What is the importance of wind power?

Why do some people oppose wind power while very few object to solar power?

• Some people, not a lot, are bitterly opposed to wind farms, especially nearby wind farms.  Yet very few are opposed to solar power installations, even when these are on a neighbour's house. Most people are concerned about climate change.  A typical modern, utility-scale wind turbine will generate about as much clean electricity as 2000 average roof-top solar installations (see http://ramblingsdc.net/Australia/WindProblems.html#How_does_wind_power_compare_to_roof-top_solar) so logically anyone who wants to see action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions should support wind power. Wind turbines make some noise, solar panels don't.  Both are conspicuous, but in different ways; wind turbines change rural views, solar panels just change the appearance of people's roofs.  Both produce clean energy.

• Answer:

  Summary:  More people actively hate wind turbines because they are harder to ignore, but there's lots of hate on for solar energy too. First, do very few people object to solar energy?  That's not true in North America.  In the USA especially, but also Canada, it is only a bit less hated by many of the same people and a bit harder to attack on quite as many fronts.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] What's the overlap?  Well, there are several groups of people who are against it. People who believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and believe nuclear is the only solution. This group, usually people who have worked in the nuclear industry in some capacity or other, believe that the only solution to greenhouse gas build up is an immediate, panic-shift, no-holds-barred move to nuclear generation. They've got some math on their side too; there are lots of engineers in the group. However, they are deeply frustrated. Very few nuclear plants are being built and lots are being taken offline post-Fukushima. [7] These people live in a zero-sum world and a pretty black-and-white one as well. They are engineers, after all. When they see solar or wind going in instead of nuclear, they get ticked.  And many of them get angry.  My favourite current group of these folks is the Coalition for Energy Solutions. [8] They actually organized a pro-nuclear protest in a small town in New England recently. It was cute. They teach pro-nuclear, anti-renewables courses at the local continuing education school and one of them, Willem Post, writes lengthy articles attacking renewables -- especially wind -- and promoting nuclear as the only solution on The Energy Collective site.[9] Libertarians and Ayn-Randians These folks find anything that has any whiff of requiring a government solution or anything that infringes on their right to customize their Hummers to use even more gasoline intolerable. In their world-view, they are exceptional and safety nets should be eradicated. They hate anything that looks like a subsidy or a handout. If prompted, many will admit that coal, oil and nuclear were and are heavily subsidized and say that's terrible and wrong as well, and that the market must be pure of all taints. That said, they mostly focus on wind and solar, with Feed-in-Tariffs in Canada and the Production Tax Credit in the USA being the red flags. Global warming denialists and paranoid delusionals These folks overlap so strongly it's hard to separate them, so I won't bother. They see global warming as a giant scam to shift money from traditional energies that make sense, are economic and are the heart-and-soul of North America, to unworkable, airy-fairy renewables.  They can't understand why anyone actually believes that humans are affecting the environment and therefore the only reason for renewables is to put money into other peoples' pockets.  And of course, by other people, they mean Democrats (in the USA, the Democratic Party is the one that isn't as right-wing). As they actually call Democrats socialists or communists, when their policies and rhetoric are pretty right wing by most of the world's standards, you can see that they are a bit lacking in context, perspective and connection to reality. Smaller fossil fuel players The energy industry writ large is pro-renewables.  It's another revenue stream, it promotes innovation, it allows them to attract talent they wouldn't have otherwise been able to attract, it diversifies their portfolio allowing them to ride out oil dips and surges and it provides a nice bit of greenwashing as well.  BP, Enbridge and many other big energy players are very happily planting as many wind farms and solar panels as they can. Then there are the other ones, usually smaller players.  They don't see opportunity, they see threat.  The Koch Brothers, the Heartland Institute, Bentek and various lobbyist groups in the USA are non-diversified, unrepentant fossil fuel producers, refiners and advocates.  They too live in a zero-sum world, and for every solar panel that goes on a roof, or wind farm that goes up, they see less demand for their product. People who don't understand geographic scale These folks do some rudimentary math that says solar or wind farms will take up X or Y square kilometres (square miles in the USA, where the only metric that caught on was the 9 millimetre handgun), don't really understand it, don't put it on maps (or put it on with Google pushpins which are 10,000 times the scale of wind turbines -- true story[10]) and think that basically every square inch of country side has to be covered in wind turbines and solar panels to make enough energy to replace any fossil fuels. (Don't ask them about roads; it will just confuse them.)  These folks love the country side, love farm food, love driving around all over it burning fossil fuels to do so, love living in their relatively large, fully-detached homes, heating and cooling rooms that they don't use, and want their favourite woodlot, beach, meadow, patch of desert, whatever to remain unsullied by these monstrous industrial machines. But the premise of the question is correct at one level. More people loathe wind turbines than loathe solar panels.  That's because wind farms make noise and stick up.  They 'spoil' more views and annoy more people as a result.  They are harder to ignore. References: [1] http://blueinthebluegrass.blogspot.com.br/2009/10/why-do-davis-rogers-guthrie-hate-solar.html [2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Solar-Fraud-Energy-Edition/dp/0971484546 [3] http://www.mysolarpanelblog.co.uk/2012/04/25/fox-news-hates-solar-energy/ [4] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904836104576558763644374614.html#articleTabs%3Darticle [5] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-09-18/news/ct-met-kass-0918-20110918_1_solyndra-loan-guarantee-obama-fundraisers-obama-white-house [6] http://free2think.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474980523586 [7] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/global-nuclear-generation-capacity-falls-to-366.5-gw/ [8] http://www.coalitionforenergysolutions.org/ [9] http://theenergycollective.com/user/61439 [10] http://windfarmrealities.org/?p=1464