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Have wind farms in rural Tamil Nadu changed the region for better or worse?

Source : Mongabay

Notes by Narsi

One of those few news reports that I have come across recently that provide such a detailed account, with brief interviews, of how the wind farms in a wind zone in Tamil Nadu had changed the region - for better and for worse.

While some of the older generations seem to be ruing the loss of agriculture because the lands were sold to wind farms, on the whole one gets the feeling that the economic development brought about by the wind farms had provided more benefits than any challenges posed by them.

A couple of points here:

One, it appears that farming is not done on most wind farms, between the turbines, but I do not really get why. While 1 MW of a wind turbine could require about 25 acres of space between two turbines, a large portion of this land area can be used for cultivation.
India’s total arable land area is about 400 million acres. Currently, we have about 40 GW of wind installed capacity, and in the real best-case scenario we could be having about 100 GW by 2030. At about 25 acres per MW, that would be 2.5 million acres for wind farms, about 0.6% of the total land area even assuming no farming is done on these lands. Farming can be done on about 90% of the area required between two turbines, so we will be losing less than 0.1% of the total land area directly to wind turbines by 2030. Nothing to worry about, really.