Is that trying to tackle the non-problem that was spun up a while ago by oil companies in propaganda pieces like the Landman show on TV?

It's a non-problem. The lifecycle assessment of wind turbines today, which is the accounting for the actual emissions of the lifetime of a wind turbine, factoring in: creation, installation, maintenance, even the disposing of it, was clocked to be offset after 5.3 months of running the turbine (according to this study: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.9b01030 ; and every other one I could find finds the same ballpark)

The fundamental question that the study ask is if the wind turbine would replace an existing natural gas-fired power plant, how much less green house gases would it produce compared to keeping the natural gas-fired power plant, and how does that compared to the production emissions of the wind turbine.

Battery backup isn't a needed as much as many thing in the real world. Those gas power plants we already have are not going anywhere, so we still use them when there isn't much wind. Though battery is something we should be building instead (and are).

Instead, civilian energy demands and energy independence are the motivating factors. Look at how Ontario leveraged its electricity supply in the early days of the trade war.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

When you also add the cost of battery backup.

Spain and Portugal have just experienced the first taste of that fact.

Batteries/storage do not produce energy so they don't displace any energy in this kind of calculations. They can be viewed as a small efficiency increase of existing wind turbines, in which case they do have a form of greenhouse gas payback time, although the energy must not be counted twice for both the turbine and battery, and the increased wear and tear on the wind turbine may impact the result.

Wind generally has an production rate of around 50%, which mean that countries like Denmark that has already reached over 100% wind production still only have energy for half of their consumption. This mean the storage need is fairly massive, which they currently solve by importing energy from fossil fueled thermal power stations, nuclear and hydropower from nearby countries. Constructing more wind power at this point does not seem economical for power companies, and any storage solution like lithium, reverse hydro, and so on are also not economical (as in, there is basically zero investment into it outside of government subsidized initiatives). As such, wind has in that location seem to have reached its ability to displace any more fossil fuel.

- methane has a higher absorption than CO2

incorrect. CO2 has a dipole moment amd c-infinity-v symmetry so it absorbs way more

- methane has higher absorption in open windows of IR frequencies

also incorrect. the water band don't overlap with CO2

- methane has a longer atmospheric half-life

incorrect. you can look up the numbers on this. i believe it was believed to have a longer half life a few decades ago but detailed isotopic studies have disproved it?

you have to dig really deep to figure out that there is I think? an estimated self-shading effect of CO2 that changes the marginal absorbance of a single molecule. but this assumes a uniform distribution of CO2 in the atmosphere and no scattering. anyways i think this is not spoken of because it also reminds that the effect of Co2 is logarthmic (A = log(T))

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/what-makes-methane-more-pote...

Very informative. Thank you.-

Here's the quote from the show for those who haven't seen it

“Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix the concrete or make that steel? Or haul this sh-t out here, and put it together with a 450 foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f-ing thing, or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery…”

Otherwise you can calculate any offset you want, but it'll be a paper exercise.

It also matters before asking the question of batteries how much turbines it's going to take before the problem actually needs to be tackled

The problem doesn't arise immediately in the duck curve. It depends on how much of the energy mix of the place is composed of controllable sources alongside your wind and solar

I recall seeing that the need for batteries is tiny if you accept a 10% share of carbon emitting energy across the year - so all in all, another non-problem, or at least first you should focus on building the turbines to reach the problem, then think of whether or not it's worth getting batteries for the rest.

I think this is massively overblown, it was actually hard to manage a grid with baseload generation, since you still needed peaker plants for the morning and afternoon peaks and then had massive amounts of excess power overnight.

It's just that that's what people were used to, not that it's actually the best or easiest model for managing grids.

Highly variable sources bring some different challenges than the old status quo, but we also have much more sophisticated technology in the power space now anyway. And that new and sophisticated tech can produce new opportunities that outweigh the challenges if anything.

So I take arguments like yours with a massive grain of salt. How you put it is not really the case.

The variation on output is over a matter of hours (wind powerful enough to spin entire wind farms is not something that comes one second and is gone the next), and large grids with import and export capabilities are largely self-regulating.

Cost fluctuations in the electricity market regulate whether e.g., power storage sites will charge or dump power, whether district heating plants will source more heat from giant electric kettles, when EVs will start to charge, when private smart water heaters will preheat, when people decide to schedule washing machines and dishwasher, whether offline fossil fuel power plants will be fired up to sell as the rate becomes more lucrative or shut down as power becomes too cheap, whether any "idle" plants will throttle up or down, and whether windmills will engage brakes and turn away from the wind or release brakes and turn into it.

Power grids have also always had the ability to load shed by dropping customers off the grid, starting with factories that have special agreements, in case the combined local production and import is insufficient, and can detatch from neighboring grids and countries if there are import/export issues that could destabilize the grid.

