NIMBY vs. humanity's future

[suchmoon]

I'm not personally too sure on the claims of renewables (in your example, specifically wind) being able to compete with Natl Gas and so on. But yeah, seems like renewables are going to have to innovate b/c the tap on government money has stopped (and will most likely stay stopped if Trump stays in office)

Wind can't completely replace NG power plants because of its intermittent nature so barring a major breakthrough in energy storage we will probably need at least the peak load natural gas power plants for a long time.

It is however price-competitive in some regions and can be installed in smaller capacities. And it's still evolving. There's some witchcraft with pitch control and remote wind gust sensors and radar and stuff like that, which allows raising capacity by reusing most of the existing infrastructure, not to mention just building larger towers and blades from some future magic materials. Combined cycle NG power plants can reach ~60% efficiency and that technology is quite old - probably not much room for improvement remains beyond that.

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[Febo]

Recently in my town there was a very big uproar because the municipality had signed a contract with some privates to install large scale wind turbines atop a very, very remote hill in order to create a wind farm.
Basically the group of protesters succeeded its goal to postpone the project.

Usually wind turbines are prohibited because of birds. If they are to be placed on paths where some rare birds move they will not get permission to operate.  I guess long term main source of green energy will be solar.  but in parts of the world with not much sun only alternative will be nuclear power.  Of course right now we mainly have hydroplants, but their share will reduce with more and more need for energy.  Power from wind will always be irrelevant.