The following article is a made up scenario, where I, the student had to pretend to work at the New York Times. The debate did not really take place and was used for the made up scenario only to make the article more realistic. However, real life facts are included to fulfil the purpose of learning more about the topic.
It's purpose was purely to increase my knowledge in an area related to Global Warming, and get a good grade in my homework.
With all this being said, I hope you enjoy:
As a journalist, working for the New York Times has really opened doors for me. On December 17th 2015 I was lucky to attend a debate about the use of Wind Farms as a way of fighting against Global Warming in Germany, where experts with different points of view gave their opinion and argued about wether the use of Wind Farms to create energy is worth it or not as an alternative to burning fossil fuels.
Mr. Allen Moore started his argument in favour of using wind turbines because they are efficient, clean and green, so in his opinion they are good for the environment. The farmers Gerant Davies and Robin Williams stated that with the use of wind turbines in their farm they gain energy production without losing much land and money, but let’s actually have a look at that, are wind turbines really that cheap? As Ms. Ethen said and as a new study from the Imperial College Business School in London suggests, wind turbines can last up to 25 years before they need to be upgraded or replaced. Now, maybe if the farm is doing good, after 25 years they have made up enough money to replace the wind turbines, but that is their own personal business and we should start thinking about the biggest picture here. Lets look at some facts:
A modern wind farm, which can generate two megawatts of electricity when the wind is blowing costs about 3.5 million dollars installed. About 4 million dollars are required to build a wind farm. But, why would this interest you? It is their problem if they go broke, right? Well, not entirely. All of these costs need to be recovered from costumers or tax payers. So if you use any sort of energy, and all energy starts coming from wind farms, the prices will not stay the same. The cost of wind-generated electricity is not free. Also, energy would be less accessible. A typical wind farm would generate electricity about 30% of the time only and that is not necessarily at times when electricity is needed.
“ I think I’ll have enough money, but if I don’t I’m sure there are open minded people who would want to invest. It’s not about the money, it’s about the environment.” Said Robin Williams when asked if he had an economic plan for his farm after he stated he wanted to start installing wind turbines in his farm.
Wind turbines and wind farms must be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity and the wind always varies depending on different factors so they are not stable. That means right now there is no way to be able to use wind power plants to their full capacity, is that worth it for small farms or just for certain worldwide big companies that can expense it? According to Eric Rosenbloom on his article about the problem with wind power, wind turbines produced on average less than 20% of their rated capacity throughout Europe and the turbines must be ironically stopped in high winds because they are easily damaged.
A German Energy Agency study released in February 2005 stated that increasing the amount of wind power would increase consumers costs by 3.7 times than otherwise and that the theoretical reduction of greenhouse gas emissions could be achieved much more cheaply by simply installing filters on existing fossil-fuel plants.
So sure, it is important to change the sources of our energy, but the money and effort invested in wind energy could be spent more efficiently and effectively to achieve the goal of reducing our use of fossil fuels. For example, something as simple as switching every lightbulb in the UK to a more efficient one could shut down an entire power plant. Imagine if we did that all over the world, how cheap and easy it would be for every individual to change a lightbulb. Does change really need to be expensive?