Bringing clarity to misleading claims about wind turbines’ costs, impacts on birds

Wind turbines are supposed to provide clean electricity. But you’ve probably seen claims otherwise: that wind turbines kill birds, that they’re unreliable, that they’re a scam designed to make you pay more for electricity.

These sorts of claims have surged again in the past month, largely thanks to U.S. President Donald Trump, who recently repeated an old claim that wind turbines are deadly to eagles.

That may be why you can find that claim and several others in a January 2026 article posted on The Gateway Pundit, a well-known source of fake news and misinformation. The article, and its attached video, includes a handful of claims painting wind turbines as costly, unreliable, or bad for the environment. All of them are claims we’ve seen before – some are claims we’ve even reviewed in depth – and all of them are ones you’ll see elsewhere.

Here, we’ll look at five of them.

Claim 1 (Lacks context)

Wind turbines occupy large land areas and disrupt ecosystems, but the most visible consequence is bird mortality. According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates, wind turbines kill between 500,000 and 700,000 birds annually in the United States alone […] Raptors—especially eagles—are disproportionately affected.

The claim that wind turbines kill birds is a common one from wind power’s opponents, perhaps most notably U.S. President Donald Trump – on several occasions. 

We’ve reviewed this claim before – while wind turbines can and do harm birds, so can loads of other things. 

In the big picture, wind turbines are a fairly minor threat to birds. Even a single bird death is unfortunate, and 500,000 to 700,000 birds may seem like a lot. But billions of birds are killed by human sources each year^[1]. Wind turbines are only a small fraction of them (Figure 1).

In context – as you can see in Figure 1 – power lines, automobiles, windows, and even cats kill many times more birds than wind turbines^[1]. Indeed, far from the consequences of wind turbines being ignored, Gateway Pundit’s claim gives them a misleading amount of attention.

What about the effects of wind turbines on large birds, like eagles and falcons? Large birds are overrepresented in recorded wind turbine casualties, and there’s some evidence that wind turbines can cause declines in the numbers of certain bird species. Such declines have been recorded in both North America and Europe^[2,3].

But this claim often comes from groups who are less interested in the environment than in simply obstructing renewables – such as fossil fuel interests, who benefit from avoiding competition with other energy sources. 

In fact, fossil fuels are likely far deadlier to birds than wind turbines, when we account for the air pollution from burning fossil fuels. A 2012 study estimated bird fatalities per gigawatt-hour – enough to power a medium-sized city for a year. It found that wind turbines caused 0.3 bird fatalities per gigawatt-hour on average, while nuclear power stations were responsible for 0.6 and fossil-fuel power plants for a significantly higher 9.4^[4]. 

Claim 2 (Lacks context)

Capacity factors—the percentage of time a turbine actually produces its rated power—hover between 32% and 35% in the United States.

This claim is true, but this isn’t how energy planners use capacity factor.

To be more precise, capacity factor is the percentage of energy that a generator puts out, compared to its theoretical maximum if it continuously operated in optimal conditions. According to data from the Energy Information Administration, nuclear power plants have the highest average capacity factor, at over 90%; coal and gas plants tend to have capacities closer to 50%; wind turbines average about 35%, and solar panels average about 25%.

At face value, then, this part of the claim is correct – wind turbines (and solar panels) can only operate in certain weather conditions, so we’d expect their capacity factor to be lower.

But it’s misleading to use these averages to make judgements on electricity sources, as Natanael Bolson at the University of Birmingham told Science Feedback:

“from a system perspective, arguing that a certain power source should be deployed instead of wind only because it has a higher capacity factor is nonsense.”

One reason is because capacity factors vary dramatically even within energy sources. “Peaker” fossil fuel plants – which are only switched on at times of high demand – often have capacity factors as low as 10%. Specifically looking at wind turbines, a turbine may have a higher capacity factor if it’s built in a place that receives more wind.

