Stuff You Should Know - The Power of the Wind

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

You probably know wind energy projects have been around since the 90s, but did you know they now provide 10% of America’s energy, and more than that in other countries? Learn about what’s ahead for wind and what it’ll need to become a real star like coal.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started. Where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's through line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy and I'm your host, Elliot Connick. Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently co-parenting two young boys with her former partner David.

David, he is the leader. He just don't want to leave me. But how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship? Like, what's the blue part? David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to Family Therapy on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody.

We are coming to a town ostensibly near you, so putatively see us. That's right. May 29th we'll be in Boston, really Medford, Massachusetts. The next night we're going to go down to Washington D.C. and then scooch back up to New York City at Town Hall on May 31st. Yeah, and if you're one of those people who likes to plan way far in advance, then you can go ahead and get tickets for our shows in August. We're gonna start out where, Chuck?

We're gonna be in Chicago August 7th, Minneapolis August 8th, then Indianapolis for the very first time on August 9th, and then we're gonna wrap it up in Durham, North Carolina and right here in Atlanta on September 5th and September 7th. Yep, so you can get all the info you need and all the ticket links you need by going to stuffyousshouldknow.com and hitting that tour button. Or you can also go to Linktree slash SYSK Live. We'll see you guys this year. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Ben here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

Wind edition because it's blowing my microphone all over the place. What is going on here? I feel like you should handle this one and I'll just do wind sound effects in the background the whole time, okay? That'll be good. My studio's haunted today. I don't know what's happening. You should handle this one and I'll just do wind sound effects in the background the whole time, okay? That'll be good. My studio is haunted today. I don't know what's happening. Is it eerie? No, just nothing is right. Sometimes I feel like Ruby comes in here and messes with stuff. Oh no. I think that's the ghost. Oh my goodness. That's hilarious Oh what happens when I do this? Yeah, like the lights are down, everything's different.

Okay. All right, I'm fine. I'm back to normal. Well, I'm back to normal too. I'm going to go ahead and presume Ben's back to normal. So you listener, if you're back to normal, great. We can get started then. If not, we'll wait.

Just email us. Yeah, so we're talking about wind power and I guess a good starting point would be history and not to get too, like, in the weeds with, you know, sailing ships and stuff like that, because people have long been using wind for different things. But I think as far as generating power, early on, you know, water was the thing. Obviously, coal was the thing. But there was a guy, a very intelligent Scot, and we love our Scottish people. In 1887, it was an engineer who designed the first

wind turbine to do what we're talking about today. Yeah, and it's not like he had the, he was the first person to come up with a wind turbine. I mean, everybody knows the Dutch had windmills for centuries and centuries before, but this guy was the first one to try to genuinely harness wind power to generate electricity. His name was James Blythe. And he had a second home, apparently, in the town of Merrikerk in Scotland, which has great scotch, I assume.

Scotland, which has Great Scotch, I assume. And he had so much power from his wind turbine chuck that he offered the excess of it to the town of Merricurk. And this guy was so advanced. He had 12 batteries storing the electrical power that his wind turbine was generating. He just invented it like lock, stock and barrel the first time out. Great Scott. Literally. He really was a great Scott.

So, you know, and on small scales, people came behind him and were doing it, but it wasn't really until a gentleman, a Danish gentleman, a meteorologist named, uh, I've never seen that P P-O-U-L. Pole? I guess. Polakor? He is the one who really gets a lot of the credit, rightfully so, for kind of getting wind generated power going in a serious way, because in the 1890s, he's like, you know

what? I can produce a steady stream of power. This thing isn't as intermittent as they were before. And I'm actually going to create enough power for my village, for the village of Askoff. And I'm going to found something that sounds like sorcery. I'm going to found the Society of Wind Electricians even.

Yeah. And he did. He was very successful out of the gate. That was 1895 he started. 1908 there were 72 different systems running in Denmark, and each of them had a capacity between 5 and 25 kilowatts, which is peanuts. Peanuts now. But at the time, this was, remember in our Love Canal episode where electricity for a while, no

matter how you generated it, had to be generated right next to where you were distributing the power. So it would make sense that you'd have a windmill right at the village that was being powered because if you were getting it from a coal-fired plant, you had to have it right there too. So that made wind kind of competitive for a while. And even until the, into the 20th century, it was still fairly competitive, even as coal and gas fired electrical plants started to take over because in rural areas, they didn't have access to the grid.

So they, they were using wind turbines. And then finally FDR comes along and said nuts to that we're electrifying this whole darn tootin country and the wind turbines fell over in surprise And then finally FDR comes along and said, nuts to that, we're electrifying this whole darn tootin' country. And the wind turbines fell over in surprise and coal-fired electrical grids took over. Yeah, and they pretty much held the, you know, the high ground until the 90s when there was a renewed interest in wind. Things got a little windy in the 90s.

