It takes a special brand of delusion to believe that we’ll all soon be powered entirely by sunshine and breezes. These days, those peddling that myth are guaranteed to be in on the greatest government-backed rort in history.
Fantastic stories continue to appear about our imminent transition to a world that runs entirely on 100% wind and solar. Albeit, with trillions of batteries – said to be capable of accounting for sunset and the kind of chaos delivered by wind power’s sudden surges and complete collapses.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, no country has ever powered itself entirely using wind and solar power; no country ever will.
WISHING something is so doesn’t make it possible, and nowhere in politics is the gap between aspiration and reality larger than in the push to quickly eliminate fossil fuel use.
Some politicians and environmental activists want to require that all U.S. electricity be generated from renewable sources by the 2030s. That would mean replacing an overwhelming majority of current production, which is generated by coal- or natural gas-fired power plants. Deploying renewable energy at the scale required to fuel the U.S. economy would require covering state-sized territories with nothing but wind turbines and solar panels. It would also require stringing tens of thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines. Meeting present-day U.S. electricity consumption with renewables would require 12 percent of the continental U.S. land area for wind. That translates into 350,000 square miles or an area more than twice the size of California.
Put simply, the push to use nothing but renewables requires disruption or destruction of thousands of miles of natural habitat. Resistance to such measures is growing nationwide, including in the country’s most left-leaning locales. Counties in California have banned or restricted wind projects. In the 2018 Vermont governor’s race, both candidates opposed new wind-energy development. Opposition to wind turbine installation is increasing elsewhere across the country.
Like most, we support using a variety of energy sources — so long as they are economically viable and logistically feasible. Suggesting that green energy use can increase without addressing the latter two factors is wishful thinking, not serious policymaking.
Among those who are unaware, either honestly or dishonestly, are mainstream environmental groups and the political groups that have tied their fortunes to the environmentalist mindset. From this crowd you often hear confident predictions that in some few decades all of our energy will come from renewable sources; wind and solar are the most touted. You sometimes even hear such predictions coming straight from high levels of government.
How credible are such predictions? They clearly lack any and all credibility, and not only for the simple reason that the sun goes down every night, raising the vexing question of what non-fossil-fuel energy source is going to power homes, hospitals, schools, and the Internet between seven p.m. and seven a.m.
The German countryside is now pockmarked with 28,000 wind turbines, rashes of solar farms and lashings of anaerobic digesters making gas out of maize crops. Renewables are now providing more than a third of Germany’s electricity, which sounds like a green triumph. But the cost is enormous. The cost of subsidising all this so far is about €190 billion, and is heading for 500 billion euros in total by 2025
In spite of that, the impact on emissions has been small, even if you count biogas as low-carbon (which it is not). This is because to back up and balance the renewables, while killing off nuclear (to appease greens scared by Fukushima), the country is unable to reduce and has actually had had to expand its coal-burning sector. It has built 10 gigawatts of coal-burning power stations in the past five years.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