Instead, planners use capacity factors in other ways. Imagine a certain city wants to build a new wind farm nearby – planners might calculate a wind farm’s capacity factors at different sites around the city and choose the site with the highest capacity factor. 

Or, planners may use capacity factors to gauge how large that new wind farm ought to be, as Bolson told Science Feedback:

“If a 1 MW coal-fired power plant operates with a capacity factor of 0.5 and is to be replaced by wind, and the expected capacity factor of the wind farm is 0.25, then approximately 2 MW of wind capacity would be required to deliver the same annual electricity output. In this sense, the lower capacity factor of wind implies that a higher nominal installed capacity is needed to compensate for reduced utilisation, rather than indicating inferior performance or lower system value.”

Capacity factor isn’t the only number that figures into energy planning. Cost is another factor: it might be cheaper to build 2 MW of wind capacity than it is to build 1 MW of fossil fuel or nuclear power. Fuel is another: planners may not want to build fossil fuel plants in their city, since burning fossil fuels emits both greenhouse gas^[5] and toxic air pollutants^[6,7].

Claim 3 (Mostly accurate)

Because wind is intermittent, grid operators rely on natural gas or nuclear generation to stabilize supply. This backup requirement raises system-wide costs.

It is true that wind turbines (and, similarly, solar panels) are intermittent. This means they can only generate electricity when weather allows for it. This does mean that a wind-dependent grid needs some stable backup. In many cases today, this backup does come in the form of nuclear or fossil fuel generators. 

However, to understand the implications of this, we need context that isn’t in the claim. Does this really ‘raise system-wide costs’?

Electricity pricing is complex, and it works differently from place to place. That said, one common system is this: if there are multiple sources of electricity, the most expensive source sets the cost of generating all electricity. This is called the “marginal price”.

If fossil fuel power is more expensive than renewables, then fossil fuels will set the marginal price, even if renewables are cheap. Mario Liebensteiner, Professor of Economics at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, previously told Science Feedback:

“During periods of unfavorable weather, dispatchable backup technologies remain essential to ensure sufficient electricity supply. In these situations, gas- or coal-fired power plants often set the marginal price, which can lead to higher spot prices despite high renewable generation.“

But it’s misleading to blame high prices on wind turbines – instead, it’s an issue related to the pricing of fossil fuels.

And it is often fossil fuels that generate the most expensive electricity. According to a 2023 study, fossil fuels generated just 34% of Europe’s electricity in 2021, but they set generation prices 58% of the time between 2015 and 2021. And when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, they caused gas prices to spike – bringing electricity prices skyrocketing with them.

But as we’ve written in a prior article, adding more renewables to a grid doesn’t necessarily increase its system costs. Between 2008 and 2019, wind and solar rose from 18 percent to 58 percent of Danish electricity generation, and the cost of generation actually decreased^[8].

Additionally, despite the claim, fossil fuels and nuclear aren’t the only possible ways of providing backup. Grids can also rely on grid batteries. While grid batteries were fairly rare until a few years ago, that’s no longer the case. There were around 110 GW of battery capacity installed by the end of 2024, according to the pro-renewables organization REN21 – larger than the total grids of many small countries.

Grids can also rely on hydropower – certain types of hydropower known as pumped-storage hydropower can store energy like a battery.

Claim 4 (Unsupported)

Over the past decade, states with rapid wind expansion, such as California and New York, recorded double-digit percentage increases in retail electricity prices, far outpacing national averages.

The implied claim that wind turbines (or solar panels) increase costs – and, therefore, your electricity bills – is a common one.

But, as we’ve covered in a past article, the data just doesn’t support this idea that wind energy necessarily leads to higher prices. The most wind-dependent U.S. states aren’t California or New York – they’re states in the Great Plains, where continual strong winds make wind turbines appealing.

In Iowa and South Dakota, wind turbines now make up more than half of all electricity generation. Electricity prices in these states are actually fairly low compared to other parts of the U.S. (Figure 3), and they haven’t dramatically risen as wind power has been added.

