Recently I was approached about an article I’d written in 2013 where I accused The Nature Conservancy of greenwashing. (See Another Poorly Sited Hoosier VAWT Vying for Worst Turbine Install.)
My correspondent noted that his company had posted an extensive discussion of greenwashing and suggested I might link to it. Indeed. Here it is: Greenwashing: The Ultimate Guide for Businesses & Consumers. Why his company wanted to take on this thankless task remains a mystery.
As I dutifully added the suggested link it occurred to me that I’d written quite a bit about greenwashing beyond that one article. Down the rabbit hole I went. Yep, I’d written more than a dozen articles where I mentioned greenwashing or identified particularly egregious examples of using wind turbines—mostly poor-perfoming VAWTs–for greenwashing.
The Nature Conservancy came in for its share of greenwashing as did the Tejon Ranch, Budweiser, San Francisco’s Public Utility Commission, and others. Greenwashing is part of a long tradition of trying to gain a positive association with some action without really doing something significant. In my work it’s often been associated with installing cheap VAWTs at sites where—if they worked—they would hardly generate enough electricity to offset the consumption from their inverters. Yes, they likely consumed more electricity than they generated.
Here’s the list.
- The Nature Conservancy Clams Up on Ducted Turbine Debacle–Who Will Pay to remove it?
- Defunct Windspire Wins Greenwashing Award
- Georgia Power Small Wind Demo Raises Questions
- Rooftop and Building Integrated Wind Turbines are a Failure Says NREL
- Text of “The Troubling Budweiser Ad on Tejon Ranch” Op-Ed
- UGE Dumps VAWT Business—What Happens Now to Eiffel Tower & Lincoln Field Turbines?
- Bird Society Leads by Example: Operates Large Wind Turbine at Headquarters
- A Tale of Two Turbines and Eiffel’s Tower
- Quiet Revolution VAWT Total Flop Says German Paper
- The Unknown Wind Turbine of San Francisco Bay or Angel Island State Park’s Enertech E44
- Questionable Turbines and Siting Give Architects, LEED, Green Builders, and Wind Bad Name
- Bay Area Wind Turbines (No, the Other Bay)
- Mein Gott! Costly VAWT Installed on Cologne High-Rise
- Another Poorly Sited Hoosier VAWT Vying for Worst Turbine Install
- Reno Nevada Proves–Again–that “Small Urban Wind” Produces Poor Results
- Urban Wind Energy–A Review
