geothermal, heat pump, tidal (sea life compatible, not underwater "windmills") and fission molten salt are all mostly good AFAWN. I personally don't like wind generators near bird and bat migratory and feeding paths, but I'm sure someone will develop solutions to prevent needless animal strike events. Deploying BWR/PWR plants as are currently designed is economic and community suicide (Fukahshima)... Taylor Smith's TED talk is actually quite brilliant on where practical fission needs to go (low pressure, higher temp, molten salt with scram basin underneath). Disclaimer: I used to work in the energy industry when nuclear was dying back in the late 1990's.

jacquesm8• 11 years ago

The bird strike issue seems to me to be vastly exaggerated, windmills are positioned as bird butchering machines with vast numbers of corpses lining their circumference.

In practice it rarely happens, I have windmills (large ones and smaller ones in significant numbers) within spitting distance from my house which also sits in the middle of one of the largest bird breeding grounds in the country. I have spent quite a bit of time at the base of the machines to look for evidence of birdstrikes but I haven't found more bird remains near the windmills than near other man made structures.

Of course I'm only one guy which happens to like rewewable energy technology so don't take my word for this.

There are some studies about this:

http://www.livescience.com/41644-wind-energy-threat-to-birds...

If anything my attempt at evidence collection indicates that the larger machines (which have a much larger swept area than the smaller ones) fare better in this respect because the rotors turn much more slowly, but the tips are still moving at very high speed (200 KM/h) and that's where the danger lies. Smaller machines rotate much faster and the whole disc area is a bad place for a bird to be.

Even so, anything we make (buildings, highways, windmills) affects wildlife and birds are killed by all of the above with the primary killer being the highways and the secondary one the buildings. Windmills do kill birds but they're a distant third.

Altay-• 11 years ago

Reasonable how? Nuclear power is insanely expensive and no private investor would fund a nuclear project without a myriad of government assistance in the form of insurance guarantees, subsidized loans, etc.

The time horizon for a nuclear plant alone makes them inconceivable as anything but government white elephant projects...

dimitar2• 11 years ago

My humble proposal to fix not-in-my-backyard - tax all local governments, give a tax break or even a subsidy to those who have windmills.

This by the way should be the rule for the EU as a whole - some countries are naturally better at producing renewable energy, others have nuclear plants or coal. The ones producing renewable energy should just export it so the ones that cannot or won't will be able to fill their quotas.

gbtw3• 11 years ago

I actually have 3 windmills in my back yard (the local industrial estate across the busy through-road)

You never hear them and hardly ever notice them once they are placed.

https://www.google.nl/maps/@52.037446,4.506723,3a,75y,90t/da... < is one of them.

Zoetermeer used to have 3 other windmills about 20 years ago, those were replaced with these.

Only thing i would like is to get cheaper power, that has not happened :|

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

The problem with renewable energy like wind is that it's not nearly as cheap or efficient as, say, coal power plants. That's the trade-off, really.

danmaz74• 11 years ago

For sure wind turbines are much less efficient than coal power plants at polluting the air. Apart from that, can you explain how could they be less "efficient", when they consume a free and renewable resource (ie, wind)?

jacquesm8• 11 years ago

I have 3 2MW+ machines a few hundred meters from my house and 10's of smaller ones (older models) a little further away. Total impact on day to day living: none.

I wouldn't mind it if they placed more windmills there either, it's not a densely populated area.

So, not all Dutch oppose windmills and renewables at this scale really do make an impact.

wobbleblob7• 11 years ago

I agree, I'm quite fond of them. People who claim windmills have no place in the Dutch landscape probably don't like tulips and clogs either.

teekert• 11 years ago

I know someone with a windmill close by, you hear it constantly and at a certain time during the day the sun shines on the house via the rotor, when it rotates it's like a cloud goes in front of and away from of the sun, at 1-3 Hz or so. It drives them crazy.

jacquesm8• 11 years ago

They must be extremely close to the machine and the suns path would have to intersect the blades 'just so' for this to happen.

