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I'm confused. Those boring flat places that get tornadoes have massive wind farms, because that's where wind blows. Tornadoes are not a major economic threat to wind farms. Have you been to the midwest? There's at least 40GW of wind capacity out there, and the wind farms are really something.

by pbmonster3 hours ago|

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> why not build panels anywhere?

Because there's better alternatives same places. Norway has legendary well-suited topography for hydro power (>90% of electricity), and it's reliably windy (>8% of electricity). It's also so far north that the sun doesn't shine very much for half the year, and it's notoriously cloudy.

So yes, it will probably never make much sense to build a lot of solar panels in Norway. Same for Greenland, Iceland (substitute geothermal), and probably some parts of Canada, Alaska and Southern Argentina.

But also, yes, there's almost nobody living in those places. They're not terribly relevant in the grand scheme of things. Probably significantly less than 50M people in total.

by belorn2 hours ago|

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Just to add some numbers here, in Sweden the amount of energy you get from solar during the worst months are a single digit percentage, while consumption of energy during the same period doubles from the average. Consumption during the best solar months drops to about half.

Solar works a bit better when consumption patterns is the opposite, and the output is more reliable.

by matthewdgreen1 hours ago|

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Solar doesn't have to be colocated with consumption. There is a massive amount of available solar in Europe and North Africa, even in the winter, and HVDC (including underwater HVDC lines) makes this available.

by fredophile3 hours ago|

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I spent a good chunk of my life in the Pacific Northwest. You get very long stretches of cloudy skies through most of the winter that are poor for solar. However, there are alternatives in that region like hydro that may be more suitable choices.

by wat100003 hours ago|

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Tornadoes are not actually very common in terms of how often you'd expect a structure to be hit by one. You're looking at hundreds or thousands of years between tornado hits even in the most tornado-prone areas. They're numerous, but small.

by customguy2 hours ago|

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So what I'm hearing is very sturdy, christmas tree shaped turbines (long blades at the bottom, getting shorter as you go up), on a very heavy central shaft ending in a spike that gets driven deep into the ground by dropping them from great height with planes (there probably needs to be a thruster stage on top that accelerates them beyond mere free fall) into the path of tornadoes. No clue what to do with the energy, but that seems like a minor detail.

by wat100001 hours ago|

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Excellent idea. You don't even have to worry about hitting people's houses and such, since they'll be destroyed by the tornado anyway.

by vincnetas3 hours ago|

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If we can build skyscrapers that can survive tornadoes, can wind turbines be made tornado proof?

by bob10293 hours ago|

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I believe this is one of those having your cake & eating your cake scenarios.

Wind turbines are designed to be aerodynamically loaded on purpose. The blades can pitch arbitrarily to compensate for unwanted loads in the axial flow direction, but beyond a certain point it doesn't matter anymore because wind can do a lot of other things.

by ceejayoz3 hours ago|

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Can we?

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/tarrant-county/the-t...

> Before March 28, 2000, a tornado had never collided with a skyscraper.

> Bank One Tower sat, rotting. The Fort Worth Fire Department declared the building a fire hazard, forcing the Bass family to replace the plywood planks with fireproof metal.