Okay, let's go one by one.
First solar and wind: The process of turning sunlight and wind into useable energy on a mass scale is far from free. In fact, compared to the other sources of energy -- fossil fuels, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power, solar and wind power are very expensive.
The basic problem is that sunlight and wind as energy sources are both weak (the more technical term is dilute) and unreliable (the more technical term is intermittent).
It takes a lot of resources to collect and concentrate them, and even more resources to make them available on-demand. These are called the diluteness problem and the intermittency problem.
The diluteness problem is that, unlike coal or oil, the sun and the wind don’t deliver concentrated energy -- which means you need a lot of additional materials to produce a unit of energy.
For solar power, such materials can include highly purified silicon, phosphorus, boron, and a dozen other complex compounds like titanium dioxide.
All these materials have to be mined, refined and/or manufactured in order to make solar panels. Those industrial processes take a lot of energy.
For wind, needed materials include high-performance compounds for turbine blades and the rare-earth metal neodymium for lightweight, specialty magnets, as well as the steel and concrete necessary to build structures -- thousands of them -- as tall as skyscrapers.
And as big a problem as diluteness is, it’s nothing compared to the intermittency problem. This isn’t exactly a news flash, but the sun doesn’t shine all the time. And the wind doesn’t blow all the time.
The only way for solar and wind to be truly useful would be if we could store them so that they would be available when we needed them. You can store oil in a tank. Where do you store solar or wind energy? No such mass-storage system exists.
Which is why, in the entire world, there is not one real or proposed independent, freestanding solar or wind power plant. All of them require backup. And guess what the go-to back-up is: fossil fuel.
Here’s what solar and wind electricity look like in Germany, which is the world’s leader in “renewables”.
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The word erratic leaps to mind. Wind is constantly varying, sometimes disappearing completely. And solar produces little in the winter months when Germany most needs energy.
Therefore, some reliable source of energy is needed to do the heavy lifting. In Germany’s case that energy is coal.
So, while Germany has spent tens of billions of dollars to subsidize solar panels and windmills, fossil fuel use in that nation has not decreased, it’s increased -- and less than 10% of their total energy is generated by solar and wind.
Furthermore, switching back and forth between solar and wind and coal to maintain a steady flow of energy is costly.
Utility bills for the average German have gone up so dramatically that “energy poverty” has become a popular term to describe those who cannot pay -- or who can barely pay -- their electricity bills.
Second, biofuels or biomass: Biomass energy is derived from plant or animal matter, whether wood,
crops, crop waste, grass, or even manure. Biomass includes biofuels, which are liquid fuels, usually alcohol, derived from these sources and used for
mobile power.
Other forms of biomass are used for fixed electrical power or directly for heat (such as wood or animal dung burned to stay warm).
Biomass is renewable and natural, because the energy comes from the sun—but not all the inputs in the process can scale. It resembles hazelnut energy; in fact, hazelnut energy is a form of biomass energy.
To its credit, biomass has a storage system, unlike solar and wind—plants store energy from the sun through photosynthesis. The problem is, it takes a lot of resources to grow them—namely the resources involved in farming, including large amounts of energy, land, machinery, water, fertilizer—just like it takes a lot of water to build solar and wind installations.
But while solar and wind installations can be built in many places biofuels need to be grown on relatively scarce farmland, which starts to bring us into hazelnut energy territory.
It means that biomass scales badly—often, the more of it we try to produce, the more scarce and expensive the inputs become, and the more expensive our energy becomes.
Biofuels like ethanol from corn or sugarcane, or biomass from wood, compete with cropland or forest land, driving prices up for both fuel and
food. Scalability has been the problem for every biofuel that works (the Bush administration tried to force Americans to use cellulosic ethanol, a form of
ethanol from nonfood sources that has been promoted since the 1920s but still doesn’t work) at a smaller scale.
But even if nonfood biomass worked better than it does, it would still be extremely resource intensive to regrow over and over.
A thought: Throughout history it has been a challenge for human beings to produce enough crops to feed us, because agriculture requires a lot of resources just to produce our meager number of calories. We need many dozens of times as many calories for our machines as we do from our food.
