Wind Farms in Perspective

Sunday, March 13, 2011

In Did 'climate change' cause the Japanese earthquake? James Delingpole writes:-

I’m grateful to “David” – a reader at Watts Up With That – for putting this into perspective: in the last decade the wind farm industry, it turns out, has killed far more people for far less electricity produced than the nuclear industry

Nuclear fatalities in the last ten years: 7

Wind farm fatalities in the last ten years: 44.

In those ten years nuclear provided thirty times the energy of wind. This means in the last decade, nuclear has been around 200 times safer than wind on an energy produced/accidents basis.

I went looking for David’s original post, but couldn’t find it.

As usual I wanted to know the system boundaries of the figures.

Here’s a thought-experiment: Suppose that 95% of the nuclear plants in operation today are over 10 years old. Suppose too that 95% of the wind farms in operation today are under 10 years old. Then the figures for fatalities are exactly what I would expect from the construction of the equipment. That is, the deaths are not caused by the energy source as much as by the sad probabilities of the construction industry.

That would destroy the conclusion of the third paragraph quoted above.

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