That sounds like a world of pain. Between the displaced wildlife and released carbon from all those trees, I'd be quite curious if that's even worth it.
It probably isn’t, which is why you don’t see it happen much I imagine.
If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the options quite a bit. I also forgot to mention, in most climates trees are a hassle this way, they also grow naturally, so even if you clear the land you need to go back and keep it clear every couple years.
Solar has similar drawbacks but worse - you can’t just clear the trees around where you’d put the windmills and roads, you’d need to clear pretty much everywhere including from where they would shade the panels. Which greatly increases the footprint.
Trees can of course be burned for heat and energy, but it’s a time consuming, dangerous, and inefficient process (time/land/manpower) compared to petroleum extraction. It tends to only happen for individual use, at small scale; or when heavily subsidized from taxes on petroleum products.
> If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the options quite a bit.
Just to make sure, did you see the edit of my comment above? I checked out the land cover in Finland, it is actually a fairly high percentage trees and I did some math on putting wind in the other places.
Now that I'm writing this I realized a major flaw: not looking at https://globalwindatlas.info earlier. It turns out that Finland looks about average (just eyeballing it, I can't figure out how to use this area energy yield tool, it just gives me a blank image instead of a simple number).
The forests are not a big issue for wind in Finland nowadays, you just build towers that are high enough. The biggest problem is the long Russian border. You cannot build a wind farm where it would hide Russian movements from the Finnish radars.