In 92, Congress passed a tax credit. Clinton came along after that, you know, started to fund more, you know, basically federal projects toward wind. And then states got on board individually, especially states like Texas and Iowa, you know, if you're out and you have lots of wind, lots of open plains. You can generate more wind energy. And Texas, for their part, has really, you know, up until recent years, been super supportive of wind energy and are far and away the leader in U.S. wind energy. as far as like raw numbers, from 1990 to 2010, we went from almost 2.8 billion kilowatt hours to close to 5.6 billion.

And then 2010, that jumped to 95 billion, which is just a huge jump over that span of time. And then now in 2022, we are at 434 billion kilowatt hours. So in 32 years, we went from 2.79 billion to 434 billion. That's pretty rapid progress. I mean, that's amazing. That's just in the United States too. As we'll see like around the world, there are countries who are like, yeah, why don't you catch up, lame-os. And then other countries like China are just jumping ahead of the curve even more impressively.

But wind is definitely, I'm sorry for this, but wind is picking up around the world. Yeah, so we should probably talk a little bit about how the actual machine works. We're going to concentrate on the hot systems, that is the horizontal axis, HAWT. Just a little bit about the vertical axis, the vaults, they're kind of cool in that you can, you don't like have to point it at the wind, but they're smaller, they're slower, they're not as efficient, they're for, you know, small scale generation, so those aren't sort of the big daddies, the big players in the field.

It's really the hot rotors that are hot. They're hella hot. They are. So yeah, if you have a small, what's called a distributed system, which is like that thing that say James Blythe or Paul Lacour came up with that just powers like a very small area, say your house, you're probably going to do a vertical access type, it's like a merry-go, say your house, you're probably going to do a vertical axis type. It's like a merry-go-round with sails around it.

But the sails are actually wind turbines and it looks cool. Cooler than a horizontal axis one, if you ask me. But the horizontal ones are most ubiquitous because they can generate power in aces compared to the vertical types, right? They're way more efficient. You can make them way bigger because if you're making something with the vertical types, right? They're way more efficient. You can make them way bigger, because if you're making something with a vertical axis, it takes up ground space, because it's basically

on the ground. The horizontal ones, they're way up in the air, catching generally steady streams of air that have very little turbulence. They're moving fairly fast compared to the stuff on the ground. And they can convert it very efficiently, at least as far as wind turbines are concerned into electricity. Yeah you mentioned the size these are the you

know if you're traveling out west in the plains or something and you see a wind farm these are the big daddies that we're talking about the the little guys are about eight feet in diameter. These are the rotors. But if you go offshore, and we'll talk a little bit more about what's going on in the ocean, but those can be 800 feet,

generate up to 18 megawatts, which is just a lot of power being generated. And I mean, those things are just absolutely enormous. Like I can't even picture what an 800-foot turbine might look like. So take three football fields, cut off just a little bit of the third one, and then that's the turbine diameter. I mean, it's so massive, it like boggles the mind, even though we're talking about, you know, a few hundred feet. It's just, I just can't imagine what that looks like up close.

Yeah, same. So connecting to the US power grid, like the size of these things have basically increased over time. They've just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. These days, if you're talking, like not those gargantuan's offshore, but a regular like terrestrial turbine on a wind farm is generally about 400 to 450 feet in diameter.

They're about 30 to 35 feet off the ground, and they generate each one about 3.2 megawatts. Yeah, and this is actually a case where bigger is better from what I've seen. The bigger they are means that they can generate more electricity, which means that you need fewer of them on site. So I saw the average is expected to go down in like next year from 222 turbines in like a good size average wind turbine farm to 89. So you got far fewer, they're bigger, but they also are figuring out how to make them quieter too.

So by going bigger, you're actually getting a lot more out of it. It's kind of like one of those things where the economy of scale just exceeds the sum of its parts. Which is two different things, but I put them together expertly if you ask me. Yeah, and these things they got to be spaced apart. You can't put them obviously right on each other. So that that makes a difference, you know, if you have fewer of them, they're not spread out as far, obviously, geographically. And we'll talk about it a little bit more, but it's not like you can't do anything with the land. A lot of times you'll just see them out kind of the middle of nowhere, but that can be

cattle land and stuff like that. Yes. So, usually the horizontal axis wind turbines, which are just the wind turbines you've seen pictures of or video of or maybe even seen off in the distance, depending on where you're driving around, they usually have three blades. And three is kind of this magic number because the more blades you have, the more drag it produces. Each blade experiences drag from the air as it moves through the air. The air is like, no, stop doing that, and tries to like stop it. And even though it's individual for each blade, they accumulate and combine and transfer that to the rotor. So it experiences five blades worth of drag. So three blades is kind of sweet because you can generate quite a bit of electricity. You can capture a bunch of wind, but you're also reducing drag dramatically so that's why

basically every single Horizontal axis turbine has three blades what's your ceiling fan breath? Definitely more than I don't know I'm trying to think now. I've got such a Strange variety of ceiling fans and I think about it. I'm gonna say, I'll go with three. Sure. Three. What's yours? I typically like a five blader.