The grid needs to change when supply or load conditions change significantly (e.g., every house in a city suddenly having an EV or heat pump, every house in a city suddenly having solar cells and supplying a ton of power, a power plant or wind farm being built somewhere power has not previously been routed), and can be optimized (e.g., power storage, smart load scheduling), but that is entirely orthogonal to windmills.

The root cause is not known, but Spain was producing excess power (primarily solar) at the time around the disconnect. Some fluctations were seen, then supply started to disconnect from the grid in Spain, leading to sudden loss of 2.2GW of power. In Spain, automatic load shedding then happened to try to recover, but it was too little too late as neighboring countries detached from Spain to protect their own grids.

Nothing about this sounds like an issue with renewables.

Still a ways away from understanding what happened

The wind turbine doesn't remove carbon from the air, so the offset you are talking about is not a real offset, it's only relative to how much CO2 wasn't released in the atmosphere by a more polluting source of power that would have been used instead.

Wooden wind turbines would allow sequestrating carbon (in the cut trees that make their structures) and potentially compensate the carbon necessary to assemble and install the wind turbine, if the trees are replanted.

The blades themselves isn't really much of an issue if you actually compare it to fossil fuels - for example, coal fly ash was 18% of all waste generated in Australia around 2019 (this is likely a bit less now as one or two major coal plants have since been decommissioned).

I think it's astronomically unlikely that wind turbine blades would ever be that kind of proportion of a country's waste, but it was just a normal thing for coal. And gas and oil have a similar problem, it's just harder to see since it's fine particulate matter belched into the air instead of heavier ash that you have to deal with!

1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-10/coal-ash-has-become-o...

For the vast majority of wind farms, dirt or gravel roads connect masts to pre-existing infrastructure.

The largest wind farm in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rPjUGSTN979dfUoDA

The largest wind farm in Europe is the Markbygden Wind Farm: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ETVeMXpf1uPieTct8

Dirt and gravel roads.

I'm not saying that there have never been roads paved to create wind farms.

I am saying that the number of roads that have paved is so small that it is irrelevant.

There have been massive protests due to the amount of nature destroyed. There are some before-after sliders on

https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/dokumentar/her-er-norges-s...

(scroll around for "wind") that give an indication, although the most striking difference is experience by the people who used to go for hikes in remote places where there are now immense wind parks. The wind companies love building them up in the previously-untouched mountain regions since I guess height = more power, also less NIMBY neighbours.

https://www.google.no/maps/place/Buheii/@58.6554134,6.887061... had zero roads a decade ago, now it's all roads. And with roads come traffic and people and cabins and tourism and more roads.

Now they're saying we need more wind parks for AI data centers (a few years ago it was for crypto). We're tearing down nature so we can keep growing our energy use while staying "green".

Unless you are talking about the last 100 meters - but as the other reply pointed out, those are not roads. Most of the ones I've seen are grass - the roads are used so little we don't need gravel and they don't even turn into dirt.

Strength per volume versus strength per weight is an interesting trade-off. They're arguing this could let towers get taller.

I would have assumed of course that wind turbines are net negative emissions, even factoring in the construction and materials.

Do they mean net-zero in materials and construction alone? Because that sounds impossible.

That seems pretty dubious to me. After the turbine’s thirty year life, what happens to that carbon?

At any rate, if it’s true that it takes 90% less carbon to produce in the first place, setting aside the whole “wood contains carbon” thing, that’s pretty cool.

> After the turbine’s thirty year life, what happens to that carbon?

Those curved boards are probably mixed with epoxy or another polymer, making it a bad candidate for recycling in other wood application (paper, osb boards…), compared to first hand row trees. We’ll probably "valorize" it in incinerators.

> The life-cycle emissions from modern wind power plants made of steel are about 4–7 grammes carbon dioxide per kWh. Building the tower in wood lowers the emissions from the wind power plant by approximately 30 percent per kWh.

That would put wind power some 50-100x below fossil fuels already. Additional improvements are always nice to have, but not really a big selling point.

It's net much-less-than-coal and much-less-than-oil, but it's not zero and certainly not negative.

I think you're confusing "if we add this to the grid we subtract the carbon emissions compared to the current system" with "this pulls carbon from the atmosphere". Those are very different things.

It makes it appear like you are working with something exotic.

And actually, when you compare it to other materials, carboniferous foam is pretty amazing stuff, it's combination of highly workable, low density, high strength, is tricky to replicate in more engineered stuff.

> So, most industrial things have big economies of scale, right? There's this imaginary world where, "Oh, I'm going to shrink down the cost, but the cost per unit is also going to go down." That requires magical thinking. It requires making it so small that you can make it in a factory and ship it in a shipping container.

Based on what I read on the site the turbine components can be transported using normal lorries. However, it would be interested to know:

1. If they can be shrunk even further and be transported in a container.

2. Would this help reduce costs.

1. https://open.substack.com/pub/davidroberts/p/taming-the-hydr...

