After cataloguing yet more follies in Ontario’s convoluted and expensive power system, Parker Gallant moves on to a key point about green energy. Namely that it’s dirty. From those discarded wind turbine blades in Texas to asbestos in turbines in Britain to rooftop solar panel fires (yikes) to the hideous problem of disposing of such panels even if they don’t burst into flames, it turns out that, to borrow a line from Voltaire, the green energy transition is neither a transition, energy nor green. Which doesn’t leave much. Oh wait. It does. A giant midden heap of toxic waste, shattered hopes, and misleading hype from activists and politicians. Ugh! [Read more.]

One very basic reason renewables are not greener is that their intermittent and often untimely generation of power means you also need traditional backup sources so to a large extent they’re an add-on not a replacement. Just as bugs aren’t better than beef as food, solar isn’t better than gas (or nuclear) as an energy source. Moreover there’s a real issue with grid stability given the “synchronization and inertia” problem. As the Manhattan Contrarian wrote this spring:

“All the sociology and gender studies majors agree that we have a moral duty to switch our energy system away from fossil fuels to ‘clean and green’ wind and solar electricity. Who could possibly be such a monster as to stand in the way?”

Unfortunately, the fact that “conventional” generation including nuclear involves big rotating electromagnets spewing alternating current whereas wind and solar produce direct current through stationary inverters actually has very real implications for cascading power system failure as in Iberia in 2025, which has major “social costs” not typically taken into account. But the problem goes deeper. Much deeper.

Including that wind and solar are not manufactured using energy from wind and solar. They can’t be. So they’re not green even on their own terms.

As an item from Roger Pielke Jr. that we’ve also been hoarding since March observes, these allegedly low-carbon energy sources require staggering quantities of concrete, steel, aluminium, chromium and on and on through molybdenum and magnesium (no, it’s not Tom Lehrer’s Elements song but it sounds like it) to lead, silver, tin, cobalt, boron and so forth. And thus, for instance:

“The IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 roadmap calls for solar PV capacity to increase 20x and wind power 11x. These increases require that annual solar additions must reach 630 GW per year by 2030 and wind must see annual increases of 390 GW. Battery storage must increase 14x to 1,200 GW by 2030. These numbers imply an unprecedented mobilization of materials and industrial production. For example: The world currently produces about 1.9 billion tonnes of steel per year. Wind turbines are 71–79 percent steel by mass. The Energy Transitions Commission estimates that a net-zero energy transition requires 6.5 billion tonnes of end-use materials between 2022 and 2050, of which 95 percent is steel, copper, and aluminum – which is about three and a half years of current total global steel production.”

Yikes. And if you think all this stuff is produced without causing other environmental problems besides whatever you think is wrong with conventional energy production, not to mention massive human rights abuses, think again. But the energy is an issue:

“Making primary steel from iron ore — about 70 percent of global production — requires metallurgical coking coal in a blast furnace at around 1,500°C. Coal is not simply burned as fuel to create very high heat, it is also used in the chemical process that removes oxygen from iron ore to make iron. In 2023, less than 1 Mt of near-zero emission steel was produced globally, of a total global production of 1,889.2 Mt.”

Well, what about solar panels? Do they perchance grow in green fields? Alas no:

“Solar panels are similarly carbon intensive. Producing solar-grade polysilicon requires smelting quartz at 1,500–2,000°C, followed by chemically intensive purification. According to the IEA’s Special Report on Solar PV Global Supply Chains, coal generates more than 60 percent of the electricity used in global solar manufacturing and in China, which dominates solar manufacturing, that figure exceeds 75 percent.”

Egad. Smelting quartz. As for lithium-ion batteries, their carbon footprint is even worse. Amazing. Satire cannot keep up. Including with the fact that because wind and solar have such low “energy density” they must be installed on a vast scale, gobbling up habitat and ecosystems and slaughtering or otherwise exterminating endangered species. There’s a reason more and more communities are rejecting such installations, at least in the U.S. where big government is less likely to trample local preferences. And we still haven’t gotten past the point where they do what they do.

Once we get there, once these already deeply unsatisfactory massive wind and solar installations have worn out, what on Earth or some other planet is anyone meant to do with the waste, still full of all those chemicals including rare earths? Or the huge bases for the wind turbines? Using yet more energy to move dozens of tons of cement and steel to… uh… where was it meant to vanish to again?

As Gallant says:

“The other side of solar panels is their recycling is similarly nil like those wind turbine blades! Interestingly even those pushing renewable energy such as CanREA (Canadian Renewable Energy Association) admit it as this quote from an article in the CBC stated: ‘Just producing that much waste, landfilling it going forward, it’s not really a sustainable solution,’ said Geoff McCarney, the institute’s senior research director.’”

So what is? As always, the fact that someone thinks something is a problem should not lead them to assume there must be an easy, painless solution. But far too often it does exactly that. Including ignoring the massive engineering and even environmental problems of supposedly green energy.