Canary Media writes, “Majority of Americans want a big power grid and more cheap, clean energy.” The media is clearly misleading Americans into believing that wind and solar power are clean and cheap. They are neither. There are environmental impacts associated with manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing of solar panels and wind turbines, and their costs are not comparable to fossil fuel or nuclear power because wind and solar need backup power, requiring either duplicate generating technologies or expensive storage batteries.
Their conclusion is based on a survey from a Conservative Energy Network poll. The poll found that two-thirds of likely voters support more transmission lines to boost clean energy and grid reliability. The survey covers likely voters in five states: Ohio and Pennsylvania — two states in the PJM Interconnection — and Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator.
Environmental Impact
Because wind and solar plants are far less efficient than fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, performing at significantly lower capacity factors than traditional technologies, more wind and solar capacity is required to generate equal amounts of power. As a result, renewables consume orders of magnitude more materials for the same electricity output. For example, replacing the energy output of a 100-megawatt natural gas-fired turbine with wind requires 20 wind turbines that occupy around 10 square miles of land, requiring enormous quantities of concrete, steel, and fiberglass, along with rare earth elements, whose processing is dominated by China. That means that wind and solar also require huge increases in mining.
According to the Mackinac Center, construction materials — steel, glass, and concrete — needed for wind turbines and solar panels are produced in energy and emissions-intensive industries, such as cement and steel production, which each account for 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Fossil fuels are used to produce cement, plastics, and fiberglass, to power ships, trucks, and construction equipment, and to provide lubricants for the gearboxes on turbines. According to Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute, “If wind turbines were to supply half the world’s electricity, nearly 2 billion tons of coal [around one quarter of all global coal use] would have to be consumed to produce the concrete and steel, along with 1.5 billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades.”
Reliance on solar power also means reliance on China, as China dominates the global solar panel market and polysilicon production, using cheap coal. Around half of the world’s polysilicon, a key ingredient in solar cells, is produced in Xinjiang, China, where Uyghur Muslims are enslaved to produce it.
Cobalt, needed for the manufacture of storage batteries to backup wind and solar and to power electric vehicles, is mostly produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo, often using child labor with abysmal working conditions. The Congo has almost half of the world’s cobalt reserves, and China owns half of the large cobalt mines.
Wind and solar units must also be replaced much faster than fossil fuel or nuclear units, meaning more manufacturing and more mining. The average life of wind and solar units is said to be 25 years, but in reality, it is much less, and some are even repowered after just 10 years of operation. That compares to fossil fuel and nuclear units whose operating lives are four, five, or six decades. The shorter life means the process of extraction and production must be renewed, and old panels and turbines must be disposed of.
Waste Disposal
Disposal has become a problem, with few waste disposal centers having the capability to cut the massive wind turbine blades. It is estimated that the global wind industry will create 47 million tons of blade waste by 2050, with the U.S. contributing around 20%. According to Mills, “When the 20 wind turbines that constitute just one small 100-MW wind farm wear out, decommissioning and trashing them will lead to fourfold more nonrecyclable plastic trash than all the world’s (recyclable) plastic straws combined.”
Texas has the most wind capacity of any U.S. state. According to Texas Monthly, about forty miles west of Abilene on Interstate 20 lies what may be the world’s largest disposal of wind turbine blades in a town called Sweetwater. The blades are between 150 and 200 feet in length and mostly made of composite materials such as fiberglass with a binding resin. The blades are cut into thirds, and each segment is longer than a school bus. The pile of wind blades covers more than thirty acres, in stacks rising as high as basketball backboards. Other used blades are being stored in ten acres, a couple of miles south of town, and in other locations in the county.
Solar panel disposal is also a problem. Disposal of solar panels can result in toxic waste leaching into the soil and into water systems. The International Renewable Energy Agency’s official projections claim that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” and could total 78 million metric tons by 2050, based mostly on a 30-year life cycle for solar panels. By 2035, discarded solar panels could outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. According to the Harvard Business Review, the levelized cost of solar could be four times the current projection when solar waste is factored into the calculation.
Wind and solar also pose serious threats to the nation’s wildlife — from endangered right whales to tens of thousands of bird deaths each year, but these have largely been ignored by the Biden administration.
Cost Issues
Because wind and solar power can only produce electricity when the weather is conducive, they require back-up power from natural gas, coal, or nuclear generators that operate 24/7 or from very expensive storage batteries, which store excess electricity when available to use when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. System costs include the cost of the backup power and the cost of the extra infrastructure needed to move power from sunny and windy sites, which are frequently far removed from where power is needed, to demand centers. Natural gas and coal generators are located near demand centers and thus do not require the extra infrastructure that solar and wind units require.
The levelized costs of wind and solar power do not include the cost of intermittency, that is, the backup power required when the wind and solar resources are not available, nor the additional infrastructure costs needed to get their power to demand centers. These technologies also receive massive subsidies from Biden’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act — subsidies that they have been receiving for decades — that make it more difficult for fossil fuel and nuclear generators to compete, compounding the situation.
Analysis
The public believes that wind and solar power are cheap and clean. Neither is the case. They require massive amounts of material to produce the equivalent power of fossil fuel or nuclear power plants, and require huge amounts of land and mining. Disposal of used wind turbines and solar panels requires special handling due to the size of the turbine blades and the toxicity of solar panels. Their reported costs are misleading because analysts often focus on the levelized cost of electricity metric, which excludes the cost of backup systems and infrastructure, only focusing on the cost to build and operate a plant, not the value of the plant to the grid.
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