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Environmental Benefits
Wind energy offers real environmental benefits. Wind power offsets other, more polluting sources of energy. That is important because electricity generation is the largest industrial source of air pollution in the U.S. When wind power projects generate electricity, fuel at other power plants is not consumed.

• Wind energy requires no mining, drilling, or transportation of fuel, and does not generate radioactive or other hazardous or polluting waste.


• To generate the same amount of electricity as does the current fleet of U.S. wind turbines would require burning 9 million tons of coal (a line of 10-ton trucks stretching 3,400 miles, from Seattle to Miami) each year.


• A recent New York study found that if wind energy supplied 10% (3,300 MW) of the state’s peak electricity demand, 65% of the energy it displaced would come from natural gas, 15% from coal, 10% from oil, and 10% from electricity imports.


• Emissions from the manufacture and installation of wind turbines are negligible. The “energy payback time” (a measure of how long a power plant must operate to generate the amount of electricity required for its manufacture and construction) of a wind farm is 3 to 8 months, depending on the wind speed at the site – one of the shortest of any energy technology.

Environmental Impacts
Information on the adverse impacts wind turbines have on the environment and wildlife has existed for years. Read the latest finding from the National Academy of Sciences on wind energy’s impact on wildlife, the environment and humans. To read AWEA’s response to the report, click here. (NAS report statement)

Wind power offsets other, more polluting sources of energy. That is important because electricity generation is the largest industrial source of air pollution in the U.S. When wind power projects generate electricity, fuel at other power plants is not consumed.