I would have assumed of course that wind turbines are net negative emissions, even factoring in the construction and materials.
Do they mean net-zero in materials and construction alone? Because that sounds impossible.
That seems pretty dubious to me. After the turbine’s thirty year life, what happens to that carbon?
At any rate, if it’s true that it takes 90% less carbon to produce in the first place, setting aside the whole “wood contains carbon” thing, that’s pretty cool.
> After the turbine’s thirty year life, what happens to that carbon?
Those curved boards are probably mixed with epoxy or another polymer, making it a bad candidate for recycling in other wood application (paper, osb boards…), compared to first hand row trees. We’ll probably "valorize" it in incinerators.
> The life-cycle emissions from modern wind power plants made of steel are about 4–7 grammes carbon dioxide per kWh. Building the tower in wood lowers the emissions from the wind power plant by approximately 30 percent per kWh.
That would put wind power some 50-100x below fossil fuels already. Additional improvements are always nice to have, but not really a big selling point.
It's net much-less-than-coal and much-less-than-oil, but it's not zero and certainly not negative.
I think you're confusing "if we add this to the grid we subtract the carbon emissions compared to the current system" with "this pulls carbon from the atmosphere". Those are very different things.