Subject: Re: Wind & Solar
And it's these negative externalities -- where the market price in no way appropriately reflects the environmental costs incurred in their extraction and consumption -- that are the crux of the objection to the "cost paid reflects the energy consumption and thus the environmental impact" thesis propounded in this thread.


There are a lot of costs involved in building a wind turbine that are not energy costs, so one might think the rule of thumb doesn't work, but I think the point is that if the energy costs of building the wind turbine (and the blades, and the tower, and the installation,, and the wires going to it, etc. etc.) were a large proportion of the energy produced by the windmill over its lifetime, or even, as some claim, if those energy costs were superior to the windmill's output, then it would never make any economic sense to build one. Since there IS an economic case for windpower, meaning you CAN conceivably pay back those energy costs of production, INCLUDING the non-energy costs, it must be that there is some positive energy output, net of the energy costs of production.

But perhaps an environmentalist would find this more convincing if it were possible to isolate the energy costs of setting up windpower infrastructure, and of course, that analysis has been done. In general, the findings are that the energy inputs represent about 1/20 to 1/40 of the energy that the windmill will produce over its lifetime, assuming that it is placed in a sensible place where there is enough wind. More details below from one good article addressing these issues:

"As widely presented in several wind energy reports (NREL (Lantz et al., 2019), Vestas (Wind Systems, 2020) et al.), steel tower contributes to about 30% of the total carbon footprint left during the manufacturing of wind turbines, while the concrete foundation and the carbon fiber plus fiberglass blades making up 17% and 12% of carbon impacts, respectively. According to these reports, the carbon cost can generally be amortized by extending the lifespan of the wind power system, and its carbon footprint is 99% lower compared with coal-fired power plants, 98% lower compared with natural gas, and 75% lower compared with solar power. Moreover, wind turbines (including both onshore and offshore configuration) produce about an average of 11 g of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour (11 g CO2-eq/kWh) of electric power generated, while for solar power with 44 g CO2-eq/kWh, for natural gas with 450 g CO2-eq/kWh, and for coal with 1000 g CO2-eq/kWh (Carrara et al., 2020). These figures are not static, particularly in the case of wind power as a result of advancing technology. For instance, the carbon footprint of the monstrous offshore wind power plant is expected to fall to 6 g CO2-eq/kWh in the future. In general, the greenhouse gas emissions by onshore and offshore wind power plants can vary depending on the capacity factor, component materials’ recovery rate at the end of the life cycle, and wind turbine mass (Bhandari et al., 2020)."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...