Wind Energy & the Environment

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Beatrice Petrovich at the Ember Energy Consultancy reports that for the first time last year, wind and solar generated more electricity in the European Union than did fossil fuels. It is another clear piece of proof that humanity can get to carbon neutral by 2050 if it wants to. The alternative is very bad for children and other living things. Combined, wind and solar generated 30% of EU power in 2025. That percentage was only 20% half a decade before.

Wind, solar and hydro accounted for 47.1% of electricity generation, nearly half, in the Eurozone.

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The Albany County Conservancy is accusing U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of concealing eagle deaths in Carbon County. A biologist on the ground says golden eagle deaths are soaring due to wind farms. . . The Albany County Conservancy has filed a lawsuit in the District of Columbia to force the U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to release all 1,166 pages of the incident reports about bald and golden eagle deaths and injuries related to the Seven Mile Hill, Ekola Flats, and Dunlap wind farms.

Wind Energy for Kids (Wind Energie Kinderleicht) is a little book for little people by Thomas Simons. The 27-page booklet … Read more

Mural on village wall in the central Appenine town Tocco da Casauria depicting the installation of two Riva-Calzoni wind turbines … Read more

A modern windmill — or wind turbine, to be exact — is not so much a constructionthat invites affection or radiates pastoral comfort. Rather, it is something built out ofan urgent necessity — a need for a better means of generating electricity, an inventionmade to wean society away from polluting ourselves into oblivion.

The dismantling of the Muel wind farm demonstrates that circularity in wind energy is already an industrial reality.

The results, with an outstanding 99.85% of materials recovered or recycled, confirm that recycling or recovering nearly 100% of a turbine is not science fiction, but the outcome of applying engineering, collaboration, and technical knowledge.

The next step for the industry will be to make it faster, more cost-effective, and with greater added value in each material flow, consolidating circular economy as a standard practice in future repowering projects.

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Oil and gas created a culture of extraction and externalization. Companies maximized short-term profits while socializing long-term environmental costs. The Texas legislation represents a belated attempt to address decades of inadequate oversight.

Wind energy built sustainability into its business model. Financial assurance is standard practice. Near-complete recyclability is an industry goal, not a regulatory requirement.

The Houston Chronicle’s investigative series on “zombie wells” reveals the full scope of oil and gas abandonment—wells that were supposed to be safely plugged but instead burst with toxic water, contaminating aquifers and costing taxpayers millions.

Wind energy won’t have a zombie blade problem because the industry engineered responsibility into its DNA. When turbines reach end-of-life, they become raw materials for the next generation of clean energy infrastructure.

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Thirty years after its publication by John Wiley & Sons, I’ve put Wind Energy Comes of Age in the public domain. The digital copy of the more than 500-page book is now open access and is available for reading on line or it can be downloaded in its entirety for free.

You can find the open access digital version here: Wind energy comes of age by Paul Gipe.

Print copies can still be found at used bookstores or in university libraries.

A cyclist was killed by falling wind turbine blade in Japan. To my knowledge this is the first case of … Read more

The Montpellier court has ordered a one-year suspension of the Bernagues wind farm, finding Énergie Renouvelable du Languedoc responsible for the death of a golden eagle, a protected species, in January 2023.