Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Wind Farms

Hello everyone!

I couldn’t come up with a fun title for today’s post, so I hope you are not too disappointed by this boring thing! I’ll try my best to make my next post title more interesting to match with the rest and hopefully, this will be the anomaly (⁀ᗢ⁀).

Now, on to the real issue! Today, I will be focusing on the amount of greenhouse gas produced by the wind energy industry. I know what you’re thinking, isn’t wind energy supposed to be cleaner? It is, but that doesn’t mean that it produces zero emissions. Making the wind turbines, bringing them to the farms and the upkeep of the turbines are all included in the calculation of total emissions when scientists make what is called a Life Cycle Assessment. I think this is important as it would give a more well-rounded idea on how clean the entire operation is, rather than just one component aka the generation of energy part.

While there is some variability in emissions calculations due to assumptions made when information is not easily obtained, it is generally concluded that onshore wind farms produce less greenhouse gas than offshore wind farms. This is likely because more structural support is needed for the wind farms to be built at sea. Other reasons for the difference in results from different sources are the differences in turbine power output and the method of calculation. This source states that wind farms on land produce 0.082kg of carbon dioxide for every 1 megajoule of energy generated, while wind farms out at sea emit 0.130kg of carbon dioxide. Using the same example as my first post, one 3-room HDB flat in 2018 would produce 77.3096kg of carbon dioxide and equivalents per month if they used onshore wind. This is still way less than the current emissions for natural gas use (approximately 34,230kg for a 3-room HDB flat per month (o_O)), but it is not insignificant. Still, using wind energy could cut greenhouse gas emissions by a lot so countries should consider using wind power more if possible.

The moving of the wind turbines to the farms, the production of making the components of turbines and getting rid of spoilt turbines are the biggest source of emissions for wind turbine production, while there are negligible emissions when the turbines are collecting energy. On the bright side, most of a turbine can be recycled or used to build new turbines after it is no longer usable. One suggested solution is to build the factories where the turbines are made near to their operation site to reduce gas produced from logistics. Logically though, if wind farms are spread out around the country, I think that it would be hard and expensive to construct so many different factories. Also, wouldn’t building more factories produce more greenhouse gas emissions since materials are needed to construct them?

I hope that you now know more about greenhouse gases produced by wind energy generation and realise that although it is a greener energy source, the life cycle of a wind farm does emit greenhouse gases.

See you next week!

~Rayzel

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Skip to toolbar