Okay. Four is okay. I've got one three and I've realized that I don't really like it. And boy, do I hate those two-bladers. Those should not exist. I think that's broken is what you're describing. I know people like them so I don't want to yuck someone's yum but aesthetically I don't care for the two-blade propeller style ceiling fan.

Okay here's the big question though. Do you like those fans that look like hand fans that they might have used in Casablanca in the 1930s. Oh, that are ceiling fans? Yes, that's what the blades look like. No, I don't like to get too, like, weird. Okay. Well, here's the real question, though. You thought you had the real question.

Do you get up and change the direction of that thing every year? Sometimes, yes, depending on whether I'm chilly. Thinking about it or? And motivated. Okay, yeah. Those are the two factors that have to combine. I think that's the factor for almost everyone, except for the real fastidious person

who just has it on their calendar. Even I don't have that on my calendar. And I'm suddenly impressed with myself and kind of relieved. Oh, good. So the hots, we said we said that the vertical winds don't need to be pointed at the wind. The HOTs do face into the wind,

but you might think, well, the wind changes, Chuck and Josh, how's that possible? Well, they do it by moving the turbine to face the wind. It's got a yaw system, so it's not too hard to do. And they also have pitch systems that can change the actual angle of the blades the wind. It's got a yaw system so it's that's awesome. They don't need to get too cooking. It's like a motor spinning too fast. It's just never good. Yeah, it can break pretty easy.

So if they change the angle of the blade relative to the direction of the wind, the wind is going to push on it rather than making it spin. And so if it pushes on it, it's going to go much slower. So you still want them to kind of move, but not too fast. And that's pretty cool that they've got that figured out. Um, yeah. So you got yaw control, pitch control, and the whole thing is, um, connected to a rotator that is connected to a generator.

And sometimes you've got a gearbox in the middle because here's the thing. One of the reasons why wind didn't catch on or didn't continue to spread as coal did is because it's really difficult to get a windmill rotor to spin fast enough to generate electricity using traditional electromagnets, right? You need something like 1800 RPMs to really get a good electrical buzz cooking. And windmill rotors, especially the big ones these days, they're at like 5, 10, 18, 60, I think is about the top that I saw. So about one rotation a second, which is still a third of what it needs

to be to generate electricity. Although, by the way, they've got that figured out. But for like one that's using a traditional dynamo, not dynamo, I guess generator, right? Where you've got like magnets spinning through coils to generate electricity. They have a gearbox and somehow, through some sort of black magic, I just genuinely don't understand gears, Chuck.

We have to do an episode on it, I guess. No, no, no, no, no, no. You don't want to do that. It translates that 60 rotations a minute into 1,800 just by changing the direction. I don't know how they do it. I know that it's really basic stuff that even Archimedes used to mess with.

I just can't wrap my head around how that happens. Well, I definitely don't want to do something on gears because many years ago I I'm pretty sure I updated the old house stuff works article on gears. Okay, and it's It's pretty mind-numbing and boring. Okay but you know just think about the size of gears and Like gears with tons and tons of teeth, you know, hooking up and making love to a gear with fewer teeth is going to, like the top one's

going to be spinning really fast and the other one's going to be spinning less. Don't, still doesn't make sense to me. Really? Well, have you ever seen a gear like,, you know, like a gif or something of gears at work? Yeah, I looked it up for this to just try to see if I could wrap my head around it this time and it still just wouldn't work. Well, fewer teeth just means slower. But that doesn't make sense. Like, I understand that more teeth means faster. How? That's where I get stuck. It's catching fewer teeth, which is like the go button basically. I'll chew on this. We'll move on. I don't think it's going to work. No, no, no. And here I'm the one like lobbying to not do this and I'm trying to explain it.

He's just sticking the short stuff in the middle of this episode. Yeah. Here's another fun fact is the, and this is not super consequential, but I just thought it was interesting, is the gearbox and all that stuff is up tall in the tower in something called a nestle, and that is an aviation term. That's like planes have nestles. So just like you have a spinning propeller on a plane. Okay. Yeah, so it's an aviation term, kind of cool.

Okay, so like that whole thing that it looks like the turbines are mounted to, that whole thing is basically the nestle and that's where the gearbox and the rotor and the generator are all tucked in, right? Yeah, I think it's like off of the blades, just like it would be on a plane. So the thing with the gearbox, it really works. Like you can get some pretty good electricity out of a relatively small set of moving parts But they are moving parts and they're way up high Usually dozens of feet in the air

And they can be loud too and they can get dirty and break down like any gears can so there's another kind called a direct drive system and it it basically they figured out and I couldn't get to the bottom of this they can use that regular rotation of a wind turbine to generate electricity. I think it just requires much larger parts. I think it's generally what the trade-off is. So there's pros and cons to both kinds and they've kind of come up with some new stuff that's on the horizon or happening now that seem to kind of supersede both of those too, as we'll talk about.

