And to your point, albeit with a more frivolous example, wind power has been subject to tests for aesthetic satisfaction that never have to be passed with such regularity by, say, telephone wires, roads or sidewalks, other forms of electricity infrastructure, big box stores, oil and gas infrastructure, gas stations, etc.
In some cases if you even ask the question you might be dismissed as a crank because, well, roads and sidewalks can crumble and fall into disrepair, but obviously we're not going to just get rid of sidewalks and roads. There's kind of an unspoken and shared understanding that the necessity of those forms of infrastructure trumps aesthetic concerns.
Status quo extremism might be summed up by the demand that new things have to pass novel and specific tests that would never be applied to the status quo.
I don't think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument entirely though.
As your yourself said, some aesthetic concerns are dismissed because of utility, but not all of them can be. It's not a fiction that a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land than an equivalent gas or coal plant. So perhaps some of the concerns aren't quite so "status quo extremism" (lovely phrasing though, I'm going to be stealing that) as just realizing that we missed some things prior that actually mattered.
They might occupy more space but I still think most people would opt to live X miles from the center of a wind/solar farm than a coal plant. Mildly bad aesthetics vs breathing in heavy metals...
Does my not living in a city require that I change my sense of aesthetics? Is my sense of what is and isn't attractive required to be defined by where I live?
I think the whole point is that in cases of aesthetics, we built a bunch of eyesores for utilities and industries in the past anyway. Also I'm sure the next guy is going to say "does my land-ownership not mean anything? Why could my neighbor build an oil field in the past but I can't put up a big wind farm?"
It's not black and white like that and trade-offs get made all the time.
> It's not black and white like that and trade-offs get made all the time.
Exactly.
My point wasn't that we should sacrifice everything for the sake of aesthetics, as many replies to my comment seem to have taken. It's that for some people, aesthetics will matter, and you cannot just dismiss that without running into pushback -- pushback which will be even stronger if you're making people feel ignored. That also directly translates to things being more expensive.
I live a couple of miles away from a windfarm. It's not directly visible, because my home is down in a valley, but it's by the main road into the town so you couldn't miss it. Now that I've set the scene, I can make my declaration: yes, they are awesome, quietly spinning giants, and no, the feeling doesn't wear off :)
Nonetheless, I'll have to admit they are a bit noisy. If you're right underneath them, it's not so pleasant - but it's better than living by a main road, and especially so when there are internal combustion engine vehicles about. Thus, it's a tradeoff I'd personally be willing to take if it meant more sustainably-powered electric vehicles.
>a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land than an equivalent gas or coal plant
The land use talking point is so old that I remember hearing it in high school nearly 20 years ago. And the answer now is the same as the answer then, which is that this is not an apples to apples comparison. Windmills actually don't physically occupy something like 99% of the space over which they are distributed, and they are located so as not to interfere with other forms of land use, on land that wouldn't otherwise be used for something.
With solar panels it's a little bit more nuanced because apparently there have been some cases where land has been cleared to make space for panels, which is bad. I would like to think however that's unrepresentative, and the same thing is true of solar panels that they're located in ways that don't interfere with other forms of land use.
Even if wind and solar were not renewable these would still be distinctive advantages they have on the land use question. But if you throw all those nuances away and purely look at something like energy generation per square meter, it makes it look like there's some sort of losing proposition you have to worry about with solar and wind, even though there really isn't.
I do think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument, because like so many other things in this thread, it's this dangling concern with an open unquantified implication for how significant it's supposed to be. That open-ended implication allows a skeptic to get away with implying that maybe it's a big problem without doing any of the work. In my opinion we are now far enough along into the renewable energy transition that this kind of rhetorical move should not be allowed, it should be considered poor form. You want to say it's a problem, that's fair and good, but how big of a problem? Are you at least interested in that kind of question or understand why it's important? What's the upshot? Is the idea that we abandon renewable energy altogether, do 5% less or something? Is it that we do exactly as much as before but we all just agree to be really careful? And why should I have to do your work for you of working through with the implication is supposed to be?
