Every time I've ever brought this up to anyone even mildly concerned about the environment they always retort with "what about wind." Wind Power is the crunchiest of energy sources. Like a distrust for vaccines though, wind power has no data to support it's validity. And unlike solar, I don't believe any amount of investment will make it worthwhile.
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1) Wind is Not Reliable
We often still want our refrigerator running when the flags are limp on their poles. But unlike the sun which rises despite weather patterns, and dumps super-energetic photons onto the earth even on the cloudiest of days. Some days it's just not windy. Even if we had Tony Stark himself to design the turbines--they can't catch any wind if there's no wind to catch. Which means regardless of how good the technology gets, wind farms will at best only give supplemental power.
The thing with the grid system is it doesn't do bonus power. If the grid is designed to handle a load when it's not windy, then there's not much that can be done with the excess when it is. You don't turn off power plants. It's not efficient to stop burning coal for those six hours of gale-force winds. So we invent ways to waste energy during high-wind days to prevent surges, because unlike solar, wind power stores badly.
Wind power demands a reliable back-up power source. If there's not a dam nearby, that means wind will never shutter coal plants. And that's unacceptable.
2) Wind power is hardly clean anyway.
Renewable, yes. But dirty.
Imagine Chernobyl in your mind. Now including Chernobyl, wind power has killed twice as many people per kilowatt hour than nuclear has. Pretty crappy considering that wind power produces less than 1 percent of the earth's energy, whereas nuclear provides around seventeen. So in other words, nuclear incidents are about as likely as winning the lottery, and wind farms are surprisingly dangerous. (And even more perilous if you're an eagle, goose, or bat.)
I trust the safety of nuclear power plants so much that not only would I live on the property, I would set up an orphanage for baby pandas there too. Consider that an earthquake and tsunami hit a nuclear reactor head on, and no one died from radiation exposure nor have they seen or expect to see an increase in cancer or birth defects in the surrounding area or anywhere else (pg. 17, point #3).
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Although Nuclear waste is, granted, more dangerous than wind's, there is so little nuclear waste produced by nuclear power plants that nearly all spent fuel is stored on site. To put that in perspective, a single coal plant produces 318,000 tons of ash and smokestack scrubber sludge every year. Each coal plant require acres of coal ash ponds to handle all of its toxic waste. But a typical nuclear reactor only produces 20 tons of waste in a year.
Coal ash is dangerous for a multitude of reasons, but one is the high concentration of heavy metals. Arsenic will still be arsenic in a hundred million years. Nuclear waste is not any more persistent than other toxic byproducts of the energy industry. It's just comes in much smaller quantities and is a lot scarier to us for whatever reason. Never mind that coal plants have given cancer to thousands more people than nuclear power ever has or will, and I'm not even including coal miners in that assessment.
Basically, I understand discomfort with nuclear energy. But it's purely an emotional reaction. An aversion to nuclear isn't logical, and it certainly is not ecological. Maybe I can't convince you to love nuclear power. But stop mentioning wind, please. Solar is awesome, and quite honestly, poised to benefit from the circuit and battery improvements of the smartphone era. Since they share an investment pool, every dollar spent on wind is a dollar not spent on solar. Which is ridiculous.
Wind is like H.G. Wells holding a Kindle with the complete works of Shakespeare. He's pretty impressed until I pull out a smartphone from my pocket that can not only store over a thousand books, but can access lectures from the greatest universities on the planet, and makes video calls to China. That's how much more powerful nuclear energy is.
Wind is a cool concept until you realize how bad it looks in comparison to almost anything else.
-Stephanie
P.S. Coal is absolutely the worst thing to use for power, claiming the most lives directly and indirectly. It supplies 50% of worldwide electricity and 44% in the US. So seriously, anything would be better than that. I just don't think wind will actually ever get rid of coal, and is therefore part of the problem.
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