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Today the reliable, efficient, low-cost, energy infrastructure responsible for the incredible abundance and wealth billions enjoy is under increasing attack by “rich world,” leaders driven to squander trillions of taxpayer dollars on virtue-signaling policies, which make the world poorer financially and energy-wise. The sickest part of these schemes is the accelerated environmental destruction brought on by plans based on fairytale visions rather than mathematically based reality.

Compare focuses on key differences between energy sources used to generate electricity, such as cost, and environmental impact (material consumption & nature disturbance). The reliability issue is discussed in Wind & Solar and Germany sections of FactsAndData.org.

Fast Facts

• Electricity is cheap when the production exactly matches consumption since large-scale storage is too expensive beyond a few locations at hydroelectric dam sites.
• Electricity is expensive in countries relying on unreliable wind and solar power since production rarely matches consumption.
• Utility battery storage is not practical beyond a tiny percentage of electricity production due to high financial ($477 to store 18 cents of electricity) and environmental costs.
• We are losing the race to decarbonize due to a focus on building wind and solar rather than taking actions proven to rapidly reduce carbon footprints.
• Solar and wind are the most environmentally destructive energy sources based on material consumption and land use.
  • Requires hundreds to thousands of times more land to produce the same amount of power as nuclear. Unreliable power which requires 100% backup with reliable power.
  • The largest solar plant at the sunniest location in the US covers 431 times the land per kWh produced compared to its closest nuclear power plant.
  • Requires 10 to 40 times the material as Nuclear to produce unreliable power that requires 100% backup with reliable power
  • Solar panels in Germany require 100 times as much metal per kWh of electricity generated compared to nuclear based on a Department of Energy Report.
• Solar produces the most radiation exposure (40 times as much as nuclear) per power produced due to the mining of rare earth metals.
• Solar = natural gas turbines producing up to 100 times the greenhouse gas emissions as nuclear, because people refuse to give up electricity every time it is cloudy, or the sun is low on the horizon, or at night (the majority of the time)
• German citizens pay the most for electricity in Western Europe to subsidize a massive investment in unreliable solar and wind.
• Germany’s closing their nuclear power plants causes them to generate some of the highest carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels for electricity production in Western Europe.
• Unreliable wind energy causes electricity prices to plummet when surplus power is produced during high winds and operators need to sell power and skyrocket during calm winds when power purchases are required. Buying high and selling low costs ratepayers.
• Extremely low CO₂ emissions are limited to countries depending on nuclear or hydropower (Sweden, France, Norway)
• Nuclear power provides the ONLY way for the US and the world to significantly reduce the growth in greenhouse gas emissions since it does not require backup from reliable fossil fuel-generated power.
  • Unreliable wind or solar requiring gas backup, producing 80 to 100 times the CO₂ of nuclear, will not support aggressive climate goals. It will, however, accelerate environmental destruction, and material consumption (stealing precious materials and nature from future generations).

Background

Behind this romantic fantasy of a world run on benign wind turbines and solar panels is the reality of massive levels of mining, waste generation, and habitat destruction associated with these low-density power sources. While the wind and sun are free, solar panels and wind turbines are not. Plus, they require  100% reliable backup power. Mostly natural gas turbines inefficiently run to match the erratic generation requirements to back up wind or solar energy. 

The facts and data on wind and solar are covered in a section devoted to Germany, which set the trend of developed countries spending massive subsidies on these unreliable costly energy sources. Wind & Solar provides performance data for locations beyond Germany. In Biomass and Hydropower, you will learn how these two energy sources can generate either more or much less greenhouse gas emissions than coal power plants, while Nuclear reveals the raw data put out by the agencies responsible for tracking health effects and deaths. Fossil Fuels identifies a few of the benefits of oil, gas, and coal use. Trivial things like helping to eliminate poverty and starvation. Greenwashing tells the story of how communities across the US are doing their part to trash the planet while making their citizens poorer (by raising the cost of a basic commodity), to virtue signal environmental goodness. Energy Overview provides an introduction to basic concepts relating to electrical energy, the primary focus of energy policies. It then goes on to compare and contrast the different energy sources based on cost, reliability, and environmental impact.  

What is Energy

An intelligent facts and data-based discussion on energy requires an understanding of a few simple terms and concepts related to electricity generation. 

How Electricity Works

Unlike other commodities, electricity cannot be stored directly for use later. While it can be converted to other forms of energy for storage, such as chemical in batteries or hydrogen gas, kinetic in spinning flywheels, or potential in pumped storage, the cost and environmental impact are usually far too high to consider for more than a tiny percent of the electrical load.

