Viral image: Says a wind turbine “could never generate as much energy as was invested in building it.”
PolitiFact rating: False
Here's why: Wind farms are a pillar of America’s climate change strategy. They now produce over 8% of the nation’s electricity, and their output is expected to nearly double over the next decade.
A Facebook post casts wind as a losing proposition.
"A windmill could spin until it falls apart and never generate as much energy as was invested in building it," a Sept. 16 version of the post says. This qualifies as a zombie claim. In 2019, we found an earlier version False, but it walks again.
The image is topped with a striking photo of a wind turbine on fire (it comes from a March 2020 fire in Texas) and gives some details.
"A two-megawatt windmill is made up of 260 tonnes of steel that required 300 tonnes of iron ore and 170 tonnes of coking coal, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons," the post says. (We corrected several typos in the text.)
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/13/wind-turbine-never-generate-much-energy-cost-build/8423146002/Our rulingA viral image said that a wind turbine "could never generate as much energy as was invested in building it."
The claim cherry-picked a quote from a book and distorted its meaning.
Every study of the lifecycle of wind turbines finds that they produce more energy than it took to produce them. Most analyses put the energy payback period at about a year or so. The most conservative, real-world assessment we found calculated that wind turbines in Texas produced more electricity than it took to build them after about six years.
We rate this claim False.
