Yet, it hasn t achieved the potential promised by environmental energy engineers back in the seventies. It expensive, it is unreliable, and it creates more pollution than a Soviet power plant. Low cost wind power also requires strong, regular winds. Unfortunately, there are few places that meet that criteria, especially near population centers. Ironically, wind power costs even more if we add on the environmental costs that environmentalists add to coal powered plants.
Wind farms require hundreds of tons of energy intensive materials like cement and steel to build.
In fact, constructing a 45 MW plant requires the emissions necessary to produce 10 million pounds of materials. There are also many other problems. Wind farms are vary noisy when the wind blows, they are a blight on the land that compares with oil derricks, and use large amounts of land for the energy supported. However, the biggest problem with wind farms is their hazard to birds. Not only do they kill the unsuspecting bird flying around, the towers, they attract rodents to their base because they offer protection from raptor birds.