* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
We can see a lot of windmills from our house - probably at least 60 in a few different windfarms. They are all nearly 40km away, but I actually like seeing them.
There are others much closer, which I also rather like seeing (closest is about 2km) but you can't see them from where we live.
Yeh I'm about 2km from a large wind park, it's the least obnoxious thing imaginable. Jogging through them at night with their dim red blinking strobes or watching them work overtime on a windy winter day is great and gives you a sorely needed feeling of optimism and hope for the future.
Yes directly underneath them there is some gentle swooshing noises but I think beyond 500m it's basically imperceptible. Nothing I'd call offensive, car traffic is easily 10x worse.
The young folks that I've talked to locally, overwhelming share the same perspective.
The opposition has to come from folks who cannot see the bigger picture and just view them as some kind of excessive ugly infrastructure. Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I kind of find it interesting that a lot of historical landscape art from northern Europe featured windmills. Nobody viewed them as a blight back then.
I live about a mile down from two large wind turbines and you can absolutely hear them, especially at night - it's a low droning noise that especially on quiet nights and in the summer when you have your windows open it actually bothers me to a point where I considered selling the house multple times already - but decided that rolling the dice on noise pollution and ending up with something even more annoying just isn't worth it.
>>Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I think we should devote every single spare inch of land to wind turbines and harness as much of wind energy as possible. But I won't pretend like the bloody things are not keeping me up at night when I can hear them.
May also depend on the age of the people nearby - am reaching an age with some level of hearing loss and I don't hear many low frequency - or high-pitch noises much anymore (drone of insects, or mosquitoes - squeaky voices of small children, etc.), so I probably wouldn't hear the turbines as much as a person with better hearing.
I thought I was strange for feeling this when I brought my US-raised kids back to Northern Ireland this spring. Some would have been visible from my childhood home had they been built earlier. It made me think that maybe these people can get something right for the future.
I can’t stand the fact that we put everything to committee when we’re trying to do something good, but not otherwise. I live near a highway, I can hear the cars all day, where’s my veto? I’ve lived near trains—but they were freight trains, so I didn’t get the “public transit is helpful for the little people” veto, I guess.
It’s like we can only accomplish anything as a society if if the fact that it is going to piss people off is baked in.
I feel like a lot of our (EU) legal structures are totally inadequate for long term periods of peace. Eventually everything gets bloated and ossified and vested interests gain more and more influence/control.
Existential threats always seem to have an interesting way of unlocking progress.
Just look at how quickly Germany was able to build the north sea LNG terminals in the face of the russian gas crisis [1].
Meanwhile the older folks are still freaked out from when they watched "The Tripods" in the 80's and can't abide big mechanical monsters looming nearby.
I also actually really like the look of wind turbines. They seems to be just the right blend of graceful, majestic and futuristic.
The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically extinct now.
I am somewhat sympathetic to, in the case of wind, low-frequency noise complaints, but I strongly suspect most of them are just tacked on for good measure.
Yeah, I get why people don't want wind turbines right next to their house, but also in my country I see people in the countryside complaining about turbines that are literally in middle of a forest, many kilometers away. It's just pathetic, especially since we're talking about economic backwater, where tax revenue and jobs from those turbines are a significant plus.
I don't mind them in the distance. I would love if these stupid things were 40km away. The closest is like 500 meters away from my house.
They're awful.
I live in the country for the peace and quiet and dark at night.
Now with a wind farm, there is a constant background hum that reminds me of living near a highway in the city, and a swishing noise that's louder than the cicadas and other night time bugs. Also, the red blinking safety lights do actually keep me up at night, but I might just be very sensitive to light.
I fully supported and still support the wind farm, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to host a turbine (and therefore benefit at all from these things). But, I really, really, really don't like the side effects at all.
500 meters is very close, if it ACTUALLY affects you negatively I'd say your concerns are valid, but at 2km it's only going to be the skyline, which isn't your property unless you're in NYC.
No. You recognize the drawbacks and still support the project for the good of others. That's the opposite of NIMBY, it's a high level of emotional maturity.
Yeah they claimed the associated hardware for it was noisy. I don’t want to link to the actual comments because that’s kind of mean spirited, I’m just pointing out that I’ve heard people complain about the noise from solar and it’s pretty wild to me. I’ve been in close proximity to pretty large arrays and in plenty of homes with them on rooftops. You don’t notice them at all. They also don’t make the air around them unbreathable
I have a residential solar installation, and the inverter makes some noise when the relays are switching between import and export. I'm not complaining - although it was indeed surprising
I assume from context that the "house values" you and several other apparently British posters are using is what in the US we would call "home prices"? Or have I guessed wrong and it is being used more like "family values"? If the latter, what kind of values are meant?
It's home prices indeed AFAICT. It's fairly bloody-minded ti think house prices will go down with nearby renewables, it'd be a small blip if any at all. Give me wind turbines around and take away the cars and delivery motorcycles.