In 2024 France electricity was responsible for an equivalent of 16.1Mt of CO2 - largely due to gas peaker plants, which together contributed to a single digit percentage of overall electricity consumption.

That's 235kg of CO2 per person, or 2.5-7.5kg of beef in terms of environmental impact.

edit: [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

felt like i read that article yesterday. 5 years ago, wow. has any progress been made there?

A fair part of new blade models are recyclable (check RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...).

Research may even enable to somewhat recycle old ones: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-make...

There's a very minor challenge (compared to decades of coal/gas related emissions) of what happens to the blades after their useful life ends. Mostly you are just putting something that doesn't naturally degrade very well in a landfill where it sits and doesn't degrade very well. It might be leaking some toxic stuff slowly over a very long time. Compared to all absolutely massive amounts of other stuff we dump in landfills, what happens to the blades is probably not the most urgent thing to tackle from an ecological point of view.

Of course, windmill construction at scale involves a lot of steel, concrete, and blades. So if would can do the same job and perform well, that's still interesting to do. We take something that's already amazingly good and make it even better.

[1] https://www.sserenewables.com/news-and-views/2021/09/concret...

Thus does the amount of material not matter as much in a crane.

For wind turbine towers the material cost can be >>50% of the installed cost.

  * The margins for cranes are thin and steel is expensive.
  * Thicker steel is harder to work with, increasing manufacturing cost.
  * Each kg of dead weight may decrease the performance of your product, e.g. max. Live load. This is especially true for the jib.
  * More weight at the top of the crane may necessitate a sturdier structure below, amplifying cost even more.
  * More weight may require more ballast blocks, which are costly (especially transport)
  * More weight means higher transport costs
  * More weight means more wind area, which is the critical factor for high constructions.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx5Qt7_ECEE

Interestingly, wind/storm loads are oftentimes the limiting factor for the configuration height of a crane.

This is because, when adding another tower segment, not only the total area increases but also the wind forces. The other loads stay roughly the same

This is the reason why bottom-slewing cranes, which are commonly used for small buildings, sometimes are built with solid walls. Top-slewing cranes, which are used for high buildings, always use a steel framework.

At the limit the failure of your statement obvious. If instead of a thick walled wood tube hundreds of feet tall this structure were an orders of magnitude wider cylinder of thin plies the same height it wouldn't even be able to hold itself up, it would flop over, tear and all fall down under its own weight if not from manufacturing variances then from the wind and differential expansion/contraction from the sun and if by some miracle it survived that it would flop over

The material has to support itself and tolerate undefined small (relative to the main load) loads in other directions as well as point loads from fastening it to whatever you are using it to bear the loads of, going all in on "large and thin" fails to optimize for this for more or less the opposite reasons that going all in on "solid" does.

Frankly your comment disappoints me. wizardOfScience gave a _great_ answer, that would make any solid mechanics professor proud.

The construction crane rarely experiences that kind of wind load, because the truss structure is hollow and allows air to pass through. Ideally, the structure has zero wind resistance (down to a point).

Tube gets manufactured in a facility specializing in doing it in a low labor way (rolling or whatever). Flanges get welded on, they get slapped on cribbing and trucked to you and then assembled with minimal labor.

Contrast with the lattice. Cheaper material inputs, a whole bunch of cheap channel with holes punched as needed, but all that punching, and then all that bolting, takes way more labor, a lot of it can be done cheaply, but it adds up, and when it does get to site there's more pieces to pick and connect, etc.

Basically the more expensive material saves you quite a bit of human labor at each step. Same reason huge rolled steel and welded tubes displaced riveted construction.

https://www.nabrawind.com/our-solutions/nabralift/

Optimization only leads to trusses if you constrain the design to have no low-density elements.

In practice this leads to things like a thing CFRP surface wrapped around balsa or stiff foam.

However there is growth in mass timber construction generally. People are competing to build taller and taller timber skyscrapers.

105m - Thailand - 1981 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_of_Truth

85m - Norway - 2019 | https://www.moelven.com/mjostarnet/

87m - US - 2020 | https://www.ascentmke.com

350m - Japan - 2041 | https://www.nikken.co.jp/en/projects/highrise/w350.html

If you mean the old water pumps used in the American west (they are still made today!), those are good for water pumping because they produce high torque in low winds, but they make less horsepower and that is what we care about.

If you mean the Dutch style windmills/houses, we could do that, but the big house blocks a lot of wind and so it is not efficient.

I can't think of any other style of old windmill. However if you can the answer to your question is likely because that style is much less efficient.

They also still haven't solved the main issue of non-modular turbine blade transport and assembly. Modular and stepped blades are the next frontier. Not tower construction.

Quite frankly, the tower is trivial.

The cost of the tower construction and materials is a small percentage of the initial blade, transmission, and generator assembly costs and on-going maintenance. Even the lubrication flow sensors and lubricants are highly specialized for the unusual duty-cycles and variable loading of a wind turbine.