Is it just me or is there a staggering amount of wind farms throughout the world. I can’t confirm or want to spend the time to validate them all, but I am so surprised as the amount of them I am encountering as I fly around.
Is it just my ignorance of how much they are used in RL or is this an auto-gen anomaly?
They do exist, if they are on land, you can find trace of them on the Bing image underneath.
I dont know about alot, I fly home airports once a days and there are definatly 5 or 6 missing, that do exist, and then farther east along the lake shore there’s 4 that arent supposed to be there. Kinda make me think that their just random or confused with another structure and drawn as a windmill instead.
another issue is Asobo has a one size fits all wind turbine model.
So where there may be a whole bunch of smaller less noticeable 50’ wind farms, Asobo is slapping a much larger 120’ or so in is place. In some cases, they overlap and hit eachother.
Europe had 205 gigawatts of wind energy by the end of 2019 which, quick maff, shoud equal to around 70k installations. Germany alone has around 30k turbines.
All over the world there is apparently an amount of 651 GW of wind energy which should equal to roughly 217,000 plants. Maybe a little less when you consider that offshore plants are usually more powerful. Offshore plants contribute with ca. 30 GW.
So, no matter how many you saw, the amount is likely still reasonable.
Edit: unless you saw over 200k, of course.
Yep. Ran into a bunch while testing a flight run for The Cannonball Run. Mostly in the Midwest. Side note, did my first Climate Change paper in 1988. It was on wind power and how lining the badlands of South Dakota could supply about 1/2 of the US needs back then for about $1/citizen/yr. Glad to see there’s some activity 3 decades later…
Imagine having your wind turbine paid for by government subsidy
While subsidies may not always be a good thing they sometimes help to get things going. More people building wind turbines due to a subsidy means more demand for wind turbines which lowers the costs of producing said turbines thus makeing wind energy affordable for the broad audience and therefore making it more able to compete with other energy sources.
I actually noticed that some wind farms are much larger than in real life. I flew over Alpha Ventus 45km north-northwest of Borkum the day before yesterday, which IRL has 12 turbines. But that wind farm extends much further away, if you fly east from there, and look left, you can spot a stream of dozens of wind turbines which certainly do not exist there.
However, I once saw a map with planned offshore wind capacity in the North Sea, it might be that Asobo just took this map and slapped turbines wherever there were areas for planned wind farms. I’ll check that once the creation of flight plans is not such a P.I.T.A. any more. Especially, I want to be able to just click anywhere on the map, click “add” and have that point added at the end of my flight plan. And I want to be able to push custom locations around. And, clicking “select as arrival” shouldn’t delete all waypoints in between. Plus, I want to be able to enter lat/lon locations into the search field and have a point on the map after pressing Enter.
Generally, single or double turbines will be small diameter private turbines, larger groupings of wind turbines will tend to be larger 100m diameter turbines.
It would also be great to have unsynchronised rotation angles, at synchronised rotational speed