The production of wind turbines eats up a lot of energy, they take up valuable farmland and eventually they are just garbage. Aren’t wind turbines green after all? starReporter Rolf-Herbert Peters takes stock – and it is clearly not.
New wind turbines are being set up in front of the gates where I live. This prompted an acquaintance to attack me while I was getting bread rolls with his thesis: he was in favor of renewable energy, but it was “crazy” to build wind turbines instead of letting existing, CO₂-free nuclear reactors continue to run. After all, every new wind turbine eats up energy, and a large piece of land is sacrificed for it. The topic is also appearing more and more frequently in the “Ecobalance” e-mail inbox. Sabine Knackfuss from Magdeburg and Klaus Frank from Uhingen ask whether wind turbines are climate-friendly at all if you evaluate their entire life cycle.