Identify two enviornmental benifits and two enviornmental costs of switching from coal to wind power.?

Question

Identify two enviornmental benifits and two enviornmental costs of switching from coal to wind power.?

Answer 1

Two benefits of using wind power instead of coal is that:

-There would be less chemicals and gases released into the air when it is burned.

- Wind power is a renewable energy source, whereas coal is not.

Two bad things of using wind energy is:

- Birds and other flying animals such as bats may accidentally fly into the turnbines which may cause damage to the turbine itself and inevitably cause the loss of life to the animal.

- Very costly.  The amount of money that is needed to construct the turbines and find areas where there is enough wind.  That and to build them where people won't be bothered by the noise.

Answer 2

benefits:

no mining of coal

no burning of coal

costs

large areas required for wind, and they are an eyesore, noisey

birds are killed in large numbers by turbines

Answer 3

There are no benefits gained by using wind power and it may cause a lot more problems by reducing wind speeds as well as killing birds. The use of coal can be good for the environment if good engineering is used it the basic design. This is not done at this time any where of the planet.

Answer 4

Coal has a lot of pollutants. For example there is a pound of thorium and uranium in every 500 tons of coal. Not to mention acid and sulfur & ash.

Coal has to be mined and shipped by rail.

There is no techology at this time that makes coal as clean as other methods of fuel.

A coal mine can catch fire and burn  underground until all of the coal is consumed. This can last for years or decades rendering the gound above uninhabitable.

Wind is not 24/7 reliable. Large scale production with wind would therefore be unreliable. A drop in supply by only a few percent can cripple a power grid. To maintain reliablity the grid then has to run reliable units in standby. So a coal plant might be running to back up a wind plant for when the wind fails.

Wind is small. A typical wind plant is about 50MW where a normal steam plant is about 500MW. This means you would have to have 10 wind sites to replace one fossil plant.

Wind is determined by location which might not be close to the customer. With their small output losses from transmitting that power to a distant customer have a greater affect.

Wind is noisy

Wind does not supply good stable voltage.

Wind has no pollution

Wind does kill birds, but really, in comparison to the cars on the road I cannot see that the number would be large in comparison.

Wind is renewable.

Wind does not change weather patterns. A wind farm would have less impact than building a couple buildings which completely block the wind.

Answer 5

The benefits are that wind is clean and is renewable.

There is very little, if any, meaningful downside to such a switch.. however there are economic costs that need to be taken into effect.  Wind power is not as efficient and would involve large amounts of money building the required infrastructure.