Wind Power Facts & Climate Change

Wind Power Facts & Climate Change
There’s Potential in the Air

The wind power industry has grown rapidly over the past two decades. In 2000, annual electricity production from wind energy in the U.S. was about 6 billion kilowatt hours. In 2020 production is up to 338 billion - a 56X increase!¹

This spike in production can be linked back to 2008, when the U.S. Department of Energy published a report examining the possibility of reaching 20% wind production by 2030, and 35% by 2050. Scientists predicted that missing these goals would make it nearly impossible to keep global warming from reaching disastrous levels. The research since then has only fortified those concerns. 

Even with the substantial increase in production globally and in the U.S. over the last decade, only about 6% of electricity worldwide was generated via wind power in 2020² , and 8.4% in the U.S. ¹

Those numbers aren’t good enough, but with advancements in technology and louder demands for climate action, wind power has become a massively important solution to climate change for a key number of reasons:

Emissions - Generating electric power using wind turbines creates no greenhouse gases, but since a wind farm includes dozens or more turbines, widely-spaced, it requires thousands of acres of land. For example, Lone Star is a 200 MW wind farm on approximately 36,000 acres in Texas. However, most of the land in between turbines can still be utilized for farming or grazing. ² 

Cost - Wind energy is affordable. Wind prices for power contracts signed in the last few years and levelized wind prices (the price the utility pays to buy power from a wind farm) are 2–4 cents per kilowatt-hour compared to about 6.5 cents with new natural gas plants.³,⁵

Potential - Due to engineering advancements on wind turbines and research revealing more regions for potential wind farms, a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study found that current wind energy potential triples the previous projections.⁴

The one negative that’s been given its fair share of publicity is that wind farms have led to the death of birds and bats, mainly from collisions with rotor blades. Though sad, the benefit from reducing emissions is much greater overall for wildlife and their habitats.

Thank you to Let’sTalkScience for this infographic, revealing that wind turbines are almost a non-factor in bird mortality.

References:

¹ - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/electricity-generation-from-wind.php

² - https://www.c2es.org/content/renewable-energy/

³ - https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/top-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-wind-power

⁴ - https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/50860.pdf

⁵ - https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-real-costs-of-u-s-energy/