I think a lot of the problems with aesthetics are similar in that there are strategic ways to mitigate them, but perhaps more importantly I don't think that there are actually aesthetic problems here in the first place, and we seem to get along just fine without applying those standards to status quo infrastructure. But, here again, even if we agree that it's a problem, and did some sort of like economic analysis of the trade-off there, we would have to weigh that against the benefits of renewables writ large, are we looking at one penny of problem versus $1 of benefit? I suspect that that even would overstate the problem, but again, It's this unquantified open-ended implication that seems to be doing no work whatsoever to assess the relative scale of the problem and weigh it against the benefits brought by renewables.
> I do think it's fair to dismiss the aesthetic argument, because like so many other things in this thread, it's this dangling concern with an open unquantified implication for how significant it's supposed to be.
And this is where the fault in your argument lies.
You present a perfectly reasonable, logical argument, that is more or less all correct. What your argument fails to account for is the human element -- humans aren't perfectly reasonable, logical beings. They're soft, squishy and have opinions that they hold despite being logically nonsensical.
By dismissing the aesthetic argument, you're dismissing a lot of the human element. Let's put it this way -- you're not getting permits to build a wind or solar farm if the people you have to get the permit from don't want you to build that wind or solar farm because they think it's ugly. You're not likely to convince them otherwise unless you actually address the aesthetics.
You can't always 'build them somewhere else' -- wind farm locations aren't arbitrary. Solar is a little less constrained in this way, but still has some location requirements (you wouldn't put a solar plant on a hillside that is shaded half the day.)
There's also losses from transmission of the generated energy. The further you generate from where you use, the more loss you have to account for.
Eh? Wind farms cause noise?? A massive windfarm was built on the hills behind the house I grew up on and I never heard any noise, even when visiting the extremely popular walking route that goes through them.
>It's not a fiction that a large scale solar or wind farm will occupy more land
This argument still baffles me - when we are talking about the US, things requiring a bit more space is laughable. There's SO MUCH UNUSED SPACE that no one cares about, there's offshore space and dual use space no one gives a damn about how is this even an argument.
If it'd be orders of magnitude yea that'd be a problem but a few percent? Please.
> This argument still baffles me - when we are talking about the US, things requiring a bit more space is laughable.
There tend to be fairly good reasons for why so much land is seemingly unused. You also can't just build a wind or solar plant anywhere, there's areas where either the construction is not feasible, far too expensive, or is too remote. Or just not usable for that type of power generation. You also need access to the labour to build and maintain the facility, and that's going to be harder if you're too far from a population center.
The thing I would be worried about is noise in otherwise serene areas. But I'm yet to see a wind farm in an area and think "bah, what a waste!" I'm usually pretty pleased by the sight of them. And if I'm going to be totally fair, I hate the noise from freeways, but I also don't like living that far away from them.
I love driving by the actual farms that are also wind farms. There are a bunch of them driving between San Jose and LA - just endless huge fields of cabbage or whatever overseen by giant wind turbines.
Also seeing rows of them along ridgelines feels very cool.
Mount Rainier isn't covered in power lines, but it'd be efficient to cover it in wind generators. We also wouldn't put pylons just offshore, but it's also a great place for wind turbines.
Nothing gets past NIMBY except car infrastructure. That's America for you.
There are plenty of alternatives to wind turbines. There are very few or no alternatives to the others you mentioned, especially in rural areas.
Even so, when a community has enough funding, they will often implement such things with additional aesthetic considerations- running wires underground, adding decorative touches or using more expensive materials for sidewalks, adding greenery to roadways such as planting flowers or trees, etc.
As for gas stations and stores, every business has local codes it has to obey, which in some areas may include the visual appearance of the building, the square footage and so on.
If a community chooses not to do these things, it is usually to save money or avoid discouraging new businesses from coming in (i.e. by requiring expensive brickwork facades).
In any case, yes, aesthetics are always a consideration.
