“Rain falls from the sky but I never understood wind”

[Snarkhund]

I am not having a discussion with H4M. I just pointed out a quote he pasted from the article. I am debating the article itself, not anything H4M typed as original content. I am, in fact, pointing out said hypocrisy, but in a more subtle way. The staisdata study shows that wind turbines are much less damaging to the bird population than, say, cats. Trump is whining about " a million birds".

He should issue an executive order to force cats to run like gerbils on a wheel to make the wind-turbines run with belts and gears. This way he is killing two birds with one stone. Cats no longer killing billions of birds, so less birds dead overall while powering the turbines. Would work especially well on days with not enough wind.

You are letting your infantile hatred of a man affect your entire world view.

Birds are a problem. Infrasound is a problem. But being net energy negative is beyond stupid.

Take a drive from LA to Palm Springs and tell me all about being pro-environment. Instead of tearing down and replacing defunct wind generators and their towers they simply buy more desert property and put up a new "wind farm". Both sides of the I-10 have vast fields of dead and rusting wind generators. What is the plan for them? Nothing. They are going to sit there until the federal government has to pay to clean up the mess and everyone in the country is going to pay for it.

Solar has different problems. Mainly storage. Trying to store energy on the scale required is absurd. Distributed systems like Musk is producing has some merit for dwellings but its very expensive and not suitable for industrial use. Disposing of old batteries is already a ground water contamination issue. Scale that up to widespread usage and you have a serious problem. I mentioned the grid-tie issue where people are not even aware that their home cannot be powered directly from their solar arrays under current law. A friend recently asked me to look over some bids for a 24kW solar installation on a largish office building and they were astonished to learn that it would not provide backup power under any circumstance and elected to stay with grid power.

Solar is useful but primarily in off-grid applications requiring battery storage. I have them on my boat and a small wind generator as well and it is surprising how much power they generally provide...until the sky is overcast and the winds die off then I have to run a generator for a couple of hours to top batteries up. Some friends have bought alcohol powered fuel cells and those produce water as a waste product and they are interesting.

 

[Overnight]

You are letting your infantile hatred of a man affect your entire world view.

Birds are a problem. Infrasound is a problem. But being net energy negative is beyond stupid.

Take a drive from LA to Palm Springs and tell me all about being pro-environment. Instead of tearing down and replacing defunct wind generators and their towers they simply buy more desert property and put up a new "wind farm". Both sides of the I-10 have vast fields of dead and rusting wind generators. What is the plan for them? Nothing. They are going to sit there until the federal government has to pay to clean up the mess and everyone in the country is going to pay for it...

And you are interjecting yourself into a side conversation which you do not understand, into this thread.

My communication style is complicated. The "number of birds" issue and Trump's contradictory nature are separate issues. I realize that "renewable" fuel sources like wind and solar would be more harmful to the environment because of the costs associated with producing the apparatus needed to generate such "zero risk free" energy. Like the amount of environmental damage needed to create the batteries for Teslas, and the amount of fossil fuels needed to produce the electricity to power said Teslas, for a measly 300 miles of range.

The costs will always outweigh the benefits. Only Mr. Fusion™ will solve our energy needs without fossil fuels.

There's a post somewhere on this site when I typed out the stupidity of treehuggers, who want it all now now now, but do not understand the amount of resources it would take to get up to fossil-fuel-producing levels of energy equivalency. And THEN who slam down their own ideas when they are proposed because they will harm the fucking spotted-owl, or the precious fish. They want all, but give nothing back. They want free energy with zero environmental impact, which will NOT happen until Mr. Fusion™ is invented.

That is a FACT.

Snark, haven't you seen this video I occasionally place here and there in threads where this issue comes up?

Ancient animal and plant life makes our world possible. Maybe the 1,000,000 birds that did not die will eventually produce the fossil-fuels of our future.

Ironical.

 

[Snarkhund]

And you are interjecting yourself into a side conversation which you do not understand, into this thread.

My communication style is complicated. The "number of birds" issue and Trump's contradictory nature are separate issues. I realize that "renewable" fuel sources like wind and solar would be more harmful to the environment because of the costs associated with producing the apparatus needed to generate such "zero risk free" energy. Like the amount of environmental damage needed to create the batteries for Teslas, and the amount of fossil fuels needed to produce the electricity to power said Teslas, for a measly 300 miles of range.

The costs will always outweigh the benefits. Only Mr. Fusion™ will solve our energy needs without fossil fuels.

There's a post somewhere on this site when I typed out the stupidity of treehuggers, who want it all now now now, but do not understand the amount of resources it would take to get up to fossil-fuel-producing levels of energy equivalency. And THEN who slam down their own ideas when they are proposed because they will harm the fucking spotted-owl, or the precious fish. They want all, but give nothing back. They want free energy with zero environmental impact, which will NOT happen until Mr. Fusion™ is invented.

That is a FACT.

Snark, haven't you seen this video I occasionally place here and there in threads where this issue comes up?

Ancient animal and plant life makes our world possible. Maybe the 1,000,000 birds that did not die will eventually produce the fossil-fuels of our future.

Ironical.

Idk, you've got some kind of fixation with the birds.

Don't scoff at fusion, they have it working on small scales. The main problem is that there is a massive power overhead necessary to run the magnetic bottle that holds the plasma. For safety that power needs to come from... wait for it.... another source of energy, a back-up station if you will. Messy but they will figure it out.

 

[Overnight]

Idk, you've got some kind of fixation with the birds.

Don't scoff at fusion, they have it working on small scales...

My fixation on the bird comment is that Trump is whining about the "million" birds, and then reduces the penalty about bird deaths. Juxtaposing his attitude. Much ado about nothing anyways, because there are 10s of billions of birds on the planet. WAY more birds then people. Everyone STFU about birds and wind turbines!

And you are now on about fusion on a small scale? Uh huh, that's what they said about the flying car...

20 years after the commercial which complained about not having the flying cars promised to us from 20 years before it, we still don't have any flying cars! Why? why WHY!

It will be the same thing with fusion for the next 100 years. Maybe by THEN, we'll have a flying car. That runs on fossil-fuels, of course.