With reliable energy sources, fossil fuel-based, geothermal, and hydro (with adequate water availability) efficiently matching electricity production to consumption is a relatively easy task. Power consumption patterns are predictable and gradually change with a sufficiently large user base, supporting peak efficiencies in generating equipment operation. Combined cycle natural gas turbines which convert 60% or more of the energy in natural gas to electricity are often the preferred choice.

Add erratic renewables, wind and solar, and maintaining an efficient electrical grid becomes a constant struggle, at a large financial cost to all consumers.  

Battery Storage

Elon Musk’s claims that the US can generate reliable power for the entire country using wind, solar,  and battery storage (produced by his company) fall apart under the microscope of 3rd-grade arithmetic. 

Why We Are Losing the Race to Decarbonize

When I first became interested in energy 50 years ago, virtually everyone was misinformed about the true potential of unreliable renewables to replace reliable energy sources. This includes then-US president Jimmy Carter, a top graduate from the US Naval Academy, who pushed wind and solar as an alternative to fossil fuels or nuclear. I gave up a 4-year academic scholarship to the University of Illinois in Urbana, one of the best state engineering schools in the US, to pay out of my own pocket to attend a much less prestigious university in Colorado, due to their solar engineering expertise.   

This belief, like many others of the 70s, was widely accepted due to ignorance, with the infancy of the wind and solar industry providing little data to dash idealistic dreams.

Today, however, we have decades of data showing the effect of trillions spent subsidizing wind and solar energy production. A pittance of unreliable electricity generation relative to the economic and environmental cost, that collapses daily at every location on the planet, while requiring massive amounts of material and land. The naivety of 50 years ago has been replaced by misinformation projected by media outlets and many YouTubers who rely on narratives prepared by special interests, rather than the journalistic investigations of past generations.  Idiocy for ideology has replaced ignorance.

Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Carbon intensity is a measure of the amount of CO₂ emissions produced per unit of energy generated. It includes the effect of the entire lifecycle, from manufacturing and construction to operation and decommissioning of the energy-generating equipment and fuel source.  It ignores, however, additional emissions associated with unreliable energy sources like wind and solar. Extra gas burned by less efficient turbines required for quick response to the erratic power output from a wind farm is not included in the life cycle gas emissions. 

Photovoltaic cells that convert the Sun’s energy to electricity are mostly produced from quartz sand or toxic materials.

Solar Panels Three Times More Carbon Intensive

An Italian researcher with a passion for numbers and truth noticed that the claimed carbon footprint for solar PV panel manufacturing made no sense based on manufacturing data for the different elements going into a solar panel.  He discovered that while 80% of the world’s solar panels are manufactured in China, with its heavy reliance on high-carbon coal-produced electricity, the numbers presented assumed the lowest carbon electricity.   In short, the numbers were artificially lowered, perhaps as much as 3-fold, to support the PV industry which provides funding for the organization publishing the carbon numbers.

Radiation Exposure for Power Sources

A United Nations report comparing radiation exposure of solar compared to nuclear once again shows the absurdity of protesting nuclear based on radiation risks.  

Material Consumption 

Few things scar the planet more than mining.  A pound of finished product can require digging and refining 100 lbs or more of material.  Since this process occurs out of sight, often in poor developing countries, it’s easy to ignore.  

The amount of material associated with wind turbine and solar panel installation ignores the additional material required to produce 100% reliable power to back up the unreliable solar and wind.  

Based on a US Department of Energy Report solar panels in Germany consume more than 100 times the metals of nuclear power plants per kWh of power generated.  This type of green energy virtue signaling is stealing massive amounts of materials from future generations.

Transmission Lines

When existing power transmission lines lack the capacity to move wind power from where it is produced to where electricity is consumed, users of reliable power, coal, gas, and nuclear, end up picking up the tab.  While this allows proponents of wind power to claim low costs, taxpayers end up paying increasingly high electricity bills as more wind is added to their electrical grids. 

Saving Nature’s Landscape (Power Density)

The amount of land required to generate power is one of the most important aspects of energy production since it affects how much land we leave undisturbed for nature. The fetish for wind and solar has caused environmental groups, and politicians, to ignore this critical parameter since both energy sources are land gluttons. They require hundreds to thousands of times more land to produce an identical amount of power as nuclear. Unreliable power that requires a duplicate system generating reliable power.  

Before fossil fuels, wood used for cooking led to deforestation in England hundreds of years ago.  Today, deforestation occurs in African countries lacking the infrastructure to extract and consume fossil fuels. High energy density fuels, such as oil and coal, were essential to avoiding the environmental destruction rampant in countries lacking these resources.

