Perhaps facietiously put but a slur against wind turbines used to be that they don't produce the energy in their life span that was taken to produce them.
In Wales it is planned to scar the country side with 800 two megawatt wind turbines at a cost of at least 2 billion pounds which will produce 300 megawatts allowing for their inherent overall inefficiency. A new gas fired station (and therefore a lesser carbon footprint than coal ) power station in Plymouth costing a quarter of this is producing three times this output. This means the cost of wind turbine energy is 15 times that of the gas fired station.
Allowing that a hefty component of any engineered product is the cost of the energy involved in it production it would be nice to know the energy component involved in the production of these 800 wind turbines and over what span of time will carbon pay back occur and will they start to actually be carbon free.
The slur may not now be that facietious after all. An interesting view on this comes from Christopher Booker .here
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