I'm not a huge fan of their aesthetic in its own right, but it beats the aesthetic of fossil fuel infrastructure any day in my view.
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Ah, sometimes it can look quite nice, or at least striking. Though usually after end of life. The Tate Modern in London is an old power station, and a disused oil power plant in Dublin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poolbeg_Generating_Station#Poo...) has become sufficiently iconic that its operator was refused permission to demolish its chimneys; they're now protected structures.
That's fair actually!
To undermine my own point further, Battersea Power Station in London is iconic. In particular the control rooms were very well-styled with lots of art deco ornamentation, anyone who's listened to Quark, Strangeness and Charm by Hawkwind will have seen it as it's the source of the album art. To be honest I think the idea that ornament in general is bad did a lot of visual damage to the world.
A huge coal power plant belching smoke probably looked pretty cool, maybe even majestic, the first time you saw London back in the Victorian Era. That's before the entire city became saturated in soot, you developed respiratory problems, and you'd seen the same stinky monstrosity every day for most of your short difficult life.
I like wind farms, but I think it's fair to observe that they're often built in nice places, whereas fossil fuel infrastructure is built in places you'd never go to voluntarily.
> whereas fossil fuel infrastructure is built in places you'd never go to voluntarily.
IMO that's the consequence, not the cause, of the infrastructure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine
Or sometimes the consequence of the closure of that infrastructure with no transitional plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merthyr_Tydfil
The latter is absolutely worth caring about even for the greenest of green energy. Even just PV on rooftops, when a town becomes a ghost town.
Lots of fossil fuel infrastructure was built in formerly nice places that now you'd never go to voluntarily...
Drive around Southern California and you’ll see everything from oil derricks to refineries in places which would otherwise be full of housing if they weren’t so polluting.
Some of them are right next to housing. Huntington beach has wells adjoining homes near the beach. Look up the prices of the houses if you want to really go crazy