Myths about Modern Renewables: Wind and Solar
We hear in the media about how modern renewable energies are the panacea for our planetary environmental and climate troubles and the proponents of clean and renewable energy use the terms as though they were literally true. Renewables eliminate emissions at the site of the energy production, while their emissions and pollution are transposed to areas not seen by the consumer.
Fossil fuel company divestment campaigns tell us that it is possible to substitute all the energy we consume with renewables by 2025 or 2050, ignoring the fact that our current energy consumption uses 80 percent fossil fuels and only about 4% is provided by modern renewables. We are told that these renewables are increasingly powering the electricity of cities, but we choose to ignore that electricity is just 18 percent of the total energy our civilization uses. The math just simply doesn’t work! It is evident that the promises for a quick transition to renewables are not based on facts backed by a scientific method, but on wishful thinking turned to dogma.
The dogma quality of the push for renewables gets worse If you research a bit into the renewability and cleanliness of these energy sources. The basis of the dogma is the fact that the sun and wind are ever present and therefore renewable. Even though we are in a technological culture full of infrastructure, renewables are usually presented as though they didn’t require any; there is no mention either of the materials required to capture and transform the energy from the sun and wind into useful energy. All infrastructure, including that of renewables requires mining and manufacturing that emit greenhouse gases and create an environmental breakdown of ecosystems that remains invisible in the West.
Our technological progress has allowed us to forget about nature and think that its commodification is the norm since it feeds our technological addiction and modern lifestyle. We have been brainwashed into thinking that what helps technology helps us, so we see nature as a source of minerals and resources that are there to be extracted for our enjoyment. We take for granted that huge forests or mountain tops are removed so we can have access to our gadgets and continue consuming as though there was no tomorrow. After all, the fast removal of trees and the digging of craters for mining could not have been done without machines that make us proud of our own ingenuity and progress.
This kind of thinking has led to our present environmentally dire situation, and renewables are just a continuation of the same mindset: the solution involves more technology to replace fossil fuels, whose implementation will inevitably increase conventional pollution, while adding new degradation sources. All this greenwashing maneuvering is what most people want to hear, an optimistic but infeasible solution that allows us to believe we can retain our current economic system and quality of life while solving the climate problem. This unreal view forgets that our lack of questioning of the effects of technological progress on the nature that sustains us, is what created the problem in the first place.
Even if we think ourselves above nature, we are part of it and our lack of respect for it will cost us dearly. Even a slight change in the oxygen concentration in our atmosphere would not allow us to breathe, in spite of all the progress we have accumulated. Technology is a veneer that enthralls us, but we still function with all the mechanisms that nature made for us, we are dependent on it and our best strategy is to understand this. Adding more degradation to our already degraded nature cannot be called clean, and extracting more resources from our already exhausted Earth can’t be called renewable.
Wind
Wind farms are the biggest providers of modern renewable energy, about 51% of the total. The farms need lots of space and the infrastructure requires about 800 components including concrete, aluminum, steel, copper and carbon fiber. All of these materials entail high energy consumption in their mining, manufacturing and transportation, most of which is provided by fossil fuels. Steel requires coke coal; concrete, petroleum; and carbon fiber is made of petroleum products themselves. Even the need for steel in wind is problematical, since the current global production amounts to 1.6 billion tons, and if wind energy were to substitute only the current use of coal in the world, it would require 10 billion tons of steel. If the current production of steel already has produced a huge environmental degradation, what could we expect if we increased its production by 6.5% or more, just to supply the growth in wind industry?
The expansion of wind farms needed to satisfy our energy needs has another problem with copper, a single 660-kW wind turbine is estimated to contain some 800 pounds of copper, much more than the amount used by conventional electricity sources. This implies that the current production would have to increase exponentially and with it the environmental degradation that comes with open pit mines for copper.
