Interesting take from The Foundry:  “Wind Power is More Dangerous than Coal or Oil”

The article suggests that, with a drop in occupational deaths in recent years, “some might think that workplace fatalities could be reduced even more by moving away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.  The facts suggest the opposite.”

Noting that with “10 deaths in the wind-power industry over the years 2003-2008,” one would think industrial wind much safer than coal which, according to the article “had 176 fatalities over the same period.”  On the other hand, “much less energy was generated by wind than by coal.”

In order to “project changes in workplace safety from switching to wind from coal, it is necessary to know the mortality rate per megawatt-hour” and, as a result, “the low number of total deaths in the wind-power industry is undermined by the very low amount of power generated by wind.”

The article concludes that, “on a million-megawatt-hour basis, the wind-energy industry has averaged 0.0220 deaths compared with 0.0147 for coal over the years 2003-2008.”  In case you’re wondering, “the workplace fatality rate for wind also exceeds that for oil and gas on an equivalent-energy basis.”

Certainly, this in itself will not sway wind’s true believers.  But, as the author suggests “the argument for forcing consumers to buy increasing amounts of wind power gets weaker the more we investigate its full impacts.”