If, when people raise aesthetic concerns about windmills, all they are really saying is that it's subject to the same level of concern as our electric and telecom and highway and gas infrastructure, which have been built out like a nervous system into every city and town across the country, and therefore it will be as equally as easy to build out as all of those, then there's no such thing as an aesthetic problem with windmills.
If there's an elevated standard that differentiates aesthetics of windmills from those other cases, then those other things are not subject to the same type of consideration after all.
I'm not sure I agree there truly are such things as "alternatives" to windmills depending on what you mean. Presumably you locate windmills in places where it's most advantageous to do so, where they are the best answer to a present need, not in places where they are worse than some other alternative, where they, as the lesser alternative, have to make up the difference with escalated emphasis on aesthetic concerns.
It's one of the more idiosyncratic rationalizations for escalated aesthetic standards I have yet heard.
I don’t think you can dismiss the aesthetic concerns. Many people consider the natural beauty around them to be a core part of their living experience. Like with offshore wind farms - if you take coastlines and dot them with wind farms, it does hurt that beauty and experience in a meaningful way. And if you’ve been near them, they produce immense and constant noise that is hard to ignore. There will definitely be effects from that on marine life, as boat noise also affects them. Many of the things you listed like telephone wires or roads don’t make noise, so it’s not the same trade off, and they are in places we expect nature to be displaced.
You're proving GP's point. Roads on their own don't make noise, but if I go outside I can hear the road noise from cars going down a IH-35 which is a mile away. (It isn't even the only road I can hear noise from)
It’s totally different from the noise a wind turbine makes. Watch a video of what it’s like on YouTube. Road noise can also be mitigated in many ways and in many areas it is - based on the surface, walls, etc. But also consider that we expect that urban areas have a degree of noise, but we also generally expect that serene natural spaces are free of those things to a greater extent.
It's hypothetically true that road noise can be mitigated, it is also nevertheless true that we have societally chosen to endure road noise, and the harms it causes which have measurable outcomes on everything from quality of life to mental health to property values.
As I noted in a different comment, if all we're saying is that we are open to windmills having the same adverse impacts on environments as roads already do, then to me that's the same as saying there's no such thing as a windmill noise problem.
Transmission lines absolutely do make noise. Plenty of smaller scale power line elements can also hum.
For anyone complaining about offshore wind (which is way the hell off in the distance) it may be worth considering that the alternative is those houses and beaches on the shore cease to exist in the future if we don't build the turbines.
> Transmission lines absolutely do make noise. Plenty of smaller scale power line elements can also hum.
Maybe higher power ones can, but I’ve never had residential lines hum. And as for long distance transmission lines - even their noise is nothing compared to what a spinning blade on a wind turbine generates. You can find videos of the noise on YouTube.
> For anyone complaining about offshore wind (which is way the hell off in the distance) it may be worth considering that the alternative is those houses and beaches on the shore cease to exist in the future if we don't build the turbines.
This feels like a strawman argument or something. I don’t think such an extreme positioning makes sense. There are many other variables like power sources (nuclear power for example), reduced consumption, changing population levels (trending downwards in many countries). It’s not like building wind power is the only way for humanity to thrive.
> There are many other variables like power sources (nuclear power for example)
The problem is that there aren't. You might be a wind NIMBY and nuclear YIMBY, but guess what, there's millions of nuclear NIMBYs ready to oppose whatever vision you personally hold.
The end result is permanent gridlock all in the name of preserving the subjective aesthetic preferences of a tiny handful of people. You can't run a society like this, you just can't.
At some point the urgent global concerns need to override sufficiently frivolous local concerns.
Having lived near both simultaneously I can tell you power lines definitely do makes noise while I'm genuinely having to google to confirm which wind turbines make noise because I never noticed.
In some cases if you even ask the question you might be dismissed as a crank because, well, roads and sidewalks can crumble and fall into disrepair, but obviously we're not going to just get rid of sidewalks and roads. There's kind of an unspoken and shared understanding that the necessity of those forms of infrastructure trumps aesthetic concerns.
Status quo extremism might be summed up by the demand that new things have to pass novel and specific tests that would never be applied to the status quo.