Some of the most toxic components in wind energy are the rare earth elements. Wind power, just like most electricity production, requires magnets to achieve the energy transformation. In the early stages of the industry, they used the same magnets as in conventional electricity sectors, but they soon discovered that the energetic intermittency of wind made that method very inefficient since higher winds were required for moving the turbines. This problem was solved by replacing the usual magnets with permanent ones, which require neodymium and dysprosium, two rare earths whose mining is extremely polluting and whose waste produces radioactivity. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences, the magnet in a 2-megawatt wind turbine contains 800lbs of neodymium and 130lbs of dysprosium plus a mix of other rare-earths.
These materials are so called not because they are rare, but because they come in small specks and their processing requires separating them to create more concentrated lumps of each element. This process is energy intensive and fossil fuels are used in many of the steps. The pollution caused by their processing has turned many rivers and lakes in China into toxic messes, so toxic, that a human can’t stand near those areas for more than an hour without falling ill. China has about 40% of the reserves of rare earths and currently produces about 80% of them. A sharp increase in wind energy will cause an enormous environmental breakdown that will add to the one caused by all our other technologies.
The waste product of all rare earths is not only radioactive but according to the Chinese Society for Rare Earths, “one ton of calcined rare earth ore generates 423,776 cubic feet of waste gas containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid, and approximately 2,649 cubic feet of acidic wastewater.”
Most people correctly worry about the radioactive waste involved in nuclear power, but they neglect the wind industry, which isn’t very regulated because of the magnitude of the waste and the expense in its proper disposal. The mining of one ton of rare earth ore produces one ton of radioactive waste. For comparison, America’s nuclear industry produces about 2,300 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel each year, while China’s rare Earth mining produces about 120,000 metric tons of radioactive waste per year.
To put the possible escalation of renewables to provide 100% of electricity into perspective, MIT and the Bulletin of Atomic Energy have calculated the amount of rare earths required for certain wind electricity output and the subsequent radioactive waste product. Using an average for their numbers, they chose to substitute all the electricity that the US used in 2018 with wind, about 4178 billion kW. The calculation arrived at a staggering 721 million metric tons of rare earths with the equivalent amount of radioactive waste.
In 2018, wind provided only 6.6% of electricity in the US and the environmental damage done to the Earth was already excessive. Is it possible to imagine the damage caused by the above quantity of radioactive waste? Or as the Daily Mail said, every turbine we erect contributes to “a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China.
As far as the renewability of wind power, the requirement of neodymium and dysprosium, makes the industry vulnerable to their depletion, especially if the goal is to substitute all fossil fuels with renewables. China said in 2012 that the increasing use of these minerals was depleting them fast and at that time, they had already used up 2/3 of their supply. They are left with the most difficult to mine ores, which require more energy and bring out a less quality product, while creating more toxic pollution. Australia, Russia Brazil and Vietnam make out the other countries with significant amounts of rare earths, but their production is still small.
It seems strange that in a scientifically-minded Western culture, such environmental destruction can go on while the majority of people remain convinced that wind power is clean and renewable. The mainstream culture accepts the definition of renewables at face value, without any exploration into their true nature.
Solar
Solar energy seems abundant and easy, but its transformation into useful energy requires lots of materials. Solar energy is based on the photovoltaic effect, by which a photon impacts the surface of a semiconductor like silicon or cadmium telluride and causes the emission of an electron, generating an electric current. Solar thermal, on the other hand, uses sunlight to heat a fluid, whether water or something else. This thermal cycle produces work that is then converted to electricity by an electrical generator.
About 90% of solar cells are made from silicon, just like the semiconductor chips for electronics. The basic staple for silicon is quartz gravel that contains silicon dioxide which is heated to get silicon that is 99 percent pure. Solar cells require 100 percent purity so the silicon has to be purified into polysilicon through several processes that produce a very hazardous compound, silicon tetrachloride. This byproduct is then thrown away, with the added hazard that when it gets in contact with water, it creates hydrochloric acid, which acidifies the soil. The byproduct also releases nitrogen trifluoride, a very toxic substance that just like hydrochloric acid, is a powerful greenhouse gas with a warming coefficient 17,200 times higher than CO2.
