Wind and Solar as Energy Sources - Trivial Now and For Decades to Come

Wind and Solar as Energy Sources? Trivial, Now and For Decades to Come

by John Shanahan June 29, 2022 There are lots of wind turbines on the plains of eastern Colorado and lots of solar panels in California and Morocco. Also lots of both in Germany and Australia.

The president of the United States and governors of New York, Colorado, and California insist that we abandon fossil fuels and nuclear and go head-long into solar and wind energy in order to “save” the world from catastrophic man-made global warming, now obfuscated by the vague term catastrophic man-made climate change.

These two graphs show data for energy sources and end uses in the USA for 2009 and 2021:

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The graphs initially look complicated because of all the lines. But given a short verbal explanation to a fourth-grade student or a careful look by an adult both will clearly get the message and remember it.

Here is one particularly salient point: In 2009, wind and solar provided 0.7 and 0.11 percent of total US energy use, respectively; in 2021, 3.43 and 1.54 percent. Significant gains, but they still amount to a combined 4.97 percent, and that’s after over a decade of billions and billions of dollars of subsidies and tax incentives meant to wean us off of fossil fuels and wed us to wind and solar. Without those billions, wind and solar probably would have lost rather than gained in percentage.

Even now, solar and wind energy are trivial in the picture of total U.S. and world energy use. Even if stopping man-made CO2 would save the world from catastrophic global warming, wind turbines and solar panels would never in a thousand years get there. From 2015 to 2021, there is hardly any change in energy produced from wind and solar. Total energy use has not increased because the global economy is still under duress from COVID and Putin’s war in Ukraine. But energy use is going to increase faster than the growth of wind turbines and solar facilities. This is because of the need to improve the lives of two billion poor people.

Here are some easy takeaways from the energy graphs for 2015 and 2021: 1) Because wind and sunshine contain such dilute energy density, they require much more mining for raw materials than fossil fuels and nuclear. And this mining is unnecessary because wind and solar photovoltaic energy are unnecessary. This is a real environmental nightmare.

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2) Over time, worn out wind and solar facilities will fill up far more landfills. Another environmental nightmare.

3) Variable, unreliable wind and solar energy are nightmares for electrical grids.

Batteries are another mining and landfill environmental nightmare.

4) Broken wind turbines and solar panels are a problem to dismantle on land. Broken, not working wind turbines at sea will be a nightmare to maintain and dismantle, especially when companies that own them have gone bankrupt.

5) American and European tourists may like solar panels in Morocco and wind turbines in Denmark but wind and solar electric generating facilities are not solutions for most countries.

6) Extreme Green Activists and their politicians are destroying the modern world with their insistence on wind and solar. That is exactly what they want to happen—destroy the modern world. Who is worse—Vladimir Putin or American and European Extreme Green Alarmists and their politicians demanding the abandonment of fossil fuels and nuclear power and insisting on only using wind, solar, electric vehicles, and batteries?

John Shanahan, a civil engineer, past President of Go Nuclear, Inc., and Editor of AllAboutEnergy.Net.

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