Commentary: The Difficult Truths About Unrenewable ‘Renewables’

by Edward Ring

Today in America, there are obvious disconnects between observable reality and the narratives we get from the corporate special interests controlling the news we consume, along with politicians who are supposedly elected to represent us.

This is nothing new. Elites have defined America’s destiny throughout its history. The only difference today is that the internet, despite ongoing crackdowns, still manages to deliver an unprecedented volume of contrarian perspectives to millions of people. We aren’t any freer or less manipulated today than we ever were, we’re just more aware of it.

What may be different today, however, is the misanthropic folly of America’s current energy policies. America’s ruling elites are not only imposing these policies on everyone living here, they are attempting to impose them everywhere on earth.

By now it should be beyond serious debate that “renewable” energy cannot possibly scale adequately to replace fossil fuels. Worse still, renewable energy systems are even less sustainable than fossil fuels and cause more environmental destruction. Renewables also fail to offer significant reductions in carbon emissions, and in some cases actually cause more carbon emissions.

Why these facts are dismissed by America’s elites is a story of corruption, collusion, megalomania, greed, cowardice, intellectual negligence, and delusional mass psychosis. Modern political theory offers solace to cynics who believe all democracies are actually just “managed” shams by suggesting pluralism and representative government are nonetheless at least approximated if there is competition among the powerful elites running a nation. But what if there is no interelite competition in the realm of ideas? What happens when every one of these elites believes the same things? When it comes to “renewables” and “net zero by 2050,” that’s what we have in America today.

As a result, Americans face a future of perpetual scarcity: rationed, algorithmically micro-managed access to energy, punitive pricing for energy use over government mandated thresholds, and a wasteland of landscapes ruined by solar farms, wind farms, battery farms, distribution lines, open pit mines, evaporation ponds, and dumps; all the destructive consequences of industrial scale “renewables” development. At this rate, the blind rush to eliminate fossil fuel and rely solely on renewables will cause catastrophic worldwide shortages of energy, spawning deadly poverty and desperate wars.

Renewables Are Not Renewable

A recent post by respected investment blogger Wolf Richter, compiling data from the Energy Information Administration, reported “renewables” generated 22.6 percent of all U.S. electricity in 2022, a record high. Proponents of renewables consider this achievement as validating their strategy. But the devil is in the details.

To begin with, hydropower accounted for 6.1 percent of that total. But hydropower is under relentless assault by environmentalists, and even if more hydroelectric dams could be built instead of demolished – which is the current trend – the best sites have already been developed.

But what about wind, which contributed 10.1 percent of all electricity generated in 2022, and solar, which added another 4.8 percent?

To put the question into relevant context, first consider what it’s going to take to get America’s economy to a “net zero” state by relying solely on wind and solar. To do this, we cannot merely calculate how much additional wind and solar generating capacity would be necessary to replace all other sources of electricity generation in the United States. The residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation sectors of the U.S. economy rely on direct inputs of natural gas and petroleum for 62 percent of the energy they require. Electricity is only used for the remaining 38 percent, which means at 14.9 percent of that, wind and solar actually only delivered 5.7 percent of all energy consumed in the United States in 2022.

Merely electrifying the transportation sector in the United States would require total electricity generation to nearly double. To electrify the entire U.S. economy would require total electrical generation to triple. To do this using only wind and solar power would require the current installed base of wind and solar to expand by a factor of 18 times, and the process would involve far more than erecting 18 times more wind turbines and solar farms than we have already. There remains as well what is euphemistically called “balance of plant.”

In the case of wind and solar, balance of plant refers to thousands of miles of additional high voltage power lines and utility-scale battery backup systems. Since most parts of the United States, such as the densely populated Northeast, do not have reliable solar energy and are not the windiest parts of the country, it would be necessary to transmit wind energy from the plains states, and solar power from the southern latitudes. At the same time, hundreds, if not thousands of gigawatt-hours of battery storage would be required.

Peter Ziehan, an economist whose new book The End of the World Is Just the Beginning should be mandatory reading for anyone promoting renewables, had this to say about relying on wind and solar power, along with transmission lines and battery backup: “Such infrastructure would be on the scale and scope that humanity has not yet attempted.”

The Resources Required for Renewable Energy

One of the most prolific and persuasive advocates for a realistic energy strategy in the U.S. is Alex Epstein, whose latest book Fossil Future, makes a compelling case for why the benefits of using fossil fuel far outweigh the costs, including the environmental costs. Using data from the U.S. Department of Energy, he produced the following chart, which ought to make plain the devastation – and complete unsustainability – of so-called renewable power.

Epstein’s analysis employs “tons per terawatt-hour,” referring to the tons of raw materials required to construct various forms of electricity-producing generating plants; natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, and wind. As the chart above shows, to generate the same amount of electricity, building a natural gas power plant uses only a small fraction of the raw materials required for a solar or wind system. The magnitude of the stress solar and wind would put onto mining operations is evident when calculating what it would take for them to power the entire United States, or the entire world.

If the entire U.S. annual consumption of energy were expressed in terawatt-hours, that is, if every economic sector of the United States were electrified it would take 28,500 terawatt-hours, based on the most recent data. That would equate to solar and wind farms consuming approximately 256 million tons of concrete and steel. The entire U.S. steel production in 2021 was 86 million tons. The entire U.S. cement production in 2021 was 80 million tons.

Then there’s the copper, which for solar requires about 1,000 tons per terawatt-hour. This means if 50 percent of the renewables required to electrify the entire U.S. economy were via solar power, 14 million tons would be required. Total U.S. copper production is only 1.3 million tons per year. This much new solar energy capacity would use up 100 percent of our entire production of copper for 11 years.

This only begins to describe the environmental toll “renewables” are poised to inflict on the planet. What about the fact that for every person on earth to consume just half as much energy per capita that Americans consume, global energy production would need to double? To do that with wind and solar would require roughly 3 billion tons of cement and steel, and well over 100 million tons of copper. Have the renewables advocates thought this through?

All conventional power plant alternatives, using gas, nuclear and coal, require one-tenth or less raw materials to generate an equivalent quantity of electricity. For modern natural gas combined cycle generating plants, the ratio is closer to 1/20th as much raw inputs. But when it comes to solar and wind power, which is distributed and intermittent, what about the transmission lines and the batteries? What about the service life of all this installed base, the solar panels and batteries and wind turbines that degrade after 20 years and have to be decommissioned, recycled and replaced? What about the environmental costs of extending this resource guzzling scheme to every nation on earth?

Electric Vehicles Are Not Sustainable

When discussing the sustainability of renewables, of course, an honest analysis cannot focus exclusively on the production side. If the energy consumption of an entire economy is electrified, that would include the transportation sector, where in every significant case the goal of electrification is fraught…