If we could eat oil or electricity, we would, because it’s much cheaper per unit of energy. Why should we feed human food to machines with hundreds of times our appetites?
Already, the increased use of biomass energy has strongly correlated with a rise in food prices.
The idea of scaling it ten times or more, to even make a dent in fossil fuels’ energy production, is unthinkable, given all of the evidence we have.
According to a recent report from the United Nations, The State of Food Insecurity in the World,
High and volatile food prices are likely to continue.
Demand from consumers in rapidly growing economies will increase, population continues to grow, and any further growth in biofuels will place
additional demands on the food system.
Biomass energy is not providing scalable energy, but it is making it difficult for farmers to provide scalable food.
Here’s the bottom line with solar, wind, and biofuels—the three types of energy typically promoted in renewables mandates. There is zero evidence that solar, wind, and biomass energy can meaningfully supplement fossil fuel energy, let alone replace it, let alone provide the energy growth that is desperately needed.
If, in the future, those industries are able to overcome the many intractable problems involved in making dilute, unreliable energy into cheap, plentiful, reliable energy on a world scale, that would be
fantastic.
But it is dishonest to pretend that anything like that has happened or that there is a reason to think it will happen. To be sure, solar, wind, and biomass may have their utility for niche uses of energy.
But they are essentially useless in providing cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for 7 billion people—and to try to rely on them would be deadly.
Third, Hydroelectricity: I would say Hydroelectricity is actually a good renewable source of energy.
Historically, hydropower has faced two types of limitations that have prevented it from producing much more than 6 percent of the world’s
power.
One category is natural limitations; the other is political limitations. The main limitation of hydroelectric power is there aren’t nearly enough suitable water sites for it to be a national source of energy.
But yes, there is considerably more opportunity to develop hydro around in India. Based on the number of dammable rivers left, the International Energy Agency estimates that hydroelectricity has the technical potential to grow by 92 percent in Africa and 80 percent in Asia.
Worldwide, according to an estimate by the International Energy Agency, hydro has the technical potential to produce twice as much energy as it does today; it is currently around 6 percent of global production.
That is an exciting prospect but not for most prominent environmental groups, whom you might think would welcome a four times greater supply of cheap, reliable, non- CO2 -emitting hydroelectric energy.
Environmental activists have spent decades shutting down as many hydroelectric dams as possible, particularly large hydroelectric dams, despite hydro’s proven track record as a cheap, reliable source of CO2 -free power, in the name of protecting species of fish, free-flowing rivers, and other justifications that focus on non-human nature.
As for electric cars: First, there’s the energy needed to produce the car. More than a third of the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car comes from the energy used make the car itself, especially the battery.
The mining of lithium, for instance, is not a green activity. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it’s already been responsible for more than 25,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: just 16,000 pounds.
But that’s not the end of the CO2 emissions. Because while it’s true that electric cars don’t run on gasoline, they do run on electricity, which, in the U.S. is often produced by another fossil fuel -- coal. Electric cars are basically coal-powered cars.
The most popular electric car, the Nissan Leaf, over a 90,000-mile lifetime will emit 31 metric tons of CO2, based on emissions from its production, its electricity consumption at average fuel mix and its ultimate scrapping.
A comparable Mercedes CDI A160 over a similar lifetime will emit just 3 tons more across its production, diesel consumption and ultimate scrapping. The results are similar for a top-line Tesla, the king of electric cars. It emits about 44 tons, which is only 5 tons less than a similar Audi A7 Quattro.
So throughout the full life of an electric car, it will emit just three to five tons less CO2. In Europe, on its European Trading System, it currently costs $7 to cut one ton of CO2. So the entire climate benefit of an electric car is about $35. Yet the governments essentially provides electric car buyers with a subsidy of up to tens of thousands.
Paying tens of thousands for something you could get for $35 is a very poor deal. And that doesn’t include the billions more in federal and state grants, loans and tax write-offs that go directly to battery and electric-car makers.
The other main benefit from electric cars is supposed to be lower pollution. But remember, Electric cars are coal-powered cars.
I do agree that we need to diversify our energy sources from fossil fuels, and the best alternative is nuclear. The others will be of no value long term.