Renewables are not what they are cracked up to be

Before going into the harm that renewables do, it must be noted that they don't seem to be doing much good. Biomass and hydropower are producing significant amounts of greenhouse gases. Solar and wind are supposed to be reducing CO2 in the atmosphere but are not doing so. The first wind farm was built in the USA in 1981. Globally there are now more than 340,000 wind turbines. It is estimated that 10 trillion dollars have already been spent directly and indirectly on solar and wind. And yet there is no sign of CO2 levels coming down. On the contrary, in the same period CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere kept on rising to record heights and in 2023 they are rising faster than ever.

Renewables are supposed to be replacing fossil fuels. They are not doing so. There is hardly any decline in the consumption of fossil fuels, while solar and wind cannot even meet the annual increase in energy consumption. This means that they are not replacing anything, only adding to the total of greenhouse gases and environmental devastation. As energy consumption is expected to keep on rising, solar and wind will be chasing a retreating target for years to come.

The harms

Misinformation

The first harm may seem unspectacular on first sight but it is the underlying cause for all the others. By creating a false impression of the merits of renewables misinformation prevents real action against climate change and is therefore extremely dangerous.

Deception has become a new normal in the modern business world, especially where the environment is concerned. Even the most destructive eco-criminals will claim that their work is environment-friendly or sustainable or carbon-neutral or whatever greenwashing term they invent. None of it is true, but that matters little if people believe it. And, sadly, people are very eager to believe what they want to believe. It is the familiar story of the convenient lie versus the inconvenient truth. And what could be more convenient for humanity than having a form of energy that solves the climate crisis without the need for any personal sacrifices.

The wilful gullibility of humanity made it easy for the renewables industry to weave a web of deceit. They constantly exaggerate benefits and downplay harms. They will select isolated cases of good performance in a particular area for a short period of time as representative for the whole industry. When a wind park briefly produces, say, 40% of electricity somewhere, they will use the word energy instead of electricity and boast that renewables are outperforming other sources of energy. But electricity only makes up about 20% of all energy and 40% of 20% is only 8%, which is not impressive at all. When unusual deaths occur among marine mammals near the construction of offshore wind parks, the industry immediately professes its innocence, long before any meaningful research could have been done into the cause of those deaths. Countless examples of this kind of deception can be found in a very important book, called Bright Green Lies, to which we shall return at the end of the page.

Here we shall concentrate on the greatest deception of all: the energy transition ("electrify everything"). The claim is that renewables will be able to phase out fossil fuels in a few decades, if given unconditional support by the powers that be. Unfortunately the idea is based largely on wishful thinking. In reality such a transition is impossible with current technology. The most basic obstacle is the difficulty of storing electricity. When solar and wind are idle, electricity must come from another source. This could be surplus electricity produced by solar and wind during working hours, if it could be stored effectively. At present the best way to do so is by using lithium batteries. Unfortunately they are a very weak source of energy in comparison with, for instance, oil. It takes 46 such batteries to generate the same quantity of energy as 1 comparable quantity of oil. In practice this would mean that a diesel-fueled truck that can carry 60,000 pounds of freight 600 miles on a full tank would need about 55,000 pounds of batteries to perform the same trip. Unthinkable, of course.

Nevertheless the advocates of renewables insist that this transition is the best way to tackle climate change because we shall quickly find all kinds of miraculous new technologies to overcome the problems. It is not impossible, of course, but not very likely either. The lithium battery has been around for about 40 years, being constantly upgraded and perfected to its present, still very feeble, state.

Until miracles start to happen, this transition will therefore require such astronomical quantities of raw materials that global mining, processing, transportation, production and infrastructures would have to be multiplied by factors as high as 40 times. An impossible task. But even if we managed to do it, this would take a lot of time, which we don’t have (because global warming is speeding up dramatically), and will always end in crippling scarcities of raw materials, because the exercise would have to be repeated over and over again.

The worst part of all this misinformation is that many people now believe that this delusional plan must be given top priority at the expense of everything else. Many trillions will be poured into a fake solution while actual solutions will be left undone. So no real cuts of emissions (without net-zero nonsense), no reduction of consumption, no population control, no end to deforestation, no rewilding, no rigorous protection of the environment etc. etc.

In short, this plan carries a high risk that our industrial civilization will collapse from the effects of climate change long before the transition is completed.

Biomass is easily the worst renewable. It relies heavily on the burning of trees, which is causing widespread deforestation across the globe. When trees are burned, they release large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, even more than coal. Their destruction also means that they cannot absorb CO2 anymore, doubling the disastrous effect of their destruction on the climate. In addition forests contain the richest ecosystems in the world. Their disappearance also means death to all the forms of life that live there.

In spite of these horrors governments all over the world are calling biomass green and climate-friendly because "trees grow back". This is a false argument, because trees take decades to grow while they can be incinerated in minutes. In the meantime the CO2 that they release may do so much harm that no trees will regrow at all, while recovery of their ecosystems takes hundreds of years. The burning of trees is simply one of the worst ecocrimes imaginable.

Hydropower is another significant source of greenhouse gases, not only CO2 but also methane, which is emitted by the reservoirs of dams and is many times worse than CO2. As usual, the quantities have been underestimated, but recent studies indicate that they make up about 6 to 8% of human methane emissions. On top of that they also destroy the ecosystems of the rivers they obstruct. They have led to the extinction of many fish and other aquatic species, the disappearance of birds in floodplains, huge losses of forest, wetland and farmland, erosion of coastal deltas, and many other unmitigable impacts.

Apart from all this misery hydropower is also very vulnerable to the extremes of global warming. Too little water makes it less productive and too much water makes the dams collapse.

