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COMMENTARY
If You Want ‘Renewable Energy,’ Get Ready to Dig
Mark P. Mills
The Wall Street Journal August 6, 2019
Energy & EnvironmentTechnology / InfrastructureRegulations
Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.
Democrats dream of powering society entirely with wind and solar farms combined with massive batteries. Realizing this dream would require the biggest expansion in mining the world has seen and would produce huge quantities of waste.
“Renewable energy” is a misnomer. Wind and solar machines and batteries are built from nonrenewable materials. And they wear out. Old equipment must be decommissioned, generating millions of tons of waste. The International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that solar goals for 2050 consistent with the Paris Accords will result in old-panel disposal constituting more than double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste. Consider some other sobering numbers:
A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving and processing more than 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet. The alternative? Use gasoline and extract one-tenth as much total tonnage to deliver the same number of vehicle-miles over the battery’s seven-year life.
When electricity comes from wind or solar machines, every unit of energy produced, or mile traveled, requires far more materials and land than f****l f**ls. That physical reality is literally visible: A wind or solar farm stretching to the horizon can be replaced by a handful of gas-fired turbines, each no bigger than a tractor-trailer.
Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of nonrecyclable plastic. Solar power requires even more cement, steel and glass—not to mention other metals. Global silver and indium mining will jump 250% and 1,200% respectively over the next couple of decades to provide the materials necessary to build the number of solar panels, the International Energy Agency forecasts. World demand for rare-earth elements—which aren’t rare but are rarely mined in America—will rise 300% to 1,000% by 2050 to meet the Paris green goals. If electric vehicles replace conventional cars, demand for cobalt and lithium, will rise more than 20-fold. That doesn’t count batteries to back up wind and solar grids.
Last year a Dutch government-sponsored study concluded that the Netherlands’ green ambitions alone would consume a major share of global minerals. “Exponential growth in [global] renewable energy production capacity is not possible with present-day technologies and annual metal production,” it concluded.
The demand for minerals likely won’t be met by mines in Europe or the U.S. Instead, much of the mining will take place in nations with oppressive labor practices. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces 70% of the world’s raw cobalt, and China controls 90% of cobalt refining. The Sydney-based Institute for a Sustainable Future cautions that a global “gold” rush for minerals could take miners into “some remote wilderness areas [that] have maintained high biodiversity because they haven’t yet been disturbed.”
What’s more, mining and fabrication require the consumption of hydrocarbons. Building enough wind turbines to supply half the world’s electricity would require nearly two billion tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. More than 90% of the world’s solar panels are built in Asia on coal-heavy electric grids.
Engineers joke about discovering “unobtanium,” a magical energy-producing element that appears out of nowhere, requires no land, weighs nothing, and emits nothing. Absent the realization of that impossible dream, hydrocarbons remain a far better alternative than today’s green dreams.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, and author of the recent report, “The ‘New Energy Economy’: An Exercise in Magical Thinking.”
COMMENTARY br If You Want ‘Renewable Energy,’ Get ... (
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After US Exit From Paris Climate Accord, Guess Who’s Leading The World In CO2 Emission Reduction?
(Tea Party 247) – While the climate alarmists on the left would have you believe otherwise, President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords made positively zero negative impact on their relentless quest to save the world from impending doom.
This impending doom, as we’re constantly reminded, is due to carbon emissions, and the international pact to reduce carbon emissions that is the Paris Climate Accord must include the US or we’re all going to die.
“The fact that the U.S.A. is leaving the Paris accord seems to outrage and worry everyone, and it should,” teen climate activist Greta Thunberg said last month. “But the fact that we’re all about to fail the commitments you signed up for in the Paris Agreement doesn’t seem to bother the people in power even the least.”
There’s only one problem.
The opposite is happening.
A new report reveals that the US has reduced its CO2 emissions more than any other nation on the supposedly doomed planet.
“The United States saw the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions in 2019 on a country basis – a fall of 140 Mt, or 2.9%, to 4.8 Gt,” The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in the report released Tuesday, according to The Gateway Pundit. “US emissions are now down almost 1 Gt from their peak in the year 2000, the largest absolute decline by any country over that period.”
“A 15% reduction in the use of coal for power generation underpinned the decline in overall US emissions in 2019,” the IEA said. “Coal-fired power plants faced even stronger competition from natural gas-fired generation, with benchmark gas prices an average of 45% lower than 2018 levels. As a result, gas increased its share in electricity generation to a record high of 37%. Overall electricity demand declined because demand for air-conditioning and heating was lower as a result of milder summer and winter weather.”
On June 1, 2017, Trump announced that the United States would pull out of the Paris Agreement, which put a heavy financial burden on the U.S. and left some of the major carbon emitters off the hook. Some climate watchdogs claimed the pullout would lead to higher emissions, but it turns out the U.S.’s emissions dropped.
On the other hand, China and India emissions grew.
“In China, emissions rose but were tempered by slower economic growth and higher output from low-carbon sources of electricity,” the IEA reported. “Renewables continued to expand in China, and 2019 was also the first full year of operation for seven large-scale nuclear reactors in the country.”
“Emissions growth in India was moderate in 2019, with CO2 emissions from the power sector declining slightly as electricity demand was broadly stable and strong renewables growth prompted coal-fired electricity generation to fall for the first time since 1973,” the IEA concluded. “Continued growth in fossil-fuel demand in other sectors of the Indian economy, notably t***sport, offset the decline in the power sector. Emissions grew strongly in Southeast Asia, lifted by robust coal demand.”