For those of us interested in the darker side of Green life...
I just ran across an article with some scary data about accidents related to wind turbines:
Wind Energy -- The Breath of Life or the Kiss of Death: Contemporary Wind Mortality Rates
"Wind energy. Clean, green, and relatively benign. The operative word is "relatively" benign. Those of us who work with wind turbines and the electricity these machines produce know that wind can also be deadly."
Most of the casualties seem to come from the system installation and operations side of the value chain.
Some examples (without too much detail) include - A runaway motor, unloading tower from truck, tower collapse... and even a parachutist who, in her first unassisted jump, hit a wind turbine (in doing so she became the first women killed by wind energy and the first member of the public killed by wind turbines)
Even though the data is from the wind industry, there are many risks associated with solar, geothermal, etc. And if you've ever seen the movie There will be blood - you will appreciate that producing energy (be it oil, wind, or any other) has many risks associated. As the article mentioned - "the current mortality rate of wind energy of 0.15 deaths per TWh is roughly equivalent to that of mining, processing, and burning of coal to generate electricity"
On a positive note, it seems there is a knowledge improvement curve and more attention to safety and security... the number of deaths per TWh of cumulative generation has steadily dropped over the last decades.
However, mining, processing, and burning are not the main cause of deaths due to coal usage - polution is the major cause.
Posted by: dotmad | September 18, 2008 at 11:43 AM