Unfortunately, the public has been misled by irresponsible nonsensical claims regarding the amount of land required to power modern society with low-density energy sources like wind and solar. Elon Musk is the most vocal example making absurd claims that a square of solar panels  100 by 100 miles could provide all the electrical needs of the US. 

In addition to wind and solar farms requiring hundreds of times more land for placement than nuclear, they require orders of magnitude more material which equates to mining.  

Wind & Solar are Land Hogs

Through the magic of Google Earth, I was able to outline the land area disturbed for the largest solar power plant facility in the US with the best solar flux conditions, in the Mojave Desert in California, at Ivanpah Solar Park, and the closest nuclear power plant in California at Diablo Canyon. Diablo Canyon produces about 20 times the power of Ivanpah on less than 1/20th of the land.  

While I prefer doing my own calculations from the raw numbers, the Environmental Progress organization does such excellent work that I thought I would share their numbers regarding land requirements for wind.

Decarbonize vs. Unreliable Renewables

Following the 1970s Arab oil embargo France, with virtually no domestic energy resources, dramatically cut their need for oil to generate electricity. Their replacement of foreign oil with nuclear-generated power provided their citizens with inexpensive electricity while reducing their CO₂ generation, providing a gift to the world. Germany, on the other hand, decided to close perfectly good nuclear power plants thinking they could replace that lost energy with unreliable wind and solar.  

Average Annual Increase of Non-Fossil Fuel Electricity

While France and Sweden rapidly decarbonized their electricity generation by expanding nuclear Germany closed their nuclear power plants.  

Residential Electricity Prices in Western Europe

In 2019, German citizens paid the highest price in Western Europe for electricity. Over half of their cost of electricity for their consumers was for taxes to subsidize wind and solar. Germany and Denmark, the two countries spending the most on wind and solar, are in a constant battle for having the highest electricity prices in Western Europe.  

In July 2022, Germans paid about 50 cents per kWh after Russia reduced the flow of natural gas, sending its price skyrocketing. By December 2022, German residents had the privilege of paying 61 cents per kWhr. Wind and solar are natural gas plants running inefficiently, rapidly increasing and decreasing output to match the unreliability of wind and solar.

Cost of Implementing Unreliable Energy

The insane cost of unreliable renewables, (wind and solar), is hidden in massive government subsidies, and the additional costs of having to deal with power production which never matches consumption patterns.

Few things illustrate the nonsensical claims that wind and solar are the cheapest energy sources more than the massive subsidies required for their implementation.

Government entities, usually countries or US states, use tenders and auctions to choose a company to build a utility-scale wind or solar project. Tenders are sales using sealed bids while auctions allow all bidders to see the lowest price as they compete for the project.  

Wind farm developers and operators are paid for all power produced regardless of the need. If too much power is produced, due to high winds, the electric utility buying the wind-generated power must sell any surplus at the spot price, and then reimburse the wind farm operator a contracted price. During windy weather, the spot price for power is likely to be less than the price paid to the wind farm operator. The consumers end up paying the cost of their utility selling wind they can’t use at a loss. Add the additional costs of transmission lines to far-off wind farms, which are underutilized due to the variability of wind power, and you end up with very pricey power for European nations with a fetish for wind or solar. 

Denmark

At an auction price of 50 Euros/MWh or less wind power appears to be an incredible bargain until you look at the price paid for buying power when the winds slow, or selling when wind speed picks up.  

Wind is like an undependable restaurant employee who shows up whenever he feels like it, and not necessarily when you need him, forcing you to hire a reliable replacement worker.  As more companies hire undependable restaurant workers the cost of the reliable replacement worker goes up.

During the 3rd week of August 2022, low wind speeds meant Denmark paid an average of 618 Euros (605 USD) per MWh to buy backup power.  European plans to reduce reliable fossil fuel production and expand unreliable wind and solar promise to drive the price for reliable power even higher.

Texas

Texas leads the US in wind energy production due to large areas of higher average wind speeds compared to most of the planet and is second to California in installed solar capacity.  As solar and wind become a higher percentage of their electricity generating capacity electricity prices skyrocket every evening when the sun sets, or wind speeds die down as residential customers return home, and utilities compete for reliable power, prior to initiating rolling blackouts.

On Aug 30, 2023, an increasingly common Texas scorcher, utilities paid more than $5 per KWh as their residential customers turned on electrical appliances and air conditioning after coming home for the day.