Posted on August 13, 2021 by John Hinderaker in Energy Policy
The Disaster of Green Energy
I didn’t write anything yesterday because my day was taken up with two anti-Green Energy events here in Minnesota. The first was a lunch in Albert Lea, which anti-wind activists drove up to four hours to attend. The second was a cocktail hour program in a Minneapolis suburb attended by more than 250. The speakers were Isaac Orr of Center of the American Experiment and Robert Bryce, one of the country’s top energy experts. The title of the program was “The Environmental Catastrophe of Wind and Solar Power,” although the program’s content was somewhat broader than that. What follows are a few of the slides from yesterday’s presentation that illustrate the foolishness of trying to power our electric grid–let alone our whole economy!–with wind and solar energy.
Along with inherent intermittency and ridiculously high cost, one of the fundamental problems with wind turbines and solar panels is that they require an enormous quantity of minerals. This is because they are such low-density sources of energy. This chart shows the amounts of copper, nickel etc. that it would take to build enough wind turbines to meet the existing electricity demand in just one state, Minnesota. Minnesota is almost exactly average in population, so you can estimate the national numbers by multiplying by 50. And this is just the U.S., not the world, and just to meet existing electricity demand, not to “electrify everything” with electric vehicles and much else, as many on the Left demand. The red dots show the percentage of existing global production of each of those materials represented by Minnesota demand alone. Click to enlarge:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/08/the-disaster-of-green-energy.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+powerlineblog%2Flivefeed+%28Power+Line%29
