August 06, 2024
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are probably aware of the massive push to transition to green energy. The goal is to have wind and solar replace coal and natural gas; the electric vehicle (EV) will supposedly replace internal combustion engines. Directives are coming from the highest office in the land; the current administration has made green energy a large part of its agenda.
We are being told that these technologies are clean and will save the planet from climate change. However, these alternative forms of energy being espoused are riddled with their own problems.
Hidden behind the solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries are some dirty secrets that get swept under the rug and ignored by climate enthusiasts. Fossil fuels are constantly put under a microscope and condemned as an evil destructive polluter; green energy is typically put on a pedestal. Green energy, however, is not as perfect and wonderful as we are made to believe. Yet, we are putting a lot of trust into these energy sources, without considering their ramifications.
The American Consumer Institute just released a report detailing many of the environmental impacts associated with the so-called green energy forms being heavily promoted. The life cycle of all three—the wind turbine, solar panel, and EV battery—involve significant environmental consequences that should not be overlooked and need to be part of the discussion when implementing energy policies.
One of the biggest issues involved with these forms is the extraction and manufacturing processes of various critical minerals that are required for wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries. Many underdeveloped nations, where there’s an abundance of minerals, are at risk. The operations and procedures not only overtake land but contaminate surrounding soil and water sources. In the worst cases, this work is accomplished through slave labor.
Various toxins and other greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, where workers and even nearby communities are potentially affected. Landscape is tarnished and various animal habitats are shrinking and/or experiencing stress. The massive amount of land occupied by both wind and solar may never be recoverable.
China dominates the green energy supply chains, but their environmental standards are subpar. CO2 emissions associated with refineries in China are 1.5 times greater than those in the EU or U.S.
All three energy sources are also creating a huge waste problem. Since any kind of recycling is very limited on a large scale, more than 90% wind turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries end up in landfills. By 2050 it is predicted that used turbine blades will exceed 43 million tons of waste worldwide. Solar waste is predicted to be close to 80 million tons. And with the U.S. projecting 33 million EVs on the road by 2030, that is a lot of batteries to end up in landfills.
Ironically, the same folks who want to charge customers for every plastic bag they use at the grocery store, out of fear of single-use plastics ending up in landfills, don’t seem to have a problem with potentially toxic machinery filling that space instead.
In a penchant for trying to solve one crisis, we are creating others.
Some of the environmental impacts and hazards posed by green energy are far more detrimental than fossil fuels, and yet the latter is often dismissed. Such risks associated with green technologies should actually be an argument against vigorous pursuit of them.
Each energy source, including fossil fuels, should be considered as part of an all-of-the-above strategy for supplying the necessary energy to power homes, businesses, and the U.S. economy at large. All of them come with some degree of environmental concerns, and each should be weighed and measured—along with costs, logistics, reliability, and geopolitical factors—when developing public policy. Instead of completely trying to phase out fossil fuels, a robust and healthy energy mix ought to be established; we need a balanced approach that does not breed additional problems.
It is past time to come clean on so-called clean energy. The real-life consequences and detrimental effects of it demand more honest conversations and a thoughtful course of action.
Kristen Walker is a policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, visit www.theamericanconsumer.org or follow us on Twitter @ConsumerPal
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
We must destroy the environment in order to save it.
EV batteries is a start. What about grid scale batteries? Wind and solar need those when fossil fuels are limited by fiat.
As the Royal Society report showed, grid scale batteries are a non starter.
For the UK “some tens of TWhs of very long duration storage will be needed. For comparison the TWhs needed are 1000 times more than is currently provided by pumped hydro, and far more than could be provided cost effectively by batteries”
They later admitted that they had underestimated the amount of storage required because they had taken the UK’s demand for electricity in 2018 and used that 32 times (to 2050) without taking into account the huge increase in electricity required to electrify everything.
It wasn’t really the demand that was the underlying issue, but the failure to use a proper long term weather history in the previous work for the Climate Change Committee. The demand projection should have been aligned with the weather in the weather history for assessing the overall storage need.
I’ve just started reviewing the methodology for the latest Future Energy Scenarios from National Grid. It seems that they maintain the flaw of not using long term weather series, adjusting everything to “normal weather”, and then considering isolated more extreme conditions. So they’re making the same mistake as the work for the CCC did. See here:
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/323866/download
No worries about grid scale batteries. They will ignite and solve the recycling and land fill problems.
Best build a few more hospitals, though.