Yeah, and you know, no matter how efficient you can build really any kind of power generation system, there are limits. At a certain point, you can increase efficiency and increase efficiency, but then the laws of physics step in and say, you can't be 100% efficient, you're never going to capture every bit of the wind, it's just not possible. And there was a German physicist in 1919 named Albert Benz who calculated the theoretical maximum of kinetic energy that you can zap into electricity

and it basically caps off at close to 60%, 59.3%. Wind is about 35 to 45% efficient, which may not sound great, but Livia helped us out with this. She points out, you know, wind is free, so it's not, you know, you've got these things sitting out there, so it's not like you're paying to generate that wind. Right, plus also if you look into the other types of fuels used to generate electricity, it's perfectly in line. Nuclear is between 30 to 45 percent efficient, coal is 38 to 45. Natural gas is only 25 percent efficient, so it's way better than natural gas as far as efficiency goes.

And if you're wondering why can't it be 100% efficient, the explanation that I found that I'm still having trouble digesting too, I think the gears thing really threw me off first, then I went into this and it was just hopeless, to transfer 100% of the power from wind to a turbine, that means the wind has to come to a stop and Transfer all of its energy to the turbine when it comes in contact with it And I understand that means the wind stops, but as long as there's a stream of wind coming at you

Why would that matter? That's my big question I don't know. I'm not gonna hazard a guess on this one. All right. Well, how about this? We'll take a break. To everybody else, it'll just be a couple of ads, but you and I will spend the next 45 minutes or so hashing this out. All right. Can we have lunch? We can have lunch. We'll order it. Okay. You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started.

Where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's through line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I Heart Podcast update this week on your free I Heart Radio app. Fodor's Guide to Espionage, a 60s era spy story of the world's first and greatest travel writer, Eugene Fodor, as he jet sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Elliot Coney and this is Family Therapy. In my best hopes, I guess, identify the life that I want and work towards it. I've never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of. I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true? That's true, and I'm not offended by that. Thank you for going through those things and thank you for overcoming them. Thank God for deliverance. Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive.

It just keeps me going. I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now. So how'd we do today? We did good. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We're going to talk a little bit about where we stand today here in the United

States. We'll get to elsewhere in the world later on. Don't you worry. We're going to talk a little bit about where we stand today here in the United States. We'll get to elsewhere in the world later on. Don't you worry. We're looking at you, Denmark. Right now, the United States has about 70,000 wind turbines going with a capacity, a total potential capacity of about 146 gigawatts, which should make Doc Brown shake in his whatever kind of shoes he wore. I looked up what that is relative to what we use. I think we use something like 1300 gigawatts.

So it's like a 10th of that, but that's still pretty good. I mean, think about it. We went from like basically zero wind power in the 80s to a 10th of our capacity power in the 80s to a tenth of our capacity is in the form of wind turbines. Nothing on Doc Brown, huh? No, I just think it was so perfectly that it'd be like me pointing out that we've been using the word turbine. You know what I mean?

Do you know who Doc Brown is? Sure. Who? He's like Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future. What kind of person do you think I am? Do you know who Doc Brown is? Sure. Who? He's like Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future. What kind of person do you think I am? Do you know me at all? I guess the kind of person who refuses to comment on a great Doc Brown joke.

I was commenting on it. I was saying that it was such a perfect joke and it was inserted so perfectly that there was no need to comment. There's no comment? Yes. Yes. I'm gonna have to remember that.

Your joke was so good. Oh no, you know what that you basically just said is that so funny I forgot to laugh. So last year, 2023, about 10% of our electricity came from wind, not too bad. I mentioned Texas is the leader. They're generating about 25% of that, a little more even. That's just mind boggling to think, considering Texas, you know? They are, well, let's talk about Texas for a second because they have been far and away the leader. They got a lot of wide open land there in West Texas.

They had their own power grid. They're the only state with their own power grid, they're the only state with their own power grid, so that makes it a lot easier for them with interstate projects to not have to, you know, they can rely on themselves like Texans like to do. But here's the thing, in recent years, I don't think it's a stretch to say that there's been some, I mean, Livia calls it ideological warfare, and she's basically right. And that's unfortunate because now there are conservatives in Texas that are making it harder to do something they're really, really good at, and that's generate wind for power.

And that's a real shame because it seems like ideology, I mean, I know there are, and we'll talk about downsides of wind production and there are gripes that it's, you know, there might be inconsistent supply, but it really seems to kind of come down to like, no, we are an oil state and we're, even though we're great at making wind, we, I guess, can't do both.

I don't know. But I mean, even though they are an oil state, they've been an oil state for decades and decades, like a century basically, and they still spend all this time and money and effort into creating this wind infrastructure. Yeah, keep it going, Texas. I don't think it has anything to do with oil. I think certain vein of conservativism equates anything-

Is it woke power? Earth-friendly to liberals. I know, I know. certain vein of conservativism equates anything earth friendly to liberals. I know, I know. And like because everything's so divisive and the sides are just so divided that like you just can't possibly be into something that liberals favor. Like that's just crazy. I know.

