Electricity generation from wind power doesn’t directly create emissions, but the manufacture, construction and end-of-life disposal of wind turbines does. To date, no power technology has achieved carbon neutrality over its life cycle (nuclear comes close but its expensive).

When defining it this way, wouldn't it be true that absolutely no new energy sources can be carbon neutral? Perhaps with nuclear given a long lifetime and rate of generation you can minimize the per kWh emissions, but the construction emissions do exist-- you can only theoretically get those to zero through some sort of offset program, right? Or are you looking to carbon negative technologies of the future?

There is a difference between carbon neutral and zero carbon. Over their lifetime, modern wind turbines generate 50-100 times the energy used in material extraction, refinement, construction, transport and installation, so in any meaningful sense they are carbon neutral. They are not zero carbon and therefore we should continue to reduce carbon in their inputs by using EAF steel, more efficient transport designs and techniques like thermoplastic or vegatable based resins and fibres in blades, however by far the best value for money on any national budget at the moment is simply to continue to replace fossil fuels for heating and transport with electricity and replacing fossil fuels in power generation with wind and solar

Not so sure the assumption of zero carbon emissions is reasonable or even attainable.

Seems to me the metrics should be based primarily on economics while avoiding undue harm to the environment, with CO2 emissions more of a secondary issue.

From looking at the summary on the Wood-Mac site, it is clear that the largest source of emissions by far comes from mining of the raw materials (they call it extraction). Both wind and solar generators rely on large amounts of precious metals, rare earths, and other oddball elements, almost none of which tend to occur in concentrated ores but rather as diffuse low grade deposits. In short, that means extracting a ton of, say, neodymium and dysporium (a large modern wind turbine may have more than a half ton of them in the magnets) requires moving thousands (or tens of, depending on ore grade) of tons of waste rock. Ergo, there are your emissions, since mining at that scale is not and cannot be done using electricity.