The author assumes, it would seem, that the environment and supplying abundant energy are the motives behind the Green Machine. I suggest that the downsides outlined are well understood by the elite who push the agenda and that the real agenda is rather darker and as old as authority itself– greed and the lust for power, the desire to control humanity, not to enhance it in any way.
Good article, but it leaves out the most important aspect of renewables non-utility, that neither sun nor wind nor both acting together or separately can support our electric grids. The grids cannot be intermittent. They must provide as much power as there is demand at any time of day, everyday, but not more and not less at any time, second by second. Both sun and wind power schemes are highly irregular and intermittent and require some form of backup power and elaborate grid control machinery to fill the gaps. Batteries do not work because their discharge properties do not support correction of intermittency for any more than a very few hours and they are hideously expensive. Pumped storage does not work because there are not enough mountain tops to shave off, dig out large reservoirs, and equipped with generators nor can there be enough wind and solar energy produced to make them work. New York has supposedly “solved” this problem by calling for “DEFRS,” Dispatchable Emissions Free Resources, as yet and likely forever uninvented. Two Island communities, King Island and El Hierro Island, have tried to make sun and wind work for their small grids but can get no more than about half of their needed power all of the time from their systems and that at a very high cost.
The simple issue is that for modern society, the grid must work all the time and electricity generating machines which cannot support this requirement are simply parasitic. They do not help, they hinder.
Spot on. The solution is Nuclear and what a monumental waste of time and money spent on non-solutions.
And a [Ctrl F] search for “nuclear” comes up empty for Kristen Walker’s article.
A careful re-read of your post requires a re-write:
Spot on. The solution is Nuclear and wWhat a monumental waste of time and money spent onnon-solutionsa non-problem.________________________________________________
Eventually at some time in the future increasing scarcity of fossil fuels will become a problem. The current decommissioning of nuclear power plants is not a move in the right direction.
For the love of God, please stop kissing
up to their imaginary CO2 Problem!
“The solution”
To WHAT ???
“”climate enthusiasts””?
“”Millions of Brits have been soaking up the sun at home and are preparing to jet off to the Mediterranean for a blast of extra-strong radiation””
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6474042/sun-tan-lines-fails-funny-pictures/
Something sensible at last.
If war is peace, then clean is filthy.
I got much pushback and trollers when I wrote a piece early on about the dirty secrets of EVs:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/08/04/the-dirty-secrets-of-clean-electric-vehicles/
lots of support too
Somebody needs to start challenging the wind tubine manufacturers and EV manufacturers on their ESG credentials, particularily the supply chain and the sustainability of their products?
Right, they must sub out work to every ethnic, religion and gender. If that drives up the price- that’s OK, it’s the progressive way! /s
Not only do the mining operations and purification use a lot of fossil fuel energy. For wind turbines,
the sheer amounts of concrete and steel which goes into their construction is huge. One should compare with nuclear on tons of steel or concrete per produced MW of current, during the turbine’s or the nuclear reactor’s lifetime. You also have to include the flattening of hilltops as well as the roads that are built just to reach the construction site as well. If after use, they had to break up the concrete base and restore the site, that should also be factored in.
The blades on the wind turbines are of fiberglass construction in which the resin is a
direct petroleum product, made entirely from oil..
“the roads that are built just to reach the construction site as well”
One road to the top of a mountain in western Wokeachusetts is 100′ wide. There is a great time lapse video of its construction online.
Please post a link when you can.
Berkshire Wind: A Public Power Project
I love watching this video- not because I like wind farms, which I hate, but because it’s a neat video.
it’s not all 100′ wide, but at one point it is
Is that so that the ridiculously long trucks hauling the ridiculously long blades can make it around the turns?
I think so. I hate wind and solar energy- but I respect the workers. Watch the video I gave the link to above. That work looks dangerous.
“Directives are coming from the highest office in the land; the current administration has made green energy a large part of its agenda.”
Asset manager Blackrock has been running the country pushing these policy’s for years.
Donilon brothers Tom and Mike, Tom’s wife Catherine Russell, Brian Deese, Wally Adeyemo,
and Michael Pyle are all Blackrock plants in the Biden/Harris administration and other going
back decades..
The AGW cabal owns the MSM, why would they publish anything contrary to their narrative?
Climate Borg:
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Existence as you know it is over.
Good article, but it failed to mention one of the biggest problems with renewables, aside from intermittency, which is that they are all hugely diffuse sources of energy.