And vice versa, like there's, I mean, I don't mean to just say like this is all conservatives, like the divisiveness, definitely it can be found on both sides of the equation. It's just sad that there's two sides. Let's just get past the sides, everybody. Well, it's sad that it's affecting something like this, which like I said, Texas is really, really good at.

They have a lot of it figured out. They're the leader in the United States. Like, keep it going, Texas. The thing is this, Chuck, they're trying, they're not necessarily succeeding. In the 2022, 2023 session, a whole raft of bills that were trying to basically make wind power investment harder, none of them passed.

And I think the reason why, and this is kind of like the thing, like, yes, you can oppose wind power, but I think the giant gears are already in motion, like massive corporations. But you don't know how those work. I know I don't, but I can tell when they're moving, I guess. Yeah. So like just giant multinational corporations have sunk so many tens and hundreds of billions of dollars into this investment and are starting now to actually reap benefit from it.

It's not going back. Like sorry, it's just not. So it's still moving forward. It just sucks that it has to move forward at this in this kind of like, it's just a negative but with a negative vibe, you know? Yeah, no, totally. I mean, hopefully, you know, Americans are capitalists and hopefully money will win out in the end.

Cause like you said, a lot of money invested and a lot of money to be made. The thing is though, that's not to say that people who oppose, especially locally oppose wind projects don't have a point. There's a lot to be said about not wanting to live near a wind turbine or in particular a wind farm because it's just one of those things that like this is going to impact your life. It can impact your real estate values. It can impact what's called the view shed. Just simply your view. There's actual legitimate reasons for people to push back on this stuff,

but that doesn't mean that there can't be like a compromise, a way forward to find legitimate places where wind can be generated well and efficiently without ruining some nearby community. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot of, what's it called, NIMBY going on. Yeah. On both sides, you know. Well, yeah, for sure. And again, I don't blame anybody for that.

It sucks because that whole idea means that usually poor communities who can't represent themselves and don't have the means to really, have the political clout to push back on that kind of thing, end up with this stuff. But it seems like with things like wind turbine farms in particular, the decision making is being decentralized. So more and more local communities are being able to step in and be like, no, this is not happening here. Sorry. Where our city council voted against it, it's not happening. Um, and I think that that's, I think that's legitimate.

Um, I think that I, I don't, I don't know what the way forward is, but I know that there's a way forward, but I don't think it's shoving a wind farm down local communities throughout, whether they like it or not. Yeah. And then, by the way, NIMBY, if people are like, what the heck is Chuck talking about, uh, that's just the acronym just the acronym the not in my backyard thing yeah you're like no wind energy is great we should totally do it but I don't want one of those in my backyard. Over there. Go do it over there much much better.

Exactly. But moving on we promised to talk about offshore most of what's going on right now is on land in terms of wind collection. I guess they're not collecting it, but in a way they are. But if you think about a lot of wind out on the open ocean, that seems like a no-brainer in some ways, and we will get to the environmental aspects of all this stuff later, so people out there screaming like, how can you put more things in the ocean?

Like, we'll get to it. But it is a promising idea, stronger winds. There's a lot of permitting issues. Obviously, what we just talked about with the NIMBY thing, a lot of communities, you know, beachfront property are generally people who either, you know, if you're lucky enough to have owned it forever, you may not be super wealthy, but most people who, like, live on the beach are wealthy, and they don't want to see that stuff. So, there's been a lot of complaints about looking at that kind of thing, but we may

be headed toward, I mean, they're building more and more of them in the coming years, it seems like. Well, this is kind of what I was talking about. There was a big push against the Vineyard Wind project. Yeah. I should say there was a vocal push against it, and it's still happening. They're doing, I think, 62 turbines. They've already got five installed, and it's just moving forward.

But at the same time, a bunch of local people who make their money off of fishing, they were affected by this. Like their fishing grounds were now a wind turbine farm. They couldn't fish there anymore. So they're being compensated for that. Um, they're paying commercial fishermen to not fish. Essentially to stay out of this area at least, or to accept a buffer zone. So, um, like, yeah, there's like, that's what I'm saying. There's compromises to be, to be made here. And other people are like, this view shed thing,

what are you talking about? Like if you hold your hand up, the, the, the windmill that you see on the horizon is smaller than your fingernail. Like that's what you're seeing in other people. Like I don't want to see it. I don't care if it's 15 miles out. I don't want to see it.

Um, but those people seem to have, I guess they're outnumbered or outgunned by the people who are like, no, this project's going forward. And again, it's tough to argue about it because sure. Right now the 68 megawatts that that Vineyard Wind project is putting out with just the five turbines,

that's enough to power 30,000 homes and their goal is something like 800 megawatts. So there's going to be a lot of people getting a lot of clean energy from the wind project. Yeah. People are looking to the ocean. The Gulf of Mexico may have one at some point, the mid-Atlantic is being targeted. Joe Biden and his administration have a target of 30,000 megawatt offshore hours by 2030.

