Anti-wind protesters often claim that wind energy requires such a large amount of backup power that it is ineffective in the fight to curb carbon emissions, however a new empirical research study conducted by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid has shown that in fact wind energy is very effective at cutting emissions, even at quite high levels.
The Spanish researchers found that every megawatt hour (MWh) of wind energy introduced into the network allows us to avoid all the CO2 of each displaced thermal MWh at a low penetration, however when the penetration levels are as high as 50 percent the wind effect achieves reductions of just 80 percent, although this is still a significant reduction. The researchers also found that the usefulness of wind turbines can be further improved by developing the technology and by modelling, the effective management of electricity networks and the deployment of energy storage technologies.
In short, the effectiveness of wind energy is only going to increase over future years.
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