0724 Green Energy VS Environment

Recently green energy has become the famous topic in the world. When people talk about green energy, they associate green energy with wind farms or solar panels. Compared to oil or nature gas, these two ways to generate electricity are clear and renewable, but wind farms or solar panels need more space to generate same electricity as oil or nature gas generate. Some experts propose to build wind farms or solar panels in coastal oceans or deserts. Before I read some reports which are opposite to these proposals, I thought the proposals of building wind farms or solar panels in coastal oceans or deserts are perfect and excellent. As I thought before, scientists use the sparsely populated area to product power by green energy equipments, they create the value of sparsely populated area. However, my thought was too simple to consider the complicated problems behind the proposals.

First of all, the areas of rare populations are often far from the areas which people demand a lot of power, so the cost of electricity delivery will become very high. Power companies also spend huge amount of money to build the power grids. According to the electricity, the longer the power transmits, the more the power loses. It is not a smart plan to build power station in the sparsely populated area.

In addition, Building wind farms in coastal oceans is another controversy. As everyone knows, the wind in oceans is stronger than the wind on the lands, so some energy experts suggest government or power companies to build wind farms in coastal oceans. They think that building wind farms in coastal oceans can lower down the cost of electricity delivery, and can have stable resources of winds. However, wind farms probably have negative effect on coastal ecology. For example, some of birds which have seasonal migrations inhabit in coasts, so they fly around near coasts in order to prey or move. Once these birds fly through wind farms, they will be a life threat for these birds. Not only birds but also marine life is affected by wind farms, especially during construction period. The disposal of constructions could be thrown into water and pollute coastal oceans. After the environments of coastal oceans are polluted, the oceanic fisheries will be deeply impacted.