However, the wind power sector has fallen under intense scrutiny in the past few years due to its impact on birds and other species. A recent review by the National Wind Coordinating Committee NWCC found that collisions with wind turbines and air pressure changes caused by spinning turbines resulted in several bird and bat deaths. Similarly, offshore wind turbines can harm marine birds. Solar — What about the Soil Erosion? The sun is a tremendous source of renewable energy.
Nevertheless, the adverse effects of solar power are associated with land use, water use, habitat loss, and the harmful materials used in manufacturing of solar panels. To build a utility-scale solar power facility, a large area of land is required. This can interfere with the existing land uses. The use of many acres of land can result in clearing and grading of land, which can cause soil compaction, erosion, and alteration of drainage channels.
Furthermore, solar energy systems can impact the land in the process of materials extraction, exploration, manufacturing, and disposal. Bioenergy — It is not really Green. Some of the biomass resources used for producing electricity are crops, forest products, agricultural waste, and urban waste. The bioenergy feedstock and the way it is harvested can negatively impact land use along with global warming emissions.
For example, human and animal waste used to power engines may cut down on carbon emissions, but increase harmful methane emission. Furthermore, using tree or tree products to create bioenergy comes with its own set of problems. To collect enough lumber, substantial forest land needs to be cleared, which again causes topical changes and destroys animal habitat. Geothermal — Heating, Electricity, and Poisonous Gases.
Besides being costly, geothermal power has many other disadvantages. Also, geothermal energy stations, under extreme circumstances, can cause earthquakes. This shows how renewables can negatively impact the planet. However, renewables are making a notable difference in the world as they are helping to curb carbon emissions.
The short answer is that renewable energy is good for the environment. But we need to be careful about where and how we build it. When compared to fossil fuels, renewables are much greener. Oil, gas and coal use can lead to air and water pollution, land degradation and dirty emissions that drive climate change. Renewables, on the other hand, release very small amounts of pollution and emissions, mostly tied to their manufacturing, construction and maintenance.
The contrast is striking. Burning coal releases into the air up to 3. In the meantime, wind power emits only 1 percent of that amount.
However, renewables can have other environmental impacts when placed in inappropriate places. Massive wind turbines, vast solar energy farms and geothermal energy plants can disturb wildlands and wildlife. The key to minimizing those risks is carefully planning their location and mitigating environmental impacts.
There are plenty of success stories. In Florida, solar industry and environmental groups came together to create solar sanctuaries — solar farms that respect the environment. The projects are placed away from wetlands and important animal habitats like the gopher tortoise.
They also include new vegetation around the solar panels that benefit pollinators and other wildlife. Researchers analyzed data collected from 4, wind turbines over a period of 15 years. The research confirmed what has already been well-documented: Wind turbines cause far fewer bird fatalities than other human-caused sources such as bird collisions with buildings and communications towers.
In any case, as we scale up wind energy, we must strive to make wind power as safe as possible for birds. And there are many ways to do that. The most important step is to plan new wind farms away from migration routes and important habitat areas. Technology can also help. Artificial intelligence is already being used to identify golden eagles and other key birds flying in the area and temporarily halting wind turbines for their safety.
Investing in safe wind turbines is key to both conservation and clean energy efforts — especially when we consider that wind energy can help to tackle climate change, one of the biggest threats to birds and wildlife in general. Imagine the state of West Virginia, approximately 13 million acres of land, covered in solar panels. Even with widespread rooftop solar, we would still need large-scale solar farms to reach that goal.
But we have to be careful where they are placed in order to preserve wildlands and wildlife. The best places are the ones already developed and near transmission lines and roads. A great example is the Dry Lake solar zone. The solar farm near Las Vegas, Nevada, powers 46, homes but had a relatively low environmental impact.
It was built in an area already affected by industrial facilities, old mining sites and multiple transmission lines. The existing infrastructure also helped to speed up the project. Thankfully, many of the tools needed to stop heating the planet already exist. The use of renewable energy resources is expanding in the West, but the production of electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar cells needs to be scaled up. To source all energy from renewables by —necessary to limit global warming to 1.
But as economies in the West address the climate crisis—albeit at a painstakingly slow pace—another crisis is worsening elsewhere. Making all those vehicles, panels, and turbines requires resources such as copper, lithium, and cobalt—which, like fossil fuels, are extracted from the ground.
But unlike fossil fuels, many raw materials for green energy come disproportionately from developing countries. Some critics even cite such adverse effects of renewable energy production to argue against any transition to green energy, such as in the recent, widely criticized Michael Moore-produced documentary Planet of the Humans —which also pushes the falsehood that manufacturing renewable technology consumes as many fossil fuels as burning them.
Scientific studies conclude that even the production of materials needed to build wind and solar technologies causes far lower emissions than coal or oil. His research also estimates that fossil fuels are more expensive and environmentally harmful than renewables in the long run.
The question of how to source metals and minerals ethically remains a legitimate and urgent one. Still, the question of how to source metals and minerals ethically remains a legitimate and urgent one. One proposal is to improve the traceability of mining supply chains. Improved traceability has played an important role in pushing companies toward more ethical conduct. For example, some diamond retailers use blockchain technology as a tamper-proof transaction tracing system to ensure that conflict diamonds do not enter the legitimate supply chain.
But applying this tracing model to something more complex, such as a battery, is more difficult. A battery consists of dozens of materials from factories around the world, each deriving resources from places with disparate environmental and social standards.
Renewable technologies create ethical issues at both ends of their life cycle. Sovacool was part of a team of researchers who recently visited the two ends of technology supply chains: artisanal cobalt mining sites in Congo, where miners extract the metal using rudimentary tools or their hands, and electronic waste scrapyards in Ghana, a global cemetery for electronics such as solar panels. For example, solar energy could meet the global demand for low-carbon energy many times over.
But the sheer size of solar panels, which often contain lead, cadmium, and other toxic metals, makes them one the largest global contributors of electronic waste.
By , which is the rough expiration date of solar panels manufactured today, the technology is estimated to produce 78 million metric tons of waste—some 80 percent more than the total annual waste from all combined technologies today.
Much of the e-waste generated by the West is sent, sometimes illegally, to countries in Asia or Africa, where a small amount of it is mined for reusable materials and sold back to world markets.
This economic opportunity often causes toxic pollution, fueling environmental and public health crises. Many workers at one of the largest e-waste processing sites in Ghana, Agbogbloshie, are children who help dismantle electronic goods, extract metals, and then burn the waste—producing smoke that envelops the surrounding communities.
Studies have found high levels of lead in the blood of those living near the processing sites.
0コメント