Ninety percent of solar panels still use this method for thinning silicon but there are newer photovoltaic cells that don’t use silicon at all and instead use thin-film copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) or cadmium-telluride. In this case, the toxicity of their manufacturing is caused by the use of heavy metals like cadmium.
Just like wind farms, solar farms use big amounts of copper. A photovoltaic solar power plant contains approximately 5.5 tons of copper per megawatt of power generation. There is eleven to forty times more copper per unit of generation in photovoltaic systems than in conventional electricity plants. Such gargantuan needs of both wind and solar for copper will have to compete with electric vehicles who typically use 10 times more copper than conventional fossil fuel ones. A normal car uses about 50 kilos of copper that require 1 ton of waste rock for its mining, an electric one ends up creating 10 tons of waste rock around it.
It is easy to see that the escalation of all of these new energy sources required to replace fossil fuels will entail a sharp increase in mineral mining around the world, risking their faster depletion, and expanding the environmental degradation.
All of the metals used in thin film solar panels are extracted in open-pit mines, where they are found in zinc, lead and copper ores. Open pit mines create an amount of waste rock two or three times bigger than the amount of ore produced and these are scattered around the mine surroundings. If not properly managed, erosion of the waste rock can leach dangerous heavy metals like cadmium into the soil and nearby streams. The waste piles from processing the ore, also produce toxic waste in the form of tailings impoundments, leach piles, and slag piles which are often very large and difficult to manage properly. The higher-grade ores of some of these minerals, especially copper, are gone, and what is left has reduced quality that requires more energy to produce a less concentrated mineral. Chile has the most copper in the world and it has been fighting an uphill battle with increasing energy and costs that yield less.
It is evident that wind and solar, the two most important modern renewables are not clean or renewable. The infrastructure required for the economic and technological growth started by the industrial revolution has already depleted most of the easy and powerful energy sources and the minerals required for a continuation of growth. The replacement of fossil fuels by renewables would require a high percentage of the Earth’s area, which would prove difficult to accommodate in a highly populated planet where access to food and water is already proving difficult for many. Human needs are already causing the extinction of many animals and widespread deforestation, our increasing need for food, biofuels and mineral and energy sources are overpowering the needs of the rest of life on Earth. The expansion of renewables would join the already tight competition for space and mineral needs and will prove inoperable.
Our excessive consumption of energy and goods has already disturbed the balance of the Earth’s systems, putting our species on a very risky trajectory. These facts lead us to conclude, as many environmental groups have done, that we should keep fossil fuels in the ground. However, as I showed above, the promise of totally replacing fossil fuels with renewables is not realistic. The only sane option is admitting that our current lifestyle based on high consumption of energy will soon become impossible.
Reducing our energy and material consumption doesn’t mean switching to electricity-saving light bulbs, recycling, buying electric vehicles or using the bike more. It means, reducing our energy consumption and consumerism drastically, to the level of countries like Cuba, in which economic sanctions have precluded overconsumption, or countries with very low GDPs.
Nobody wants to hear logical reasoning that leads to a drastic reduction in energy consumption with the accompanying change in lifestyle and economic system. We live in a society with a cornucopian bent in which infinite growth is taken for granted and few questions are asked about how all that energy is produced or the entropy production our technological conveniences entail. We imagine it is all well taken care of, after all, we are at the height of progress and we believe technology can solve any problem including our own death.
Respected authors like Harvard Professor Steven Pinker can make a lot of money with their books in the New York Times bestseller list by promoting a non-existent optimistic tale and affirming that we are living in the best of times for mankind. Pinker is an expert at ignoring the elephant in the room of our disturbance of Earth and the astounding environmental degradation we increasingly cause. His success makes evident that people are more willing to pay for an optimistic book that lies by ignoring reality, than buying a book from a true expert who can explain the infeasibility of his optimistic assertions. It doesn’t pay to be a Cassandra, even when the world is in deep need of understanding what most people don’t’ want to hear.
