Although Austria is surrounded by land and is really hilly topography, meteorological preconditions permit the utilization of wind power.
First calculations on the basis of wind measuring data assessed at the meteorological stations in the early 1980s rendered the surprising result of annually approx.
[1] Austria ranked as the world's seventeenth largest producer of wind power with an installed nameplate capacity of 995 megawatt (MW) in 2008, behind Ireland and ahead of Greece.
[4] Important influences on the life span are site specific (wind speed, storms, icing conditions) and the quality of the maintenance of the turbines.
Examples of external costs for fossil fuel and nuclear electricity production are political and military securing of the access to these energy sources, costs of green house gas emissions, cleaning up of spilled oil, police operations during the transporting of nuclear wastes and other similar activities.
Negative external costs arise from wind turbines' impact on landscape aesthetics, animal habitats, increased mortality of bats and birds, noise, and flickering.