House prices are the UK's version of "the spice must flow". The whole Ponzi scheme is dependent on that market, as there isn't much else. Too big to fail.
Specifically, concern for house prices in a really myopic way. It's 'preferable' to hamstring the place you live in than to turn it into somewhere with a functioning economy that people want to live in.
If it makes you feel better, it's the same in the US. Some cities self destruct in pursuit of maintaining real estate prices. Of course, once they self destruct, prices plummet. Nobody considers that part.
This has been going on for decades, e.g. 275 kV and 400 kV Supergrid construction back in the 1960s:
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
In Norway, power cables have been a top-tier political issue for years. They make electricity more expensive locally, since the surplus power can be exported instead of needing to be dumped for 0 or negative cost.
Even without new physical cables - very recently Nordic power markets switch to Flow Based Market Coupling (FBMC) - which basically takes physical properties of the existing lines (coupling points) in grid balancing operations, which allowed some underused lines to be used more (practically) - which made electricity cheaper in some locations, and more expensive in others (because cheaper electricity flew from that region to more expensive ones). It is akin to blocking train lines to a holiday resort because poorer people will be able to access it.
Heard lots of grumbling from an acquaintance in Germany that a big issue is, I quote, "Bavarians not wanting either overground nor underground power lines that would bring power from north to south, so at best we sell wind power from north to west and the south of germany buys nuclear from france" ;)
It's a huge issue, see the depressing web page on Südlink. Massively delayed, much more expensive, and less efficient because it has to be underground. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink
Germany, like the UK, has dynamic national electricity pricing, which makes no sense when the interconnections are not powerful enough to actually make it a single electricity market.
It's not a real free market, though, if you ignore transmission. Since transmission is a scarce resource it needs to be part of the market to send the signal to build more of it (or more battery storage, or better located production). The national auctions obscure the actual resource shortage and therefore the market can't work.
And at its extreme BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
It's frustratingly hard to get friends and neighbours to understand when they're part of the problem, that their "special" situation isn't special after all.
Oh there was this whole famous case with construction of HS2(Britain's high speed rail project) - a farmer was offered £2M(!!!) compensation for the project requiring that a single pylon was going to be constructed on his land. Outrageous, right? But get this - he successfully sued the government saying 2M is not enough, and an independent expert valued his losses due the presence of the pylon at twice that if I remember correctly - the government(the taxpayers) had to pay.
Power lines I don't get as a NIMBY concern. The other things I can see the argument. I bought a house partially because it has direct access to a pole mounted transformer.
I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers can easily take 8+ hours due to the excavation requirement. I've had outages that lasted over 24 hours because of buried infrastructure issues. It's nice that it's all hidden until it breaks.
I guess it depends on what the common failure mode is. During the 2020 derecho our neighborhood with buried lines was without power for roughly four hours and it's the only time our power has gone out for any significant time in the 10 years I've been here. It wasn't even our buried lines that had the problem, but the lines serving them. Places in the city with poled power delivery were down for up to two weeks. There have been multiple times where houses surrounding us are out of power but ours just keeps chugging along.
Mine's buried; was dug up and replaced overnight a few years ago. If it's slow I think that's just under-resourcing and scheduling rather than it actually taking that long to deal with the specific circumstance.
I'm not involved or anything, but I certainly agree aesthetically. In visiting Canada it often strikes me that what ought to be beautiful landscape looks more like an industrial estate.
Same shit is happening in Belgium. We need extra transmission lines to connect the offsore wind turbines to the rest of the grid, and to improve grid stability in general, but NIMBYs have been campaigning against this for years.
Power lines that cut over your property? I can buy that - thats a nuisance. I'm not saying I would I am saying that as a rural property owner that would be annoying.
We have a similar situation in Italy with garbage.
Nobody wants new waste dumps anywhere near (tens of miles) of their own houses, and each time there's an insane amount of blockades and protests.
Bureaucracy gets very messy because towns and provinces and regions (equivalent to less federated us states, more or less) and the central government start having legal disputes over those things that drag decades.
A 400kV trench construction swathe also includes the soil storage areas - subsoil and topsoil are separated for return afterwards, as well as clearance to the fencing (https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download).
Why do trenches need to be dug across the countryside? Put them alongside existing roads and rail lines. Same with above-ground power lines. It might make them a bit longer, but the ‘eyesore’ is already there, and we can avoid making new ones.
(Re rail lines — if you build power lines over existing rail lines you could also electrify the rail route at the same time, and get rid of the diesel locomotives).
To be fair to the National Grid there - a 400kV power line is substantial: it has to have phase separations and be buried deep enough, plus space for reactive compensation from being buried.
Rail lines go though towns by design, and as you see from comments even here, the one thing people really hate the thought of is power lines near houses.
It all links back to preventing renewable energy and maintaining our dependence on fossil fuel imports from autocratic nations and "big enough to lobby" O&G industry. The locals and their dislike of power lines are just convenient pawns.
Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.