Change of perspective: The smallest screw and the largest rotor blade are important for the CO2 balance of a wind turbine.
Bild: Picture Alliance / dpa
With them we calculate our CO2 balance nicely – this suspicion clings stubbornly to renewable energy systems. However, a look at the figures shows that wind turbines and solar systems are much better than their reputation suggests.
Ooptimism has no boom. At the same time, anyone who looks at the emissions of the German electricity mix actually sees a small success story. Not a completed one, certainly not a perfect one, but a measurable one. In 1990, every kilowatt hour of electricity produced 860 grams of carbon dioxide and its equivalents. In 2021 it was 485 grams. The climate-damaging emissions in the electricity sector are falling thanks to solar and wind energy. But there is a supposed flaw in the success up to this point. There is a suspicion that the balance sheet is a gamble because photovoltaic modules and wind turbines don’t just fall from the sky. Someone has to get the raw materials out of the ground, process them, screw modules together in energy-intensive factories, transport them around the world, pour concrete foundations, lay undersea cables and dispose of much of it twenty or thirty years later. This does not appear in the electricity mix emissions.
So do we buy our improved emissions by ignoring the initial investment in energy and materials? In other sectors, on other continents?