Wind Power Cuts CO2: Fact

June 27th, 2012 by Zachary Shahan

Sometime before I started blogging, I heard or read somewhere something completely counter-intuitive (and, actually, completely false) — that wind turbines created more emissions than they saved because of the energy required to manufacture and transport them. When I ‘learned’ that, I thought perhaps it was right, and if it was, it was a very depressing thing.

However, after getting into cleantech blogging, I learned that was completely false. Of course, I also learned a lot more about the cleantech misinformation machine that spreads this lie and so many others to try to stop the clean energy revolution, or at least slow it.

Now, the excellent post below is for anyone who hasn’t learned yet that wind power does in fact produce more than enough clean energy to have a very positive effect on the global climate (that is, to reduce CO2 emissions from other energy sources, and thus, reduce global warming). It’s got some other interesting and useful information in it as well. Here’s the full repost, from Skeptical Science:

Adding wind power saves CO2 (via Skeptical Science)

Posted on 21 June 2012 by MarkR Over the past decade, engineers and scientists have studied questions about the effectiveness of wind farms. They found that turbines produce much more energy than they take to build and that even though wind needs backup power stations for when it’s calm, they still…

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Tags: wind energy co2, wind energy emissions, wind energy global warming, wind power carbon emissions, wind power co2, wind power global warming

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

CwV1

There is a solution to the intermittency of wind. Instead of running electrical generation directly from the turbine, use the wind to either pump water up into a high tank that is then used to run generators on demand, or to raise a large weight, again running generators as needed.
My hope is for new turbines that don’t include three huge blades with a tip velocity of near the speed of sound.
There are some other designs in development that are far friendlier and can use wind coming from any direction, such as an updraft between buildings in an urban setting.
And speaking of urban wind, moving the windfarms closer to the energy users is probably the most important reform in our approach to it. Long transmission lines lose a lot of energy, they are a massive scar on the land they cross and have to be maintained (cleared) every few years. That often means a swath of land being drenched in herbicides, regardless of what else is on that land. And did I mention that they are expensive?
For far too long we sited energy infrastructure well away from population centers, both to be closer to the sources of fuel and because Coal plants are ugly and smelly, they bring down property values, doncha know. And few people want to live near a nuke, particularly if they have had one of these monsters built near them. About as popular as having a prison for a neighbor.
And that tendency to build HUGE and distant is carrying over into alt.energy. With wind and solar, it’s unnecessary, it’s wasteful and it makes alt.energy projects harder to get off the ground.
By bringing wind and solar projects closer to their users, smaller and more distributed systems and shorter distribution lines, we increase our efficiency, increase our dependability and decrease our cost/Kw and shorten the time from project pitch to energy flow.