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It's a pretty solarpunk fact that small, distributed wind turbines use steel more efficiently than big centralised ones (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The most steel-intensive power source – by far – is the modern wind turbine. The steel intensity of a wind turbine depends on its size. A single, large wind turbine requires significantly more steel per megawatt of installed power than two smaller wind turbines.

The link is from the-most-solarpunk-website and is mostly about steel in general, but I wanted to pull out that one fact.

Wind and solar energy are not "good for the environment"; they pollute; it's just that we hope they pollute less than the alternative. One major reason they pollute is because they require a lot of steel to build. But the household-scale or village-scale ones use less

de Decker is citing: Topham, Eva, et al. “Recycling offshore wind farms at decommissioning stage.” Energy policy 129 (2019): 698-709.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (6 children)

They use steel more effectively, but use other resources like wind, land, labor, and electronics less effectively, and all of which are harder to recycle. It also didn’t mention household or village scale as much as was still comparing very large grid scale systems, which is important as once you get much smaller than that energy efficiency falls off a cliff.

Finally, while a detailed look into a specific resource can be very interesting, it’s important to take a holistic look at how energy sources compare and not just evaluate on one figure.

Ultimately, as our ability to manufacture steel is not currently a major constraint to decarbonization, more important limitations like installation and maintenance costs are going to be dominant at least for the next few decades. Similarly as the low hanging fruit like electricity generation make up less and less of our collective GHG emissions, we’ll have more resources like plentiful wind energy to throw at problems like decarbonizing steel, as its still a problem will have to solve sooner or later.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

They use steel more effectively, but use other resources like wind, land, labor, and electronics less effectively, and all of which are harder to recycle

Wind is a renewable resource. Saying wind is not easy to recycle is incoherent.

Electronics is the only one of the four you mentioned where recycling is a relevant concept.

As for wind farms being an effective use of land, that's just obviously wrong. You can't even have livestock near them.

As for less labour-efficient, I'd've thought that's part of solarpunk: being less capital-intensive/more labour-intensive.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Sonori is completely right here, and it feels in bad faith to critique the semantics of their comment rather than the substance of them.

One of the things that is difficult about solarpunk is that there is a huge divide between where we currently are and where we want/need to be. Smaller turbines for a more distributed power grid is a part of a great future to look towards! But it's not the reality of our power demands now, which necessitate larger turbines and more steel production to meet any of our climate goals. Speaking coherently through that divide can really lead to mismatched expectations and miscommunications.

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