Explain energy from wind is less polluting than the energy from fossil fuel?

Answer 1

Anytime you drill deep into the earth to extract a natural resource for energy, you are going to create millions of tons of environmental pollution. Then turning fossil fuels into electricity is another mess. We use predominantly coal, natural gas and petroleum and crude oil in the US.

Fossil fuel drilling and mining contaminate the water, and any time you clear out an area for drilling, you are destabilizing an ecosystem that was previously absorbing pollutants (especially through plants.) Then when you get all those messy resources to the power plant you gotta burn it to generate energy which produces C02 (global warming!) which is probably our biggest environmental challenge clean up wise (but then there is also all that bad sulphur dioxide, Volatile Organic Compounds, heavy metals and Nitrogen oxides.) And then all that oil is going to cars (burning a lot more CO2) and all that energy is going to factories (CO2 and a disgusting array of environmental contaminants air and water wise.) And all these pollutants cause smog and acid rain too. And you probably saw what happened recently with that coal ash spill in Tennessee. That ecosystem is going to have a lot of problems for a very long time. And don't forget that soils holds many toxic heavy metals (especially deep down) that are released during drilling and mining into our air and water supply. Some of these toxins are radioactive such as Uranium and Thorium. And power plants are more prevalent in cities making them environmental disaster areas.

Being that Wind power stays on the surface you don't have any of that. Only the energy that creating the turbines themselves require. If we switched entirely to wind power we'd see a 99% reduction in CO2 and air pollutants. If the entire country's vehicle fleet were battery charged electric cars, we'd only need 3 sq km of wind turbines to power them. A recent Stanford University study found wind power to be the most efficient, followed by "concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric" power.

(But we have our work cut out for us because the US still relies pretty heavily on fossil fuels.

Answer 2

Wind energy is generated by harnessing the power of the wind without burning any fuel, therefore producing zero greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, fossil fuels like coal and oil release a significant amount of carbon dioxide and other pollutants when burned for energy production, contributing to air pollution and climate change. This makes wind energy a cleaner and more environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels.