The fallacy of “Renewable”
It is an outright lie that solar energy, wind power, or the action of tides and waves can allow us to continue consuming as much energy as we are accustomed to, with minimal impact on Climate Change.
Commercially-available Solar Photovoltaic panels (PV) have barely increased in efficiency from about 13% in the 1970s to 18% in 2020 (32% in prototype lab conditions). They have sprouted thousands of new factories worldwide, cost millions of Carbon-ton equivalents in manufacturing, transportation, and installation, and their efficiency seldom reaches the 18% because it drops dramatically with pollen or dust deposits, or when the sky is clouded. Also, they are not recyclable, being made of silicon wafers that have been printed with electronic circuits, laid out on a support, encased in a protective layer with one transparent side, all of it mounted on stiff steel structures; and they remain to have an estimated lifetime of 20-30 years. Imagine the waste of dysfunctional PV installations that we’ll face by 2050…
Additionally, where large arrays have been built (hundreds of acres, as in Nevada, or Morocco), local environmental conditions are changing. Vegetation is growing in the shadows of solar PV farms, where used to be only a desert. Regardless of where it is installed and how long the sun shines, PV cells will have some impact on the environment, one that we cannot foresee.
When large wind farms were developed in Germany, it wasn’t long before some physicists realized that the first line impacted the wind reaching the second line more than had been anticipated. Imagine putting up so many rows of wind turbines that the 20mph breeze hitting the front row is nil downstream… that will inevitably have some effect on all the natural environment, plants, wildlife, everything will be affected over the long term. And again, that’s not to mention the astronomical Carbon-equivalent cost of manufacturing the parts for these giant towers, shipping them to the site, pouring millions of cubic feet of concrete to solidly anchor them, and digging hundreds of miles of trenches to bury the cables connecting the array, and of course their recycling when they end their productive lifetime (everything has a finite life).
Compared to gasoline or coal engines, these sources of electricity do appear less polluting in the short term; but we shouldn’t forget that it took us over 100 years to discover the dramatic impacts of burning fossil fuels. Is it just possible that we might face equally dramatic impacts from this “renewable” madness?
Again, the best solution seems to reduce our consumption frenzy. Instead of increasing our light output because we think LED bulbs are more energy efficient, we should simply stop using as much energy as we do… but then our entire economic system would collapse, which would jeopardize the main industry that everything relies on (even politics), Finance. More to come…
