Wind Energy’s Key Environmental Advantage? Low Emissions

Q: Are wind farms harmful to the environment?

A: Like all energy sources, wind farms have some negative environmental impacts. But getting energy from wind farms results in dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from fossil fuels.

FULL QUESTION

I received this post on Facebook today. I know it contains a lot of claims [challenging the eco-friendliness of wind turbines] and I don’t know where to start in terms of validating them (for myself). Can you help out?

FULL ANSWER

A genre of lengthy posts on social media claims to poke holes in measures designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. The posts throw out numerous statistics without citations, making it difficult to quickly sort fact from fiction.

A reader recently contacted us asking for help evaluating one such post, which cast doubt on the eco-friendliness of wind energy. The post has been circulating on Facebook since March 2021, racking up more than 135,000 shares. Other versions of the post have also been spreading on social media.

Some statistics and statements in the post are arguably accurate, while others are misleading or flat-out wrong. But perhaps more important is what the post left out. It referenced the petroleum products used while building, operating, maintaining and decommissioning wind turbines without ever stating that over its entire life cycle, a wind turbine produces among the lowest greenhouse gas emissions of the main electricity sources in the U.S.

The post also misleadingly said that the land for wind farms “would have to be clear-cut land” and referenced the need to cut down “all those trees.” But in the U.S., wind farms are largely located on land that is already not forested, and this is likely to remain the case as wind energy expands.

The post discussed the landfill space needed for decommissioned wind turbine blades without providing the context that, even as wind power increases, they will make up a small percentage of all waste, and without mentioning efforts to recycle them. And it referenced bird deaths from wind farms without putting them in the context of far greater  to birds, such as collisions with glass buildings and vehicles.