Okay...but the article has far too little emphasis on wind's problem with polarizing cultural branding. If you're just trying to sell wind at small scales, in deep-blue areas - that can be quite useful. But at real scales, nationally, when 1/2 the population votes for Team Red? D'oh, no. Wind advocates should be talking "like drilling oil wells, but with thousands of tons of steel, going straight up into the air, and a 200-ton generator on every one, pumping out umpteen gigawatts of power, and proving that America can still build man-sized stuff, and ...".

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atoav 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You Americans always tell me (European), just how big your country is. When we talk about nuclear energy my worries of nuclear waste are always countered with: "We have enough empty space".

There are literally oil fields with millions of tons of steel moving about, but suddenly with wind energy space with moving metal structures in it is a problem? I don't buy that the opposition to wind energy is entirely rational.

	▲	sfn42 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People aren't rational. If people were rational we would have been building exclusively nuclear, wind, solar and other clean power generation for the past 40+ years and coal power would have been history decades ago. Natural gas would have been niche power generation for special use cases.

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lithos 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah that works.

Also worth mentioning there are some great studies of windmills helping crops by regulating temp and humidity in the day/night when they're in farm fields.

(Right now Trump has a hate against them for losing a NIMBY fight against power companies).

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SpicyLemonZest 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it true that wind power has polarizing cultural branding, or do opponents of wind power fabricate cultural issues with it to justify their opposition? Vestas for example, the world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines, has a US site that's framed pretty much how you're recommending (https://us.vestas.com/en-us).

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bell-cot 11 hours ago | parent [-]

With the bitter cultural divide, and Team Blue so obviously besotted with wind, I don't think "rational" opponents of wind (Big Coal, Big Oil, etc.) need to do any fabrication. And less-rational opponents of wind power don't need any reason, beyond "to show off my loyalty to Team Red", to fabricate.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't understand what you're talking about. Who is "Team Blue" and what makes it obvious that they're besotted with wind? I understand that you're trying to gesture at the major political parties and their supporters, but it's not at all obvious that the Democratic National Committee, or Hakeem Jeffries, or Joe Biden is besotted with wind. So who specifically is the subject here?