It seems like we're going to mention a lot of goals and things. It doesn't seem like any of these will be reached, but those are the goals at least. And we're explaining why as we're going. But California is trying to get 20,000, I'm sorry, 25,000 megawatts by 2045. These are going to be floating because the Pacific is so deep. And Cal Berkeley, they did a study and they said that offshore wind by 2050 could potentially

supply between 10 and 25 percent of all US energy not just wind energy. And offshore is the smallest one so far it's the smallest segment and the fact that the offshore wind farms are so small right now that's significant growth and I get the impression that one of the reasons they're growing is one it's not up on anybody's real estate it's like way out in the ocean even though you can kind of see them. But secondly, 50% of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast, and transmission lines are a real thing, a real issue for wind power.

So if you can get a 50-mile length of transmission wire to 50% of Americans. That's a pretty significant number of people. Yeah, I wonder if some of these, you know, like the younger generation is generally, I mean this is a broad stroke, but generally a little more into trying to go toward renewable energy. So I wonder if they're sort of, you know, if like the rich kids are even fighting back against their parents about stuff like this. Like I wonder how, you know, you said it was like a pinky nail. Right. Dad's complaining. He's on the beach. And the kids are like, Dad, just hold up your pinky nail and block it out. Boomer.

Right, exactly. The thing is, is I was very interested to find this out. There's a lot of environmentalists who are opposed to these wind projects too. They're making strange bedfellows with people who don't like renewable at all. They're like, you're an environmentalist, how can you be opposed to this? They're like, look at those giant turbines. That's just one of them. And they're putting more and more offshore. They're ruining habitats. They're ruining communities like this is not the way to go and they're like well

what way do you want to go hippie like what's wrong now we're finally doing the stuff you wanted to do and the thread that seems to be emerging among younger environmentalists or among environmentalists in general is degrowth it's like no we don't need to create more and more wind farms to meet electrical demand that's going to increase over the next two decades. We need to decrease the electrical demand. And yeah, we need to supply it with wind and stuff like that, but we're going in the wrong

direction here. We're billing, billing, billing to meet growth, growth, growth. They're like, we need to stop growing. So that's actually made them opposed to a lot of these projects, especially the biggest ones. Yeah. I mean, I think those people look out and see a big wind farm and it doesn't look any different to them than a nuclear power plant or a huge coal plant. All they see is some giant monstrosity of capitalism at work. That's exactly right. Yeah, and you know, there's a point. So I say we take a break and we'll jump back into the more of the nuts and bolts of this.

All right. You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Thru Line, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started. Where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's Thru Line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Elliot Conney and this is Family Therapy. In my best hopes, I guess, identify the life that I want and work towards it. I never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of. I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father.

Is that true? That's true. And I'm not offended by that. Thank you for going through those things and thank you for overcoming them. Thank God for deliverance. Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions be positive. It just keeps me going. I feel like my focus is redirected

in a different aspect of my life now. So, how'd we do today? We did good. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy. Listen now on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Unbroken season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for two season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the

romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, in addition to a lot of the pushback that we just covered for a while, there's a lot of practical issues and challenges to making wind, what was it, like up to 25% of US demand by 2050, I think. That's crazy. One of them is transmission,, I think. That's crazy. One of them is transmission, like I said. Yeah, the wind is out in the middle of nowhere.

That's the problem. That's exactly right. Yeah. The places where it blows the most, they're the least number of people. And that means you have to build an infrastructure to get it from those less populated areas to the populated areas that want to use it. That's a big one and apparently there is a Princeton study that found that transmission

Infrastructure is growing at just like 1% a year and that if we keep that pace up the the reduction in fossil fuel emissions that the Inflation reduction act envisioned with a lot of its green stuff that was associated with it. We'll lose 80% of that Yeah that reduction so we need to definitely expand transmission lines. It's a big big step Yeah for sure getting the power there is a big deal one idea that You know is has a lot of promise and but you know it all has its downsides of course like there is no like perfect system Is storing the energy so there's a lot of work being done toward you know storage capacity because you know right now if the sun isn't shining if it's super

cloudy a lot if the wind isn't blowing very much then solar and wind are gonna take a hit and then that means that the fossil fuel plants just sort of make up for that. But if you know if we're leaning more and more on solar and wind and other renewables, we're going to have to figure out a way to store that stuff. Yeah, so just real quick for people who aren't in the United States or who are in the United States and don't pay attention to congressional packages, the inflation reduction act was a, um, a bill, there's a law that was passed in 2022 that had, it

was just this huge, huge spending package. But one of the things that it really focused on was the U S infrastructure, which needs updating big time, but it also looked forward down the future and it was like, how can we invest in, in, um, energy and renewables? And basically it said the government's even more open for business for renewable investment than

before. And as a result, it's already had huge impacts that was passed in 2022. In 2023, the investment in, um, renewable storage, so basically giant batteries that can store solar and wind power for use later has increased by 300%. They predicted that in 2040 there was going to be 50 gigawatts of storage capacity and

now they're up to, they're predicting it'll be more like 200 gigawatts of storage capacity by 2040 just because of the Inflation Reduction Act. Yeah, but again, you know, these batteries are, you know, not environmentally friendly to create the batteries like that. I don't even think we mentioned really the rare earth metals and things that are used for these, for the magnets, for the turbines, like that stuff isn't great either. So, like we said, there is no perfect system. I think early on the sort of pie in the sky stuff

with renewables was just like use wind and use sun, which is great. But you can't just talk about the blue sky stuff without talking about the downsides. Yeah, and we need to listen to the downsides too and then go back to the drawing board and not be like, nope, this is the way we're doing it. Totally.

