Wind turbines in Nether Monynut, Scotland. Scotland plans to use all renewable energy by 2020. (Photo by Flickr user cowrin.)

Scotland plans to harness it's high wind concentration as a renewable energy source with wind turbines. Wind turbines have often been criticized as ugly and loud, but now they're being called potentially harmful to the environment. That's because wind turbines have been releasing carbon stored in peat bogs into Scotland's atmosphere.

Scotland, the windiest place in Europe, plans to harness its wind power and rely on only renewable energy by 2020, a plan that's drawn criticism from Donald Trump.

The turbines, however, do more damage than simply disrupting Trump's golf game. Many are concerned with building wind turbines on peat bogs because the bogs contain massive amounts of CO2, and the turbines release carbon from the bogs into the atmosphere. They may even release more carbon than they save.

Dave Gilvear, professor and River Science expert at Stirling University, pointed out the distinction between renewable energy and going green.

"I think most people understand what renewable energy is," Gilvear said. "Its getting power from the sun. Its getting power from water. Its getting power from the wind. But that doesnt necessarily mean that its green, in that the construction of a wind farm, the construction of a hydropower station, is going to have an environmental impact, so if you put a dam across a river, for example, and you dont have a fish pass built into it, its going to stop the migration of fish. And thats an environmental impact."

Gilvear was one of the first to discover the environmental impact of wind turbines built on peatland. He said four or five years ago, his team monitored dissolved organic carbon in streams near the turbines and found a higher concentration of carbon in the water than in streams near peatlands without it. He noted, however, that turbine planning has improved since his discovery.

"Weve also been monitoring another wind farm down in Ayrshire. Were not finding the same results there, in that best practice methods of construction are being adhered to. The Brazer Dune site is now seen as sort of poor practice, and hopefully those sorts of construction wont be happening again," Gilvear said.

As a response to this, the Scottish government launched a carbon payback calculator, an estimator of how much time it would take for wind turbines to save more carbon than it cost to build them.

"The initial estimates that this group came up with, I think, were kind of between 3 and 30 years," Simon Drew, biologist at Stirling University said. "Now the operational lifetime of a wind farm is about 25 years, so, potentially, although you have a sort of non-fossil fuel energy source, its not carbon neutral if its going to be for that long."

Link:

Scotland's wind turbines less eco-friendly than they appear