“Green” energy and “green” tech advocates boast that their technologies are more eco-friendly than those that depend on fossil fuels. They’re wrong. And Mark Mills proves it in Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check. Here’s a little taste: The materials extracted from the earth to fabricate wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries (to store grid electricity or power electric vehicles) are out of sight, located at remote quarries, mine sites, and mineral-processing facilities around the world. Those locations matter in terms of geopolitics and supply-chain risks, as well as in environmental terms. … For green energy, it all begins with the fact that such sources are land-intensive and very diffuse. For example, replacing the energy output from a single 100-MW natural gas-fired turbine, itself about the size of a residential house (producing enough electricity for 75,000 homes), requires at least 20 wind turbines, each one about the size of the Washington Monument, occupying some 10 square miles of land. Building those wind machines consumes enormous quantities of conventional materials, including concrete, steel, and fiberglass, along with less common materials, including “rare earth” elements such as dysprosium. A World Bank study noted what every mining engineer knows: “[T]echnologies assumed to populate the clean energy shift … are in fact significantly more material intensive in their composition than current traditional fossil-fuel-based energy supply systems.” All forms of green energy require roughly comparable quantities of materials in order to build machines that capture nature’s flows: sun, wind, and water. Wind farms come close to matching hydro dams in material consumption, and solar farms outstrip both. … all three require at least 10 times as many total tons mined, moved, and converted into machines to deliver the same quantity of energy. For example, building a single 100-MW wind farm—never mind thousands of them—requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of nonrecyclable plastics for the huge blades. With solar hardware, the tonnage in cement, steel, and glass is 150% greater …. |