Solar panels are made of silicon refined to 99.99 purity. Pure silicon does not occur naturally. Raw silicon must be mined and then refined. The basic raw material used is sand, which is already being depleted all across the world, because it is used in enormous quantities for many human activities. Its mining, like all mining, causes great harm to the environment.

Once mined the sand must be transported to refining locations by fossil-fueled vehicles.

The refining process of silicon is very intensive, requiring specialized equipment and large numbers of dangerous chemicals. During the process about 80% of the original silicon is wasted. For every ton of the end product four tons of toxic waste are produced. This waste can be neutralized but only by expensive technology, which few companies want to use. Instead it is dumped in the environment, with disastrous consequences for plants, wildlife and humans.

During the process three extremely potent greenhouse gases, hexofluoroethane, nitrogen trifluoride and sulfur hexafluoride are released. They are 12,000, 17,000 and 25,000 times more potent than CO2 . The quantities are relatively small but rising rapidly.

Apart from sand solar panels also require metals and rare-earth minerals, which also require large-scale mining. Separation of rare earths from ore produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste for 1 ton of rare earths. Colossal amounts of toxic wastewater are also produced, which is pumped into ponds, some covering several square miles, totally devoid of life.

Apart from the panels themselves the solar power systems also require lots of other hardware, made up of many different materials that must also be mined, processed, transported and finally linked up with some kind of grid with its infrastructure.

A particular odious kind of solar power system is the Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) system. Mirrors reflect sunlight to towers in which the heat is used to generate energy. The concentrated beams of sunlight kill birds and insects in high numbers. The installations occupy large tracts of land, completely ruining the original ecosystems, and also use considerable amounts of water (as much as nuclear plants according to one source).

Wind
The generation of wind energy harms the environment from beginning to end. First there is an abundance of materials. A wind turbine may require as many as 8,000 different materials.
The most important are:
steel, for the tower, nacelle and foundation
concrete, for the foundation and sometimes the tower
wood, for blades
fiberglass and carbon fiber, for blades
copper, in the nacelle
rare earth materials in the nacelle

Many of these components, such as steel, copper, rare earth metals etc. require mining, with all the corresponding environmental horrors already described above.

Processing of the raw materials requires large amounts of energy and water, and transportation to and from factories, all involving fossil fuels.

When the wind turbines are finally ready to be used, huge tracts of lands are needed for them. As they can't be placed in urban areas, this again often leads to deforestation and destruction of existing ecosystems with yet more killing of wildlife.

The construction of these colossal structures and the huge infrastructure to distribute the electricity require heavy machinery (all fossil fueled), creating massive disturbances in the environments where they are placed.

During operation they cause a variety of harmful effects. They kill and maim significant numbers of birds, bats and insects, which are all already in steep decline. Offshore wind parks in particular are lethal for migrating birds. Each wind turbine can kill as many as a 1,000 birds per year, especially if it is lit up for the benefit of fossil-fueled aircraft. The argument that more birds are killed by other causes is no argument at all. Evil is not lessened by the fact that there is worse.

Turbines make a lot of noise and vibrations, all harmful to wildlife, which will often leave the area.

The construction of wind parks at sea involves especially heavy construction work, again creating lots of environmental destruction and pollution, including noise, which is very harmful because sound is much more important to marine animals than land animals. The high sound levels from pile-driving, when the turbine is hammered to the seabed are especially harmful to marine mammal species, such as endangered whales.

Wind farms don’t last forever. Sooner or later they reach the end of their useful life and must be decommissioned. This is usually a requirement when permits are issued for them. The removal of turbines and their foundations is costly, almost as much as their installation, and much costlier than their salvage value. This means that abandonment of wind farms is often the cheapest solution, which has happened on a significant scale. There are about 5,000 abandoned windmills in the USA alone. (The practice is by no means new. It is estimated that there are more than a million abandoned mines in the world and millions of abandoned oil and gas wells in the USA alone).

Although attempts are made to prevent abandonment by forcing wind farm operators to provide financial security for decommissioning, this is still poorly regulated, also because wind farm operators routinely overestimate the salvage value of their windmills and underestimate the costs of removal, to make permit-issuing parties minimize the amounts that must be set aside.

The costs of decommissioning will rise dramatically as the size of wind turbines increases. In the 1980s they were only 20 metres high. Now an 11-MW wind turbine can reach 225 metres, its decommissioning, especially offshore, can cost 20 million dollars per turbine.

This could, of course, become a huge and even crippling problem for the wind industry but it is unlikely that many of these monstrosities will ever be decommissioned. It is already too late. Global warming is speeding up so rapidly that mega disasters cannot be far away. They will mark the end of our industrial civilization. Nobody can predict the future exactly but humanity's future will certainly include floods and fires and droughts and global crop failures, widespread famines, mass migrations and human conflicts of unprecedented ferocity. And most windmills will remain standing as enduring symbols of human folly for a very long time.


The lies about renewables and other allegedly "green" sources of energy were thoroughly covered in the book "Bright Green Lies". It was also turned into a movie of the same name, which was released on Earth Day 2022. We could not agree with its message more. It reveals the terrible state of our planet and the woeful lack of a meaningful response, highlighting that all kinds of half measures, presented as environmentally friendly or sustainable or renewable, are quite the opposite. We strongly recommend it. Watch the trailer below.



There cannot be the slightest doubt that renewables are part of the problem. Like the rest of our civilization they are unsustainable because they contribute to depletion of the environment. At a certain point, in the very near future, that environment will become so depleted that it cannot sustain our civilization anymore. Then that civilization will collapse, most of us will die ugly deaths, and the survivors will be faced with a depleted environment without much to survive on.

This means that every day's delay in restoring the environment will make matters worse and increase the likelihood of humanity's extinction.