Miners love wind and solar – demand for iron ore and coal has never looked rosier, and at the heart of every Electric Vehicle, solar panel and wind turbine there’ a bevy of rare minerals which are fast becoming rarer, thanks to our ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future and the much-heralded (and overhyped) shift to all EV motoring.
Diffuse, intermittent and unreliable wind and solar are utterly pointless as power sources – because they can’t deliver power as and when we need it. However, as a source of insatiable demand for the Planet’s (purportedly) dwindling resources they are first rate.
John Hinderbraker takes a look at how our “inevitable transition” to an all-wind and sun-powered future is devouring the world’s dwindling resources.
The Disaster of Green Energy
Powerline
John Hinderbraker
13 August 2021
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.
So meeting current U.S. electricity needs with wind and solar would require a 50% increase in global copper production, a tripling of global nickel production, and a 2,150% increase in global cobalt production. This would be the largest mining and manufacturing project in world history, and even if one assumes that sufficient supplies of those minerals exist somewhere, the vast increase in demand would send prices through the roof.
If we adopt electric vehicles and otherwise try to electrify our economy, these numbers skyrocket, so that, for example, global copper production would have to triple and cobalt production would have to increase by 8,200%. I will hazard a wild guess that this isn’t going to happen.
Where would all these minerals be processed? You don’t get three guesses.
Great idea! Let’s turn complete control of our economy over to the Chinese Communist Party. Which the Biden administration, with its energy policies, is trying to do. (I haven’t even mentioned the fact that 80% of the world’s solar panels are manufactured in China using coal-fired power plants and, in large part, slave labor.) This prompts once again the thought, if Joe Biden were an enemy agent, what, exactly, would he be doing differently?
Robert Bryce has written extensively about the fact that because wind and solar energy are so low-intensity–i.e., feeble–they require an enormous amount of land. In fact, to meet existing U.S. electricity with wind power (unreliably) you would have to dedicate an area twice the size of California to wind turbines. This obviously won’t happen, especially since local opposition has forced the cancellation or restriction of more than 300 wind projects in the U.S. since 2015:
You would also need 240,000 miles of interstate high-voltage transmission lines, enough to go around the world nearly ten times. Add that to the list of things that aren’t going to happen.
Powerline
STOP THESE THINGS 
Hello STT. You know I was trying to highlight the dangers of Lithium hexafluorophosphate (Li PF6). Don’t forget the batteries. Clean Energy except for the folk of Moorabool who had to close the windows and block chimneys. I hear there’s a lot of lithium in Afghanistan, but we’ll not go there.
“Clean Energy Exploitations”, a nominee for a 2022 Pulitzer Prize.
According to Podcasters Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris of the America Out Loud Podcast Network, the new book, “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping citizens understand the environmental and humanity abuses that support ‘clean’ energy” is the best written and researched book in years. If there is one book that you read this year, this book is a MUST read.
Jay and Tom encourage everyone to listen to their one-hour Podcast with the books authors Ron Stein and Todd Royal to learn how wind and solar power use rare earths and other minerals derived from child and slave labor in developing countries, and to check out their interview posting “Blood Minerals Behind Wind and Solar Power”.