Do you know if it would be easier to get fully domestic supply and manufacturing chains for solar or for wind, if a way is found to prevent corruption undermining setting up fully domestic production?
Forgive the ignorance, what drives the demand for offshore wind instead of on land anyway? Shorter power run to coastal cities vs longer transmission loss from exurban environments?
And with solar, I can't imagine that would be fast to stand up production for... but we're attempting the Herculean task with modern chip fabs. Would panels be harder than that? They both seem existential needs for the future of the country.
Offshore wind is far more reliable than onshore wind. Geography ensures that some ocean locations pretty much always have wind blowing. North Sea wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 60%, approximately double that of onshore wind turbines.
The other advantage of offshore is that it can support the truly massive wind turbines. Onshore wind turbines are a lot smaller.
While I do not know if the following is relevant for the Carolina Long Bay area, and while neither Republicans nor Democrats can be trusted, it is not without precedent for offshore wind turbine projects to be disallowed due to radar concerns.
> Why Sweden nixed new wind farms for fear of missing Russian missiles
> BERLIN — Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.
> ...
> That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.
Other possibilities than radar concerns is that the stopping of the project here hinders corruption, or is corrupt itself, or it moves corruption around (as in both the old project and new project was corrupt). Whatever the case, a way to avoid corruption would be helpful. Perhaps like making it market-driven and contest-driven as much as possible. Solar and wind is already significantly cost-efficient and market-driven despite their significant drawbacks like not producing energy consistently and on demand. If the main challenge is creating domestic production of wind turbines and solar cells instead of being reliant on other countries and without state support ending up being mired in corruption, perhaps some bidding and contract process that moves the financial risk onto private companies, such that the government never pays in advance, could work.
I agree with posts here saying that a mosaic or plethora of energy sources should be used. Wind, solar, fossile, nuclear (for big countries like the USA at least), geothermal, etc. In general, energy companies should not be focused on just one kind, but lots of kinds.
Wind power is a purely commercial enterprise which only requires state support for permissions to build and permissions to connect to the grid. There is no issue about state support for manufacturing of equipment.
Living here where this happens. They are stopping it for two reasons:
Second, on a local level, the far-right party "SD" is voting agaisnt wind power in 96% of the cases.
As presented here, the national government is declining 84% of all requests of requests to build wind power, ad on the local level the right wing parties vetoed wind power at a rate of 64-92%: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/?created=true&id=09...
That is not correct (https://finansnytt.se/vattenfall-pausar-havsbaserad-vindkraf...). They don't just need permission to connect. Wattenfall (the main producer of energy in Sweden) demanded to get subsidizes to construct the connection to the grid and transmitting the energy back from the wind farm to the main land and the grid. They canceled the project when the government denied those subsidies. They have all the required permissions, and still it was not economical to build.
In optimal weather, wind power already produce more or less all current demand in the grid if we include wind energy produced in nearby countries. The nordpool price (electricity market in the northern Europe) already goes below zero several times over the year. Shortages in production do not occur during periods of windy weather, which is especially true for the south part of Sweden where the energy price is highest and which is connected to the wind farms of Denmark and Germany. The reason that south of Sweden, Denmark and northern Germany has so expensive energy prices is that when the wind is not blowing there is nothing else to really support it beyond solar, and solar is neither reliable nor effective enough during the winter months where output of solar on average reaches around 10% of capacity in Sweden. The only other producer of energy in that region is thermal power plants that mostly burns fossil fuels, like natural gas (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/ore...) and oil (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/kar...). Those two are naturally the single largest sources of carbon emissions in those regions.
They may be talking about building nuclear power, but what local government in south of Sweden is actually building right now is more thermal power plants (https://hallbartbyggande.com/bygget-av-kraftringens-nya-kraf...). That one is supposed to be burning wood but time will tell what happens if they can't find wood to burn.
Nope. I don’t claim it to be undemocractic, I only insinuate that it is very stupid. And to be fully clear: I also think these people are hypocrites because they loudly proclaim in debates and public discourse to be pro wind energy, but once they vote it is against it. I also think they are hypocrites about energy independence, because that they also want, but they have cumulatively during the past five years declined wind power equal to about 18 full nuclear reactors.
Does your 18 full reactors count name plate capacity only, or does it take in to consideration that wind needs to be massively over built or also come with gas peaked plants?
The number is based on expected actual annual output in GWh, not theoretical maximum. We don’t really do gas peaker plants because they are so expensive and seldom needed here.
Sorry your argument for something being renewal able or not is based on if it grows on trees? You realize modern infrastructure is generally not growing out the ground or we would not have taken thousands or years to get to this point?
Show me anywhere that is recycling wind tubing blades.
Or solar panels.
Steel is infinitely recyclable and valuable enough as scrap to largely be recycled at a high rate.
Solar panels are so cheap new because there’s bigger all of anything worth recovering in them.
The secondhand market is littered with stacks of panels that don’t move.
The glass isn’t worth anything as scrap, we literally throw it in the recycling bin and it costs councils and governments to recover it and manage the waste streams, largely done as a vanity project.
Aluminium is so light and there is so little of it wrapped around a solar panel it’s not worth the labour and machine capability to recover it.