So in addition to the noted minerals and waste problems, there’s also the prospect of having to devote vast areas of our habitat, including arable land, to these ‘resources’ in order to obtain a modicum of the energy we need to survive.
3-4 years ago, the first “energy czar” in Wokeachusetts admitted that hundreds of thousands of acres of forest will have to be destroyed to install solar “farms”- and that wouldn’t even be enough to provide current electric needs, never mind future needs- but then he got fired for saying that.
“For years, we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet’s natural resources, without consequence. We were wrong.”
That single quote from The Day After Tomorrow made the scifi movie worthwhile.
Without that quote, it was pure propaganda, entertaining certainly, but grossly bad science-wise.
Sorry, I thought it was unentertaining propaganda with or without the quote, but you’re right about the grossly bad science.
We each have our perspectives and at the moment are free to choose what entertains.
There were moments that were entertaining.
Sir, I am president of the Math Club, president of the Science Club, and president of the Chess Club. Find someone who is a bigger geek than me and he can help. (words to that effect).
The homeless man’s dog.
Seeing the Mastodon that had been instantly frozen with food in it’s mouth from 10,000 years ago.
The debate about using the elevators ending when power went out.
There are whole sections of tax code books we can burn.
20 year old scotch… To humanity, to England, to Manchester United!
There were moments.
You are right that there was a major thread of propaganda, but most of that was derived from a book published a decade or 2 prior, The Coming Global Superstorm. A less than entertaining piece of science fiction, without plot or characters or humor.
The life cycle of all three—the wind turbine, solar panel, and EV battery—involve significant environmental consequences that should not be overlooked and need to be part of the discussion when implementing energy policies.
Yep and unlike wanting to start a new mine and having to stump up a remediation bond guess what wind turbine and solar factories have to put up?
Something ‘deeply wrong’ with the cost to decommission wind turbines (msn.com)
(the Made in Oz solar panel subsidy miner is off to a great start with layoffs too)
There’s obviously a market for CO2 that’s being met with today’s methods. So what happens to all the extra CO2 that’s being captured? Stored? How much for how long? Forever? Will we ever have enough storage? What about the potential for leaks like that have occurred with the various lake eruptions around the world causing mass people and cattle deaths?
One commenter here- perhaps in a previous article, said leaks won’t happen. I wouldn’t bet on them not happening.
Yeah, and the Titanic was unsinkable.
Yuh, and Russia is a super power, nobody would dare invade it. /s
We will just have to drink more beer!
Yeast releases CO2 to the atmosphere to make alcohol.
No beer for you.
“that is a lot of batteries to end up in landfills.”
I quoted that phrase as an example of the internal inconsistency of the article’s POV.
IF the elements required to make the batteries are hard to get THEN it will make economic sense to recover them instead of landfilling them.
I know most disadvantages of EVs and electrical capacity for charging them, I chose an ICE, I just can’t not see the inconsistency. Smart people can beat the challenges. Collecting car batteries is not the kind of intellectual challenge awaiting the next Einstein.
Maybe- but EV batteries are different than ICE car batteries. Maybe it won’t be so easy to recover any of the elements. I’m just guessing but I’m sure others here know a lot about this.
Lead-acid batteries have been around for a very long time and the recycling is a mature process. It is rather easy to recover the metals in the plates and the electrolyte is basically acid in water, also relatively easy. Just pull off the top and start.
LiPO batteries are much different. One has to open the package, then unroll the plates taking care to not ignite the electrolyte. Then the process to recover the lithium and rare earths is much more complicated and energy intensive. I have not seen any practical estimates on percentage of materials that can be recovered. That and the recycling in not mature as of yet.
Story tip
One for Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13720695/Scientists-warn-Great-Barrier-Reef-disappear.html
Bullshit anomalies, who was “measuring” reef temps back in 1624?
But they drilled the coral and it was like reading tree rings.
Oh boy.
0.34ºF in 400 years. ie the middle of the LIA
WOW….. PANIC !!!!!
Meanwhile let’s look at a longer period…. MUCH warmer before the LIA
Guess what, The GBR is still there
Story tip: EV catches fire in parking garage in Korea, destroys garage and causes injuries and evacuation of apartment complex:
21,000 EV (electric motorcycle (bike)) fires a year in China
Wind, solar and EVs are not green, are not efficient and are not affordable. If the government would only step aside all of this mess would go away. Only an out of touch, irrational, no nothing government could perpetuate a hoax like this.
You left out greedy, power mad, etc.