African Wildlife & Environment Issue 76 FINAL

LETTERS

From Jack Ellery (letter shortened)

I felt that your argument presenting wind energy as not ‘carbon-free’, to be a little misleading to readers. Of course, NOTHING is carbon- free. It is impossible toproduce energy without ‘burning’ something, whether it is you or me walking up a flight of stairs, or shovelling coal into a furnace - both produce carbon dioxide amongst other things. The 'burning' of energy produces carbon dioxide in most instances in the natural world. Saying that producing wind turbines is 'carbon negative' due to the fact we must burn fossil fuels to produce them, is true to an extent - you do have to burn fossil fuels toproduce steel and concrete, and all the various components. But if you look at the life span of a wind turbine vs the same energy produced using fossil fuels, the usage becomes fairly negligible. Based on your calculations,

By that logic, should we then stop producing bicycles because we need to burn carbon to produce them? Or solar panels, because we need to burn carbon to produce them? No. Because the NET positive impact (in terms of greenhouse gasses released) over the lifespan of a bicycle or solar panel, or indeed, turbine, far outweighs the NET negative impact of producing them. Of course, I completely understand your argument with regards the impact onwildlife and biodiversity. I also 100% appreciate and support your concern on the lack of attention to biodiversity present in the report. It is highly concerning, and quite frankly just reflects the lack of research which is applied to these initiatives in that regard. However, it is also important to consider at these issues from a macro- perspective. There is no way to produce energy which will not have some negative effect on some wildlife or habitat in some way. Even solar panels - in order to produce the amount of energy required to meet global demand, huge swathes of land would have to be cleared, forests felled, in order to create these power banks around the world.

one wind turbine requires 150 tons of coal to be burnt in order to construct themachine, equalling 279 tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.A1.8-2.5MWturbine has a capacity of 2.86MW per year - and without actually ‘burning’ any fossil fuels. For a coal plant to produce the same amount of energy, it must burn 11,440 tons of coal per year (these calculations do vary from one to another in the various sources I looked at, but not by much, so this is a rough average from what information I could find. The variation tends to come from the quality of coal used as a basis for calculation). This equates to 21,278.4 tons of Carbon Dioxide released into the atmosphere. Annually. Around 276 times MORE than it takes to produce a wind turbine - once. Even if you factor in all the transport, fuel and lubricant to service the machines, I still think it pales into insignificance when compared to the lifespan of a turbine in terms of Fossil - shall we say - ‘reduced’ (rather than ‘free’) energy production.

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