Links tagged “wind”

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Opposition by green groups to clean energy projects and mining in the Southwest “threatens to significantly slow efforts by the Biden administration and businesses to fight climate change by reducing America’s carbon emissions,” The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday in a story about efforts to stop a solar power project in Moapa Valley. ...

“The Biden administration is at a crossroads, and the Tiehm’s buckwheat is a symbol of our times,” said an overheated press release from Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Will the clean energy transition choose a new path and support our country’s remarkable biodiversity? Or will it opt for business as usual, with mining and development continuing to fuel the extinction crisis that’s bringing our life-support systems to the brink of collapse? There’s only one way forward, and that’s to protect Tiehm’s buckwheat and stop this destructive mine from driving a species to extinction.”

Steve Milloy: Joe Biden’s climate plan will put America at the mercy of its superpower rival, China. ... The technologies involved in wind and solar power and electric vehicles are much more reliant than their conventional alternatives on metals and minerals including copper, lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, graphite chromium, molybdenum, zinc, rare-earths and silicon.  ...

Wind and solar technologies require about three to eight times more of these materials per megawatt of electricity than coal and natural gas plants. Electric cars require about five times more of these materials than conventional cars. Joe Biden’s climate agenda involves replacing the coal and gas plants powering our electrical grid with wind and solar farms. He also wants to replace gasoline-powered cars, buses and trucks with electric vehicles.

The IEA reports that China is one of the top three locations for the mining of copper, nickel, rare-earths and lithium. When it comes to mining rare-earths, China is responsible for 60% of global extraction. But there’s more to these essential materials than mining; they must be processed as well. When it comes to processing the ores, China is the leader for all of them plus cobalt, the latter of which is mostly mined in the Congo. China processes about 35% of the global nickel supply, 40% of copper, 55% of lithium, 65% of cobalt and 85% of rare-earths.

Robert Bryce: The academics and bureaucrats who create models that claim we can run the global economy solely on renewable energy live in a different world than you and me. In their world, there is no shortage of money, land, or commodities like copper, cobalt, and lithium. In the modelers’ world, wind turbines don’t slaughter birds and bats by the hundreds of thousands per year...The models also routinely ignore the myriad supply-chain problems that would come from attempting a massive increase in the use of solar panels, including the sourcing of polysilicon from China, and in particular, from Xinjiang province, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are being forced to work for polysilicon manufacturers. ...

“Green” technologies will also require an enormous increase in mining to supply the staggering amounts of copper, cobalt, and other minerals that are required by “green” technologies.

Michael Shellenberger: "Here's the Malthusian environmental record: 

The reason that Malthusian pro-scarcity activists & pseudoscientists like @PeterGleick have to lie, cheat, and steal is because their agenda hurts people and the environment and is bought and paid for by powerful interests

The Wall Street Journal joins the math-challenged club with a front page story headlined “Batteries Challenge Natural Gas As America’s No. 1 Power Source.” 

The theme of the story is that “renewable” energy sources, such as solar, paired with batteries to balance periods of low production, are rapidly becoming so cheap that they are likely to “disrupt” natural gas plants that have only recently been constructed...the only possible plans are either fossil fuel backup or trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries. But the author never mentions any of that. How much fossil fuel backup? ... 

The simple fact is that wind/solar plus battery systems would not need any government subsidies if they were cost effective. The Biden Administration is proposing to hand out many, many tens of billions of dollars to subsidize building these systems. They are clearly not cost-effective, and not even close.