Greenpeace Gets It Right: More Wind Power In Erie A Good Idea

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1 point·kkim··4 comments

Wind power scales linearly with land used. There is nothing environmentally friendly about significantly greater land-use for energy output. I'm surprised how rarely this is observed.

This is a disadvantage of wind power? I always imagined that coal power scaled linearly with coal mined, and that nuclear power scaled linearly with waste produced. Please enlighten me.

For more detail on land use, see this page:

http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_environment.html

Coal mines can yield more coal without taking up more surface area. That's what mines are: they go underground.

Nuclear power requires orders of magnitude less land surface area. Waste produced can also scale underground. Yucca mountain doesn't actually take up much of the surface of Yucca mountain.

See the second comment on the following page:

http://greenoptions.com/2007/07/26/nuclear_power_is_green_re...

Re. "orders of magnitude" see the page below.

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/printable_versions/ge...

Quote: An entire geothermal field uses 1-8 acres per megawatt (MW) versus 5-10 acres per MW for nuclear operations and 19 acres per MW for coal power plants. Coal power plants also require huge acreages for mining their fuel. These mining operations can involve large-scale movement of earth for construction of underground mine shafts and tunnels, waste heaps, and/or open pits. Disturbed surfaces from open pit mining also can limit plant life participation in the carbon cycle and evapotranspiration, which replenishes water in the atmosphere. Adequate remediation of strip-mined areas can be expensive too.

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