Wind turbines and solar panels don’t grow on trees.
By Joshua Antonini.
Reprinted with permission of Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Wind and solar energy do not generate much electricity, but they have a great power to cloud people’s minds. It is now fairly well known that wind and solar can pose serious threats to the nation’s wildlife — from endangered right whales to tens of thousands of bird deaths each year from solar. But optimistic green energy advocates still don’t realize the many environmental impacts associated with manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing of solar panels and wind turbines.
It takes a great deal of material to produce solar panels and wind turbines. Wind and solar energy technologies collect diffuse and intermittent gusts of wind and rays of sunlight to generate electricity, which means they have a very low energy density in comparison to other generation technologies, like fossil fuels or nuclear.
Because of the diffuse nature of their fuel sources, renewables consume orders of magnitude more materials for the same electricity output, thereby causing greater environmental burdens than do more dense energy sources.
A single 100-megawatt natural gas-fired turbine about as large as a residential house will power 75,000 homes. Replacing that energy output with wind requires 20 wind turbines that occupy around 10 square miles of land, and it also needs “enormous quantities of conventional materials, including concrete, steel, and fiberglass, along with less common materials, including ‘rare earth’ elements such as dysprosium,” Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in a 2020 report.
Increased demands for materials leads to the first major impact: Wind and solar require massive increases in mining.
