Rooftop Solar is 0.44 deaths/TWh, wind is 0.15 deaths/TWh, Hydro is 1.4 or 0.1, depending on if you count the biggest accident or not.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...

I don't think that would count natural gas emissions for backing renewables.

The referenced hydro accident is the Banqiao Dam failure, which Wikipedia says resulted in between 171,000 and 230,000 deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

I'd expect deaths from big solar farms to be quite a bit lower than that, possibly lower than nuclear even.

Hydro is missing too.

Hydro has a pretty terrible track record with regard to safety, most of it because of a single accident: the Banqiao Reservoir Dam failure, which caused 230000 deaths. And even if much less dramatic, dam failure still happen regularly, costing deaths, property and environmental damage.

And while I tend to think of hydro as the ideal energy source (renewable, on demand, with built-in storage), safety is not one of its strong points. Or at least, not with the way it is managed now.

It is pretty good. It has a few other problems:

* Can't be built in lots of areas due to geography

* Struggles seriously in droughts

* Large reservoirs emits significant biogenic methane (especially in warm areas) [1], which is a powerful greenhouse gas

* Messes with fish

* Gets scary in major rainfalls

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5023102/

Deaths from solar and wind are almost entirely due to falls during installation and service. I looked into this a few years ago while writing my thesis and death rate per TWhr for different energy sources was: coal (29), oil (18), natural gas (2.8), biofuel/biomass (4.6), hydro (1.4), solar (0.11), wind (0.06), and nuclear (0.052).

Perhaps because installers are knowingly and willingly choosing to take the risk of falling off a roof, and are getting paid to accept that risk. It doesn't seem right to compare that type of death with people dying from lung cancer caused by air pollution that they have no direct control over.

> Note: Figures include deaths resulting from accidents in energy production and deaths related to air pollution impacts. Deaths related to air pollution are dominant, typically accounting for greater than 99% of the total.

Based on that note it sounds like it might be pretty close to 0.

My guess it would be related to gas. It's my understanding that new utility-grade wind and solar installs have to have generating capacity equal to or greater than the nominal generation capacity of wind/solar to maintain a stable base load when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining and that natural gas powered two-stage plants tend to be the "insurance" layer (they are relatively clean, start fast, can throttle up/down far more flexibly than other modes of generation...)

I'd guess that hydro is worse than solar/wind by this metric. While rare there have been some pretty bad dam breaks, the Banqiao Dam failure alone killed ~200,000 people.

This older article has estimates for more production types including those:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Exactly what I was thinking.

I'd expect it to be quite high (deaths per TWh) while the technology is new or advancing fast, both because the energy production will be low, and because there must be more risk in newer industrial-scale technologies.

Deaths per TWh in Offshore wind vs Onshore wind production would be interesting to see too.

I know it's not completely related since it's not about human deaths, but wind is quite disruptive for the local fauna actually.

My country invested a lot in wind generated energy in the past decade (and that's a good thing), but the bird populations in those areas clearly suffered for it.

One of the first hits on google. Deaths are per 1000 TwH, and numbers are somewhat different, probably illustrating how hard it is to estimate casualties from pollution. Nuclear is still safest, followed by solar and wind.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...

Also missing: water power.

There were lots of deaths from hydro power dam failures.

(Update: fixed typo, thanks :D)

Ya I wanted to see solar in the chart because I always wonder what the lifecycle costs are for solar. It seems like recycling a solar panel would be as labor intensive and toxic as most other electronics.