To ensure that 40% of the EU and the USA to have the ability to drive electrical automobiles, 56,000-70,000 km² of land should be cleared for wind generators – watts with that?
Reposted from The NoTricksZone
By Kenneth Richard on July 15, 2021
A new study warns that “massive expansion of impervious surfaces” is an inevitable consequence of electric vehicles accounting for 40% of the driving needs of citizens. An area of land the size of Croatia (in the European Union) or West Virginia (in the United States) must be completely covered with wind turbines to meet the power needs to charge electric vehicles for 4 out of 10 vehicles.
The already weak power capacity of wind turbines, an average of 0.5 We m², will only decrease further if more wind parks are added to the landscape (Miller and Keith, 2018).
As a result, the land area that must be made available for the construction of wind turbines to meet the continually growing energy needs of the earth’s inhabitants is staggering.
Look at the USA. Electricity generation accounts for only 17% of primary energy consumption in the United States. In order for wind energy to meet the entire electricity needs of US citizens, a land area the size of California – 12 percent of the adjacent US – must be cleared for wind farms (Miller and Keith, 2018). This, too, is only supposed to cover 1/6 of the Americans’ energy needs.
Image source: Miller and Keith, 2018
In scotland, 14 million CO2-absorbing trees were recently felled to make way for wind farms. In this way, ironically, the Scottish Government can claim to be doing its part to reduce carbon emissions.
And now a new study documents how much more land has to be converted into impermeable surface so that new wind farms can supply the electricity to charge an exponentially growing number of electric vehicles in the coming decades.
“In order to run 40% of its vehicles on electricity, the EU should allocate more than 5000 km² of land (twice the size of Luxembourg) for photovoltaic modules or almost 56,000 km² (about the size of Croatia) for wind turbines, while the US should allocate over Spend 6,000 km² (about the size of Delaware) for the sun or almost 70,000 km² (more than the area of West Virginia) for wind. “
Image source: Bears, 2021
In other words, the average EU or US city will need to expand its urban area by 0.2-4 km² as the number of electric vehicles using low-density wind and solar energy to power them is increasing dramatically.
And is that green?
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