How 'green' are wind farms?
The growth in renewable energy as a means to tackle climate change is a well known argument but the development of wind farms - the world's fastest-growing source of power - particularly when placed in equally important environmental areas like peat land (rolling hills near the sea which offer the right kind of wind are also the right conditions for bogs) and the adverse affects this could have on the environment is less well documented outside of the environmental community.
If we build wind farms in order to reduce carbon emissions, but then build them on peat lands which often play a critical role in providing clean drinking water and significantly they represent the one land-based habitat that is a major long-term carbon store, then we release this carbon store as carbon emissions into the atmosphere and so defeat the objective of having a renewable power source in the first place.
Some ecologists are already warning that unless we think carefully about where wind farms are sited, they could disrupt fragile ecosystems and even contribute to global warming.
To read more visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4557255.stm or http://www.windaction.org/news/3789.