We need to say, OK, great. Like, we're all on board with moving forward with this. Like, how can we figure out, or enough of us are on board with moving forward, how can we figure out how to do it so that it impacts the fewest people possible and the least amount possible? And that's, I mean, we're smart.

Like, humans are fairly smart animals and we can figure that kind of stuff out. We just have to go out of our way to take that into account. I feel like that's going to happen. I think so too. I say with trepidation. So we talked about, or we promised to talk about what's going on around the world and we mentioned Denmark, of course, because just like those windmills back in the day, they

were leader then and they're the leader now. They create 54.3% of their power supply from wind in Denmark as of a couple of years ago in 2022. Other European countries, Spain, Germany, Portugal, and then the UK, they're over 20%, so they're doing pretty good. If you're talking and that's percentage wise if you're talking just total wind generation the US is number two with 430 watt terawatt hours annually right now but you mentioned China. We're at 434 in second place. China is generating 763

terawatt hours per year and like running away with it. Yeah. And actually the world is extraordinarily fortunate that China has decided to do that rather than just rely on fossil fuels because the pollution that would be even worse than it is now if they use fossil instead of like wind and solar as they're planning on doing, it would just be, the impact would be nuts, essentially. Yeah, I mean, I think their goal in China

is full carbon neutrality by 2060, and wind is a very, very big part of that. Also, we should point out, China's not doing that because of their magnanimous benevolence towards humanity and the planet. They're doing it because they recognize that there's a lot of money coming down the pike for whoever's prepared for this kind of revolution. It's actually happening right now.

That figure from how much just the US alone improved as far as wind generation goes from the 90s is just astounding. Like I knew it was going on in the background. I had no idea that we were this far along already, which I found very heartening. Yeah, yeah, same. So we talked a lot about the downsides here and there.

We haven't talked about animals yet. Obviously, anytime you're screwing up a habitat for animals and nature that's gonna have a real bad effect you know there's no way around it they're gonna I mean just those spinning blades are gonna kill birds and bats and things that fly into them but the wind pressure around these farms can affect the habitats the terrestrial animals are affected I think they did a study in Europe about their roe deer and the European hare that are like, they're just not here anymore because of these wind farms.

In Norway, you know, they're obviously got a lot of wind going there, but they're shutting things down because reindeer, it's affecting reindeer, which is, you know, a very big deal in Norway, and the indigenous Sami people who heard the reindeer, so they can't mess with the indigenous cultures there, so they're shutting some of those down. Right, it's impacting local communities, no matter how small the community,

that they're responding to it. That's a big deal. There's also, I think you said earlier, a lot of impact, um, with ocean based wind because these things are huge. They're like giant oil derricks, but there's a bunch of them and they have to be like mounted to the continental shelf so they don't blow over.

So it's a huge, massive project. And the sound that it generates can rupture whales' ear drums. Um, it can completely disturb breeding grounds. It can do a lot of stuff. But again, it's been pointed out, like, if you do this right and you do the right kind of studies, if you look around and say, who is this going to impact? And then how can we mitigate those impacts?

There's stuff you can do to, to, to make the impact that much less or as low as possible like if it if you're impacting whales Then plan the construction phase of it for a time when the whales are off migrating on another part of the ocean so it's not gonna blow out their eardrums when you pile drive the pylons into the continental shelf or Move it over a little bit. Keep it out of the whales breeding ground put it somewhere else like there's just little things you can do that will decrease the impact tremendously. Yeah for sure. One thing we haven't talked about that I mean I never really considered this which is really short-sighted of me, but

these are big massive machines and when big massive machines reach the end of their life, it's not like they'll go forever. These are physical materials that wear out, including those huge turbines and blades. So when that stuff, the ones that came on early in the 90s and 2000, some of those are nearing the end of their life, and all of a sudden you're stuck with these blades that, you know, are just gargantuan and they're not made of bamboo

or banana fiber, you know, they're fiberglass and epoxy resin and they're kind of an environmental nightmare and so, like, what do you do with those? You can't just fill landfills with these giant beasts. No. There's a company in Tennessee called carbon rivers that says that they, they recycled about a thousand of the blades in 2023, which I'm guessing is probably significant, but still maybe a drop in the bucket. But they figured out how to extract the carbon fibers from the epoxy resin.

And then you can reuse the carbon fibers because they're very strong stuff. So that's great. That's good to have that online. But the better solution, at least in the future, is to start manufacturing the turbine blades in ways that they can be much more easily recycled. So I think they're using the same material still. They're just using processes that can later on down the road be reversed more easily and you can separate the fiberglass from the epoxy more easily.

