Abstract
Wind energy is currently one of the cheapest renewable energy technologies and plays a central role in many countries’ climate and energy strategies. However, like any electricity-generation technology, wind energy affects and interacts with the broader environmental, social, economic, technical, and legal systems it integrates with. These impacts can potentially slow its deployment, delaying progress on essential decarbonization and energy security objectives. Solutions often exist, but challenges remain due to fundamental research gaps and limited understanding of the true scale of impacts. This article identifies four broad impact categories and fourteen individual impacts, which we systematically analyze through a review of over 400 scientific articles. We qualitatively assess these impacts in terms of importance and spatial diversity, proposing concrete solutions where possible, and suggesting directions for future research. We also demonstrate that some recurring issues are actually not substantial, such as bird and bat collisions, noise and health impacts, local weather changes, and market price impacts at low penetration levels. However, we identify several genuine issues that are currently hard to solve, such as lengthy planning and permitting processes, rare earth material dependency, the recycling of blades, visual impacts on landscapes, and integration into power systems at high penetration levels.