timate from a private email sent to le Pair by an acquaintance.
Even worse, that estimate only roughly guesses at the energy needed for the steel and concrete, the two largest energy consuming components of a wind turbine, and then roughly doubles that number to account for other energy uses with no effort to precisely quantify those factors. Le Pair also assumes a 25% capacity factor for the wind turbine, even though typical wind turbines in the U.S. produce about 1/3 more energy than that. Correcting that discrepancy alone brings the energy payback time back to about one year.
In contrast to the rough and unsubstantiated estimates in le Pair’s work, a number of peer-reviewed studies have thoroughly accounted for the energy inputs and outputs for wind turbines and all have found the energy payback period to be around 6 months. Here are a couple of the comprehensive peer-reviewed analyses, each finding an energy payback period of under one year, that le Pair should have referenced instead of relying on an unsubstantiated back-of-the-envelope calculation:
Le Pair also entirely ignores the fact that a significant amount of energy and carbon emissions are involved in constructing and operating all types of conventional power plants and providing them with fuel . Coal, gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric plants are all built out of massive quantities of energy-intensive materials like concrete and steel. In addition, significant amounts of energy are involved in mining and transporting coal, natural gas, and nuclear fuel. Of course, the most important factor is that after the brief energy payback period a wind turbine will continue providing zero emissions energy for decades, while a fossil plant will continue to consume fossil fuels and belch pollution for decades. Again, all peer-reviewed analyses have concluded that the lifecycle emissions of wind farm plants are at most a small fraction of those from conventional plants.
Le Pair also makes the entirely unsubstantiated claim that wind plants have considerable onsite energy use. In fact, the onsite energy use of wind plants is minimal, considerably less than the onsite parasitic losses associated with pumping water at conventional steam plants, operating pollution control equipment at fossil plants, drying and crushing fuel at coal plants, etc.
Despite the facts, the desperate misinformation campaign to muddy the waters about the benefits of wind energy continues. So far in this case it appears that the facts have prevailed, as the obscure, unsubstantiated, and deeply flawed website posting of a single Dutch anti-wind farm activist has been treated with the skepticism it deserves when directly contradicted by a large body of government and independent grid operator data and peer-reviewed studies showing that wind energy does result in the expected savings of fossil fuel use and emissions.
In the interests of space we won’t repost all of the data and citations here, but they can be found at the following links:
By Michael Goggin, American Wind Energy Associatio Manager-Transmission Policy, www.awea.org/blog