And like you you know kind of what you've been saying about like why don't you change the way you're doing things as we go instead of being locked in. That is happening with those blades and there's a company in Germany, oh actually it's Siemens, big company. Is that the same company Siemens, GMSA, as regular Siemens? Sure. Okay, I just never heard the full name I guess. I didn't know Siemens had a last name. But they're basically saying well why don't we make a better kind of blade that uses a different kind of resin that is much more easily separated from that

fiberglass. So things like that, like you're talking about, like make the parts more easily recyclable or reusable. You know, I know they're using them on like like playgrounds and stuff trying to repurpose them. I guess it makes it a heck of a slide or something like that. But there are limits to how much you can, I mean, it all helps, but how much, because there's a lot of blades out there, they're gonna be coming offline. Right, and they're big.

Also, by the way, I think I was using carbon fiber and fiberglass interchangeably, and I'm not quite sure that's right. So they're fiberglass, right? Yeah, I think so. So there's a couple of other things that, um, that are drawbacks to turbines that need to be addressed, um, one's called shadow flicker. When the sun is lowish in the, on the horizon and

it's just kind of beaming through the wind turbine, as the turbine spins, it makes a flickering shadow. And if you live in range of that shadow, it can drive you crazy. As a matter of fact, they did a study to make sure that it wasn't rapid enough to trigger seizures. Yeah. And apparently the max is, again, 60 RPMs. So I think it's like a hundred and it takes double that to start to trigger photosensitive seizures.

So they're like, it's not going to trigger a seizure, but yes, it's extremely annoying when it happens, but they're like, it only happens certain times of the year for a couple of hours out of a day. Can we, can you just get used to it? And some people are like, no. And then other people are like, yeah, it's not. They, they did another study of people who've

lived in proximity of wind turbines. They're like, I don't even really notice anymore. And then noise too, like it makes a noise. But again, the fewer parts that you have, the less noise it's going to make. Like if you don't have a gearbox, those gears aren't there to make a bunch of noise. If you do have a gearbox, you need to soundproof your, what did you call that package that the airplane has too? Nest a nestle and then also they're making I think these giant those giant turbines are also going to be quieter they're like 18

percent quieter or something like that so yeah there's a lot of stuff that needs to be addressed but I feel like I just think it's gonna get addressed if I can share my opinion. Yeah, it's a sunny opinion. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right. Well, that's it for wind turbines for now. We'll have to revisit it in year 35 of Stuff You Should Know. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Yeah, I'm gonna call this Marcy is definitely Asian. We heard from quite a few Asian listeners for our peanuts episode. Mm-hmm Who were very kind, but they were kind of like guys you seemed a little hesitant to kind of to kind of go there but go there because Marcy was clearly Asian to every kid that was Asian in reading peanuts. And this one is from Hue Nguyen. So, hey guys, I'm a 43-year-old Vietnamese-American who grew up reading and watching peanuts. My friend's family and I assumed without question that Charles Schultz intended Marcy to be Asian-American

by drawing and writing her with so many shortcuts to signal Asian-American identity. First, her haircut. Marshy's hair is a short black bob with bangs. Many Asian-American girls had this fuss-free homemade haircut exacted upon them by their frugal mothers. Number two, her glasses. Asians and Americans and Asian-Americans do have a higher rate of myopia in developed countries.

So eyewear is just more common with us. Mm-hmm. She's awkward because she is so busy. I quote an article by Kevin Wong, which resonates with me, and so many children raised by overly protective immigrant parents who carried the trauma of war and or forced immigration.

Marcy couldn't come out to play because she had to practice her organ. She had to study. She had to read. This was our experience. Number four, she is othered by everyone. Asian language, food, religion and culture in general were and might still be considered foreign and weird in many parts of the US and I just assume Marcy was depicted as a strange little girl because that's how the peanuts gang and the rest of America would perceive a An unathletic bookish Asian child and then finally she calls peppermint Patty sir because English is her second language guys

In many East and Southeast Asian languages children address adults and people in positions of power and respect with courtesy titles That have no gender. So that's why Peppermint Patty was called Sir. Wow, wait, who is this? This is from an, I got a pronunciation guide. It's spelled H-I-E-U, pronounced Hugh, and N-G-U-Y-E-N. And Hugh said, I pronounce that Hugh Nguyen, but different people even pronounce my last name

differently within my own country. Yeah, I've always seen it pronounced, or heard it pronounced as Wen. Yeah, so that was a great email, and we appreciate all our Asian and Asian American listeners who wrote in about that saying, guys, we thought she was Asian, so it's okay to say that. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing. If you want to get in touch with us like Hugh did

and everybody else, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started. Where it really started.

To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's Thru Line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Erasure and Genocide. Table for Two, Season Two. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy

and I'm your host, Elliot Conning. Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently co-parenting two young boys with her former partner David. David, he is the leader. He just don't want to leave me. But how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship? Like what's the blue part? David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to Family Therapy on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.