“Thousands of Britain’s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save, according to potentially devastating scientific research to be published later this year.”
“Thousands of Britain’s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save, according to potentially devastating scientific research to be published later this year.”
A Cal-Berkeley professor (Dr. Per Petersen) did an interesting analysis on wind vs. nuclear in terms of CO2 emissions. The biggest contributor was the concrete needed for construction. To make concrete one roasts limestone, driving off large quantities of C02 to make cement, which is then mixed with crushed rock, sand, and water to make concrete.
Comparing the CO2 vs unit of electricity delivered, wind uses much more concrete and hence gives off much more CO2.
Article here:
http://pb-ahtr.nuc.berkeley.edu/papers/05-001-A_Material_input.pdf
It takes CO2 to build and deliver all the components and to build the grid to deliver the electricity — which would also be true for any other generating system, but the conventional systems don’t pretend to be built of pixie dust and run on unicorn poop.
We keep slamming into this: the “clean” energy systems are almost always feel-good engineering Goldberg systems that do more environmental harm than conventional energy.
Turns out that building service roads to the wind turbines causes the peat to dry out & release CO2.
Dried peat makes an excellent home heating fuel, I hear…