Renewables And The Green New Deal

Environmental costs of renewables are staggering! ¹ Some proponents of the Green New Deal seem to believe that renewables will pave the way to a utopia of 'green growth.' Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there's no reason we can't keep expanding the economy forever. However, if the world isn't careful, renewable energy could become as destructive as fossil fuels. ²

There are two good reasons for this concern. One of them has to do with clean energy itself. The phrase 'clean energy' normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind are obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture them is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs. In 2017, the World Bank released a report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That's enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the world Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions—and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron. ³ In some cases the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium, an essential element in wind turbines, extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates suggest it could double. The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent. ² And then there are all the batteries we're going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium—an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.

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The problem here is not that we're going to run out of key minerals, although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of over extraction. Mining has become one of the biggest single drivers of deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss around the world. Ecologists estimate that even at present rates of global material use, we are overshooting sustainable levels by 82 percent. Silver is a good example. Mexico is home to the Penasquito mine, one of the biggest silver mines in the world. Covering nearly 40 square miles, the operation is staggering in its scale: sprawling open-pit complex ripped into the mountains, flanked by two waste dumps each a mile long, and a tailings dam full of toxic sludge held back by a wall that's 7 miles around and as high as a 40-story skyscraper. This mine will produce 11,000 tons of silver in 10 years before its reserves, the biggest in the world, are gone. To transition the global economy to renewables, we need to commission up to 130 more mines on the scale of Penasquito. Just for silver, reports Jason Hickel. ² Lithium is another ecological disaster. It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium. Even at present levels of extraction this is causing problems. In the Andes, where most of the world's lithium is located, mining companies are burning through the water tables and leaving farmers with nothing to irrigate their crops. Many have had no choice but to abandon their land altogether. Meanwhile, chemical leaks from lithium mines have poisoned rivers from Chile to Argentina. The lithium boom has barely even started and it's already a crisis. ⁴ There are several studies that indicate it would cost the United States trillions of dollars to transition to an electric system that is 100 percent renewable. Costs range from $4.5 trillion to $5.7 trillion in 2030, about a quarter of the US debt. The lower estimate results in a cost per household of almost $2,000 per year. ⁵ The US power grid has about 1,060 gigawatts of total capacity, of which about 130 gigawatts is wind and solar capacity. One hundred percent renewables by 2030 would require adding more wind and solar power in the next 11 years than the total capacity of these two sources installed in the past 20 years. The costs of new wind and solar units needed for a 100 percent renewables standard would be about $1.5 trillion. Adding the required battery storage would raise the cost to about $4 trillion. The United States currently has about 200,000 miles of high voltage transmission. Estimates for achieving 100 percent renewables would require doubling the transmission lines, which would add $700 billion to the total price. ⁶

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Then there's the issue of land area. Ed Hiserodt reports the land area required in the US for wind and solar installations to meet the green new deal requirements. Wind turbines would require a cleared land area greater than the of N.Y., Pa., Ohio, N.H., N. J., Mass., Del., Md., and R. I. Combined. Add W.V. For the energy to run electric cars. And more states to charge battery backups. Acres required to generate 1,000 MW: nuclear, 421; solar, 37,900; wind, 154,000. Replacing batteries could cost trillions of dollars every 3-5 years.⁷ David MacKay makes this calculation for the UK: “The windmills that would be required to provide the UK with 20 kWh/d per person, which is half of the power used by driving an average fossil fuel car 50 km per day, amount to 50 times the entire wind hardware of Denmark; 7 times all the wind farms of Germany, and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world.” He adds he is not against building wind farms but is simply trying to convey that if we want wind power to truly make a difference, the wind farms must cover a very large area. ⁸ Clearly, a 100 percent renewable electricity system is not realistic by 2030 as the Green New Deal requires and certainly not at a reasonable cost. Wind and solar technologies are intermittent, as they depend on the weather and have low capacity factors, meaning that much more capacity would be required than the coal or natural gas capacity that they would be replacing. Further, battery storage is currently not a viable option as the technology is expensive and still developing. 100% renewable energy isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. The science doesn't exist, the cost would be astronomical and the politics impossible.

References

1. Mark J. Perry, “The environmental costs of renewable energy are staggering,” fee.org, September 15, 2019
2. Jason Hickel, “The limits of clean energy,” foreignpolicy,com, September 6, 2019
3. Daniele LaPorta Arrobas et al., “”The growing role of minerals and metals for a low carbon future,” documents.worldbank.org, June 30, 2017
4. Amit Katwala, “The spirally environmental costs of our lithium battery addiction,” wired.co.uk, August 5, 2018
5. Philip Rossetti, “What it costs to go 100 percent renewable,” americanactionforum.org, January 25, 2019
6. “Cost of transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy,” instituteforenergyresearch.org, July 15, 2019
7. “Unmentioned costs of the green new deal,” Civil Defense Perspectives, May 2019
8. David J. C. MacKay, Sustainable Energy- Without the Hot Air, February 20, 2009