Comparison of Environmental impact of Hydropower and Wind Power

One of the best ways to reduce the effects of climate change is to increase electricity production from renewable sources, which offers an excellent prospect for low carbon emissions and greenhouse gas reduction, However, it is difficult to claim that renewable energy has no environmental impact. Because each renewable energy technology has its own environmental disadvantage, depending on the technology the impacts can be on aquatic or terrestrial biodiversity. This study compares the environmental footprint of renewal energy by selecting three hydropower plants named Grana, Litfossen, and brattset, and from the wind power plant, the selected wind farms are called Geitfjellet, Stokkfjellet, and Hitra 1&2. The analysis is divided into three-time steps for hydropower and two-time steps for the wind power plant to see the land-use change through time. The first-time step is taken before the deployment of the project, the second time step is 2-4 years after the construction and the third time step is long-term after construction for each selected hydropower plant, For wind power, the time steps are divided into two, before construction and after the construction of the wind farm. The selected technologies generate close to a similar capacity of electricity in MWh. The comparison of land-use dynamics is done by getting raster images from satellite data and performing image classification, and change detection in Arc GIS Pro to get the quantitative area of land use in different time steps. According to the case study results, a hydropower plant occupies more area than a wind farm. The average land occupation of wind power is computed as 0.019m2yr/kWh, whereas the average direct land occupation of hydropower is 0.159m2yr/kWh. The indirect impact of the wind farm-related to deforestation and urbanization is smaller than the selected hydropower plant