NJ5 said:
I have to ask though, what are those very serious environmental problems caused by large scale wind farms that you mentioned? PS: Obviously any power source (or any big construction in general) will have an environmental impact. I don't see many people claiming renewable energy sources are worse than non-renewable ones though.
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Without going into any studies, but basically the most ideal places for deployment of wind farms (with the exception of desert areas) are areas that are likely inhabited by significant amounts of wildlife. Because of this, the only places that North American governments recommend placing wind farms is on farmland (where there isn't a lot of natural wildlife already). I've also heard of the problems with the direct pollution from the wind turbines into the environments, since wind turbines require large amounts of lubricant and coolant to work. I don't really think any solution is going to be a single solution, but to get any significant amount of wind power there need to be relatively large scale wind farm deployment in the most ideal locations.
Of course any type of solution we come up will have an environmental impact, but the problem with a lot of the people that tout Wind/solar/tidal/geothermal talk like these power generation methods are as clean as they come (as I used to think that way), and when I was in post secondary doing plenty of research on nuclear power generation, I gained a slightly more realistic view of these "clean" power generations.
P.S. I don't know if any of my explanation of wind power environmental effects makes any sense, but I would be happy to try to make my jumbled thoughts in my head clearer.