Wide Awake Media repeats misleading claims that wind turbines are expensive and environmentally unfriendly

On 18 July 2025, the X account Wide Awake Media reposted a video showing how a wind turbine is built. The post adds claims that don’t appear in the original video – that even a single wind turbine needs a “jaw-dropping quantity of energy and resources”, making it environmentally unfriendly. 

This is not the first time Wide Awake Media (an account that appears to be operated by only one person) has posted this particular video – we’ve actually addressed their claims before – but the latest post has since accumulated more than 500,000 views, many more than the post we’ve previously reviewed.

Furthermore, Wide Awake Media adds additional claims that wind turbines are “expensive”, “inefficient,” and “bird and bat slaying”.

In fact, these are all common claims that wind energy’s opponents use against wind turbines. Many of them are actually claims we’ve also addressed before. Now, as we’ll show below, not all of them hold up to scrutiny.

Wind turbines are cheaper and less energy-intensive than many other types of power sources

When Wide Awake Media says that the video describes “the jaw-dropping quantity of energy and resources required to construct a single wind turbine”, the post misses key context. 

For one, the video appears to be cobbled together from several sources – including an animation of a wind turbine foundation from a Finnish construction firm, a 2015 timelapse of a wind turbine’s construction in Scotland, and 2017 documentary footage of a wind farm’s construction in Spain – and combined with original narration. The reposted video therefore stitches together footage of the construction of several different wind turbines, rather than “a single wind turbine”.

Also, neither the video nor the post compares a wind turbine to other energy sources. It’s important to do this – we need electricity, but can’t just get it from thin air, and it’s important to compare between the options we do have. Any power plant needs ‘energy and resources’ to build. 

It’s easy to make other power sources’ demands for ‘energy and resources’ sound fearsome out of context. A single coal, gas, or nuclear power plant might need more than 40,000 cubic meters of concrete and 20,000 tonnes of metal. These power plants also need something that wind turbines don’t – a constant source of fuel. U.S. electricity production alone uses more than 400 million tonnes of coal, more than 350 million liters of gas, and more than 30 million pounds of uranium concentrate each year.

Since each power source’s footprint is different, a better way of measuring all their associated pollution is to examine data on each one’s lifetime greenhouse gas emissions. Every part of a power source’s life cycle produces emissions. There are emissions associated with building the power source (concrete is actually a major source of greenhouse gas), fueling it (if needed), staffing and maintaining it, and dismantling it at the end of its life.

Life cycle emissions let us gauge how much greenhouse gas comes from generating the same quantity of electricity over a power source’s entire lifetime (Figure 1).

The results are clear – wind turbines are far less greenhouse-gas-intensive than most other power sources, especially fossil fuel sources. The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates that gas-fired electricity generates 35 times more greenhouse gas and coal-fired electricity over 75 times more greenhouse gas than the same amount of electricity generated with wind turbines (Figure 1). 

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) gives similar numbers – no matter where in the world they’re built, fossil fuel plants are tens of times more greenhouse-gas-intensive over their life cycle than wind turbines, solar panels, or nuclear plants.

Little evidence to suggest that wind power increases electricity prices

Wide Awake Media claims that wind turbines are “expensive”. Renewable energy opponents often purport that adding wind turbines (or solar panels) will increase the price that customers pay for electricity.

In reality, one of the reasons wind turbines are mushrooming across the world is precisely because they’re relatively cost-effective. It’s now cheaper to generate electricity with wind turbines, either on land or at sea, than it is with most fossil fuels.

The relationship between generation prices and the amount you actually pay on your electric bill isn’t straightforward. This is because electric bills don’t just cover the cost of generation, but also the cost of transmitting it and often additional taxes and fees, and these vary from country to country and city to city. We’ve previously written an insight article on this subject – you can read more there about what sets electricity prices.

However, data from U.S. states tells us that wind turbines don’t necessarily make electricity more expensive. In fact, some of the states with the cheapest electric bills tend to be states in the Great Plains that have built large numbers of wind turbines in the last several years (Figure 2).

Wind turbines can harm birds and bats, but so can other threats

There is scientific evidence that wind turbines can harm birds. Turbine blades can kill or injure birds who fly into them, and wind turbines can shift birds’ migration patterns. There’s evidence that this disproportionately harms certain species, especially of large birds^[1,2].

However, wind energy opponents who claim that wind turbines ‘kill birds’ – as we’ve also covered in a prior review – often ignore the fact that wind energy is not the only threat to birds. It’s not even the largest threat. When we zoom out and look at all bird species, the evidence says that wind turbines are only responsible for a very tiny fraction of unnatural bird deaths (Figure 3). 

Several studies have tried to count how many birds are killed in the U.S. each year. They’ve concluded that wind turbines kill tens to hundreds of thousands of birds annually. This estimate might seem high, but it’s dwarfed by fossil fuel power plants, electrocutions, communications towers, automobiles, windows, and feral cats – each individually responsible for tens of millions to billions of deaths each year^[3].

Furthermore, many bird species are vulnerable to climate change^[4]. One reason for the interest in building wind turbines is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, a major source of greenhouse gases that cause the planet to warm and other drastic changes to the climate^[5].

As for bats, like with birds, there is indeed similar evidence that bats can collide with turbines. Since about 2000, researchers have observed a rise in events with multiple bat deaths, which they partly attribute to a buildout of wind turbines^[6]. 

However, as with birds, many bat species are vulnerable to climate change. A warming global climate is expected to change bats’ hibernation patterns and make it more difficult for bats to find food^[7].

There is good reason to highlight the effects of climate change here. For example, many anti-wind groups are linked to fossil fuel interests that spread climate change misinformation. Wind energy opponents often use protecting wildlife as a reason not to build wind turbines. They may have valid critiques – but they exclude important context we’ve highlighted above.

References:

• 1 – Heuck et al. (2019) Wind turbines in high quality habitat cause disproportionate increases in collision mortality of the white-tailed eagle. Biological Conservation.
• 2 – Diffendorfer et al. (2021) Demographic and potential biological removal models identify raptor species sensitive to current and future wind energy. Ecosphere.
• 3 – Loss et al. (2015) Direct Mortality of Birds from Anthropogenic Causes. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.
• 4 – Bateman et al. (2020) North American birds require mitigation and adaptation to reduce vulnerability to climate change. Conservation Science and Practice.
• 5 – IPCC (2021) Sixth Assessment Report.
• 6 – O’Shea et al. (2016) Multiple mortality events in bats: a global review. Mammal Review.
• 7 – Adams et al. (2024) The state of the bats in North America. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.