I can see how this would be a very annoying thing to experience, do you know how many minutes per day this line-up causes the problem?

reycharles• 11 years ago

Here's a video I found of the flickering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbIe0iUtelQ

According to the video description the windmill is 1000 feet (304 m) away, and is 40 stories (132 m) tall. FWIW in Denmark windmills have to be at a distance from nearest (inhabited) building by least 4 times the height of the windmill (source: http://naturstyrelsen.dk/planlaegning/planlaegning-i-det-aab...).

This article <http://www.windpower.org/da/energipolitik_og_planlaegning/na... says that the windmills can cause shadows for up to 4-6 weeks a year. It is computed when this will happen and the windmills can be stopped for that period, although the law doesn't mention this.

I linked the Danish sources. You might want to put it through google translate.

legulere• 11 years ago

There's usually regulation how often this is allowed to happen. In Germany I think it's maximum 1 or 2 days a year. This isn't that hard to achieve as the sun wanders throughout the year

Yaa101• 11 years ago

The main reason of the rejection is that the dutch government is pushing that through big companies while in germany a lot of individual owners can reap benifit.

Dutch governemnts, especially right winged ones are very paternalistic and dislike individual oportunism where it costs the big and powerful companies.

wobbleblob7• 11 years ago

The energy situation now is:

- A legal requirement to cut CO2 emissions

- A ban on building new nuclear plants as well as a commitment to close the remaining one

- A moratorium on building windmills because they scare birds and pollute the horizon

- The largest supply of natural gas in Western Europe, but an increasing limit on exploiting this because shifts in ground level are causing cracks in people's walls.

- A ban on fracking

- There so notoriously little sunshine that people refuse to take solar power seriously, even though it seems to be working just fine in Germany.

Different groups want opposing things. The energy situation would be fine if environmentalists would allow the construction of more windmills and nuclear plants, or if the CO2 reduction target was dropped. You can't have it both ways.

The people in Groningen would probably be fine with continued exploitation of the gas wells if the profits were spent there, but the money is needed by the national government to meet the EU's budget deficit requirements. Now much of it will remain in the ground while we buy Russian gas.

In my opinion the very concept that a horizon is something that can be polluted is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I think the Dutch landscape is featureless and boring, and windmills are a vast improvement. They look modern, industrious, cheerful.

pgeorgi2• 11 years ago

I think the Dutch landscape is featureless and boring, windmills are a vast improvement. They look modern, industrious, cheerful.

I recently visited relatives in a German village where in the last few years a bunch of windmills where built. We went for a walk outside the village, and I heard a surprised "oh, those windmills are much smaller than I remember them to be".

Turns out they looked imposing and scary in the beginning because they're of such a different scale than anything else in the area, but they got used to them quickly.

Like the Netherlands it's a relatively flat area, so I guess the effects will be similar (windmills looking huge at first, then perceptually shrinking).

wobbleblob7• 11 years ago

They are gigantic, they necessarily tower over everything (otherwise they wouldn't work), but once you take your gaze off the gigantic gray rotating blades against the clouds, and direct your eyes further down, you see [1] or [2]. Then you gaze back up again and think the windmill looks grand and beautiful in comparison.

[1] https://stock-foto.nationalebeeldbank.nl/nationalebeeldbank_...

[2] https://stock-foto.nationalebeeldbank.nl/nationalebeeldbank_...

amelius2• 11 years ago

In my opinion the very concept that a horizon is something that can be polluted is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

Well, sometimes it can be wonderful to be in a place without any sign of civilization, except perhaps the road you're walking on.

But, I think they could easily put windmills in places which are already polluted on way or another.

As another solution, they could build those windmills in 19th-century style :)

mdemare2• 11 years ago

Well, sometimes it can be wonderful to be in a place without any sign of civilization, except perhaps the road you're walking on.

Agree, but in Holland, that ship has sailed.

jacquesm8• 11 years ago

The Netherlands is mostly artificial anyway, the very land you walk on is sign of civilization. A very large portion of the country is below sea level and technically borrowed land.

Why the Dutch oppose windmills

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