Carbon footprint: almost zero.
Toxic waste produced: almost zero.
Radioactive waste produced: zero.
Noise: much less than road traffic or aeroplanes.
Danger to wildlife and people: some bird and bat kill, but much less than road traffic or aeroplanes. Other species, zero. (Apart from a minuscule risk from breaking blades – there was one broken blade on this farm when we saw it in 2008. Doesn’t happen often, and it’s highly unlikely to hit anyone when it does.)
Effect on visual amenity: a matter of opinion. I think they’re actually quite attractive. This consideration hasn’t stopped people building motorways and airports everywhere, nuclear power stations in remote locations, or towns and cities.
Land covered: very little – even if this were farmland, less than 0.3% of the land the windfarm stands on is taken.
The number required, even in a densely populated country like England, isn’t such as to cover more than a few percent of the country with windfarms (and of course less than 0.3% of the land even within the windfarms themselves).
That many would supply all our power whenever there was a reasonable amount of wind; a huge surplus (which could be sold cheaply for uses which are currently too power-hungry to consider) whenever the wind was stronger than usual. We’d still have to use fossil fuels on days when it was calm everywhere, or extremely windy everywhere – but it would cut our fossil fuel consumption (and correspondingly our carbon dioxide emissions) dramatically. (Norway of course doesn’t have to use fossil fuels on calm days: they can use their hydroelectricity instead. The windfarms mean they don’t use so much water out of the dams on windy days – and can sell electricity to other countries, whether it’s windy or not.) And that’s before you consider pumped storage or other methods of storing energy.
Similar observations apply to the sailing boat.
Not far from Kristiansund, Norway.
©Clive K Semmens 2008