New York actually isn’t a good example for judging the impacts of adding wind – it only generated about 4% of its electricity from wind in 2023 (and another 5% from solar).

It’s hard to generalize about electricity prices. Electricity pricing is complex, and what exactly you pay for your power can vary dramatically from place to place.

If electricity prices rose in renewables-dependent California, for example, it may have been because many households have installed solar panels on their roofs; in California’s pricing structure, this pushed the costs of maintaining the grid onto other households. This isn’t the fault of the technologies themselves; rather, it’s the fault of the policies that guide them.

Claim 5 (Misleading)

Today, China controls more than 70% of the global wind-turbine supply chain […] China expanded its coal fleet—adding roughly two new coal plants per week in recent years—to power factories producing “green” hardware for global export.

Some parts of this claim are true, but without crucial context, the claim is misleading.

Let’s start with what is true. China does indeed manufacture many more wind turbines than any other country – as of 2023, Chinese companies produced 60% of the world’s wind turbines, helped by cheap raw materials and government support. At the same time, China is still building far more new coal power plants than any other country.

For one, it’s misleading to suggest that these coal power plants are only “to power factories producing ‘green’ hardware for global export.” This electricity is used for all sorts of things. While China does produce the majority of the world’s wind turbines just as it does the majority of the world’s solar panels and electric vehicles, a Carbon Brief analysis suggested that “clean energy” in total accounted for just 10% of China’s economy.

For another, this claim gives the impression that China produces wind turbines only for export. This isn’t true – many of China’s wind turbines are used within China itself. In fact, China is also adding more new wind capacity than any other country: as of 2024, more than two-thirds of the world’s under-construction wind capacity was in China alone.

Many analysts credit this rapid renewables rollout with causing China’s greenhouse gas emissions to plateau.

The claim that clean energy simply shifts emissions to China is an old one. This did have some basis in reality: China did spend many years rapidly building out its fleet of coal power plants, and as a result its electricity remains more greenhouse-gas-intensive than in countries which are reliant on lower-emissions natural gas or which have phased out coal outright (such as the UK). But it seems increasingly clear that the claim no longer reflects reality: China’s emissions aren’t rising like they were just a few years ago.

We don’t endorse any particular policy, and it’s hard to say what these trends will look like in the future. But we can say that making judgments based on years-old data is often misleading.

Conclusion

Wind energy is a relatively new technology, which also means it’s a rapidly evolving one. For example, we’re starting to see batteries built onto grids as a solution to wind turbines’ intermittency. The cost of building new wind turbines has plummeted across much of the world.

While not all of wind energy’s shortcomings have been solved, engineers have made great progress in addressing some of them.

But many wind turbine opponents’ claims ignore these changes. When they criticize wind power, they’re often criticizing power based on things that may have been true ten or fifteen years ago. They’re ignoring how the technology has changed. To do so is misleading.

References:

• 1 – Loss et al. (2015) Direct Mortality of Birds from Anthropogenic Causes. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.
• 2 – Gedir et al. (2025) Estimated golden eagle mortality from wind turbines in the western United States. Biological Conservation.
• 3 – Heuck et al. (2019) Wind turbines in high quality habitat cause disproportionate increases in collision mortality of the white-tailed eagle. Biological Conservation.
• 4 – Sovacool, B.K. (2012) The avian and wildlife costs of fossil fuels and nuclear power. Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences.
• 5 – IPCC (2023) Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report.
• 6 – Markandya and Wilkinson. (2007) Electricity generation and health. The Lancet.
• 7 – Lelieveld et al. (2023) Air pollution deaths attributable to fossil fuels: observational and modelling study. The British Medical Journal.
• 8 – Sorknæs et al. (2019) Quantifying the influence of wind power and photovoltaic on future electricity market prices. Energy Conversion and Management.