A new op-ed from Environmental Progress president Michael Shellenberger highlights how energy from natural gas is a better choice for Texas than wind energy. Shellenberger pointed to the large quantities of land wind energy would use in contrast to natural gas:
“Solar and wind farms around the world require at least 300-400 times more land on average than a natural gas or nuclear plant to produce the same quantity of energy, a calculation easy to make using Google maps. Vaclav Smil, a widely-respected energy scholar praised by Bill Gates (among others), concluded that it would take 25-50% of all land in the US to go 100% renewable. Today, the US uses just 0.5% of its land for energy.”
Shellenberger also discussed the threat wind energy poses to Texas’s bat population:
“In some places such as Texas, where white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungus, has only recently arrived, wind turbines are the single greatest threat to bats. ‘There are no other well-documented threats to populations of migratory tree bats that cause mortality of similar magnitude to that observed at wind turbines,’ one scientist wrote.”
Energy and Wildlife Coalition co-founder Lisa Linowes further highlighted the threat:
“The wind industry is well aware of the problem yet vigorously resists even modest mitigations known to reduce bat mortality at operating wind facilities. The result is that many of our bat species are on a path to extinction.”
Despite this threat, Texas cities such as San Antonio and Austin are embracing climate action plans largely dependent upon expanding wind energy, with the support of former liberal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Fellow co-founder of the Energy and Wildlife Coalition summarized the problematic nature of these climate action plans embrace of wind energy:
“Democrats have been sold a false narrative by the industrial wind industry… Many Democrats somehow imagine that industrial wind farms, which take hundreds of times more land than a natural gas plant, are better for the environment.”
