Unfortunately renewables only produce energy about 30% of the time.
by Charles Tyrrell
The people who believe in climate change believe it is caused by the carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity. In order to eliminate CO2 and greenhouse gases they have focused on using "renewable energy," getting electricity from the sun and the wind. Slick advertising and political agendas have convinced them that renewable energy is clean, green and critical to stopping global warming.
But that's far from the truth. Most people haven't considered that we pay twice for renewable energy. Once in taxes that finance its billions in subsidies and a second time in our electric bill. Large-scale renewable energy farms create more pollution, more destruction, more danger, more expenses, and more jobs than they do electricity.
Wind and solar enthusiasts only talk about "installed capacity" claiming that one megawatt powers 1,000 homes. However, the amount of electricity that any power plant actually delivers is its "capacity factor." Solar and wind farms have the lowest capacity factors of any energy source. About 30%.
So, with both wind and solar farms generating less than 30% of their installed capacity, and according to the Renewable Energy association, that one megawatt of potential output actually powers only 164 homes. Not 1,000 homes.
Most people seem to feel we are on the right track with renewable energy, arguing that their low production can be overcome by building "more" solar farms and erecting "more" wind turbines.
Well, consider this. The U.S. has 1.4 million solar farms, some with over 8 million PV panels. So, there are already trillions of PV panels in use, but they generate less than 1% of the nation's electricity. The U.S. has 58,000 wind turbines (20% of them in Texas). They generate 6% of the nation's electricity. Compare those colossal numbers to the 99 nuclear reactors in the U.S. that generate 20% of the nation's electricity.
Palo Verde Nuclear Station, in the Arizona desert, has been the largest producer of electricity in the U.S. for over 30 years. It generates more than 32.3 million MWh and supplies electricity to homes and businesses in Arizona, California, Texas, and New Mexico. It has 3 reactors, a capacity factor of 93.8%, and serves over 4 million people.
Palo Verde has offset the emission of almost 534 million tons of carbon dioxide (the equivalent of taking up to 84 million cars off the road for one year); more than 278,900 tons of sulfur dioxide; and 681,000 tons of nitrogen oxide.
Nuclear energy is the cleanest, most reliable and the only energy source that can produce more electricity than oil, coal or gas and eliminate CO2 and greenhouse gases. It takes millions of tons of oil or coal to produce the same amount of electricity as one ton of uranium.
Few people know that solar energy is NOT environmentally friendly. It creates 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. Solar panels only last 25-30 years and they can be broken by lightening or during hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
Every photovoltaic (PV) solar panel contains lead and cadmium. Lead, cadmium and cadmium compounds are highly toxic. When panels are broken or are discarded in landfills, these toxic chemicals can leech into the soil, poisoning aquifers and water basins.
And, this is not to even mention the environmental damage done by making solar panels in the first place. The manufacturing of silicon solar cells requires furnaces running at 2,000ยบ C and involves a witch's brew of chemicals. The furnaces emit CO2 and some of the chemicals and byproducts are tens of thousands times more harmful than CO2.
Solar panels are mostly glass and plastic so the cost of recycling them can be more than the value of the materials recovered. In Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) panels the glass is infused with toxic minerals. So, the recycling process for CdTe panels must include a step to separate the toxic minerals from the ground up glass.
The problems of solar panel disposal is going to explode soon and little is being done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment. A growing number of environmental scientists and even solar industry leaders are voicing concern about what happens to discarded solar panels. And still the U.S. has no plan, no regulations and no money set aside for the disposal of PV solar panels.
Wind turbines are not the clean and green structures that we think they are. It takes over 175 tons of coal to make the 800 tons of steel and concrete that are used when installing a single wind mill.
Turbine generators use permanent magnets that are made from rare earth elements. A single 2 MW wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium.
These rare earth minerals are mined almost exclusively in China. But as mining spreads to countries like Malaysia and Brazil, scientists warn about the dangers of toxic and radioactive waste that is generated on an epic scale from the mining and processing of rare earth minerals.
Wind turbines are as tall as 30-story buildings with blades as wide as a passenger jet's wingspan. These large turbines must be spaced 5 to 10 blade diameters apart which requires the clearing huge stretches of land. Massive wind installations are expensive and rely heavily on large government subsidies.
Wind farms are built outside of populated areas and far from major cities. Transmission lines, at a cost of $1.9 million per mile, must be built to carry electricity to consumers over long distances.
The average cost of a wind turbine is about $2 million per megawatt. The cost of offshore developments is 5 times more than the cost of onshore developments as construction and maintenance must all be handled by ship and helicopter.
The lifespan of wind turbines is about 20 years. Offshore turbines don't last as long. Salt water is far more damaging than the sun and rain. Every turbine requires preventive maintenance checkups two to three times per year and repairing wind turbines is difficult with workers making repairs while up over 300 feet in the air.
Wind energy needs locations where wind speed is high. It turns out there is considerable overlap between the places where there is a lot of wind and where there are migratory bird routes as well as a lot of lightning strikes.
Although the blades appear to move slowly, they can reach speeds over 170 mph at the tips. Ecologists are seriously concerned about the number of protected species such as golden eagles, burrowing owls, red-tailed hawks and falcons that are being shredded each year by wind turbines.
Tragically, the size of these majestic creatures makes it difficult for them to maneuver through forests of spinning wind turbine blades, especially when they are concentrating on looking for prey.
The risk to birds is highest at night, when the blades and towers are cloaked in darkness. The argument that millions of birds are killed annually by house cats and flying into buildings and other structures would be acceptable if wind energy was supplying plenty of cheap, dependable, carbon-free electricity. But it does not!
Wind turbines get more than their fair share of lightning damage as compared to buildings and towers of a similar height.
The materials the blades are made of are insulators that cannot easily dissipate the charges racked up while whooshing about their business. And lightning strikes can cause significant damage. Blades explode; generators and control system electronics fry.
Wind turbines are noisy. A study in Sweden measured the noise of wind turbines to be 5 to 10 decibels louder than the noise of a chainsaw at a distance of 120 yards with wind speeds of 28 mph, the wind speed at which turbines perform their best.
Ivanpah Solar Electric is the world's largest Solar Thermal Plant. It has 173,500 double-mirrored heliostats which turn to keep focusing sunlight toward "boilers" located on top of three 40 story towers. The boilers create steam that is then piped to steam turbines, which generate electricity.
A CSP plant can store the heat of solar energy in molten salts, which enables them to generate electricity day or night. However, at night CSP plants burn fossil fuels to keep the water in the boilers heated so electric production can start up more quickly when the sun comes up each morning.
Of course, birds unfortunate enough to fly through the 800° to 1,000° Fahrenheit beams of sunlight aimed at the towers while chasing after insects that are attracted by the mirrors, are instantly incinerated. Employees at Invanpah call them "Streamers" because of the trail of smoke they leave behind as they fall from the sky.
Invanpah is on 3,500 acres of public land in the Mojave Desert. It still cost taxpayers $2.2 billion and it received $1.6 billion in loan guarantees and $600 million in federal tax credits.
The cost of electricity from Invanpah is over 21 cents per kilowatt hour. The cost of PV solar is about 12.2 cents per kilowatt hour. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates generating electricity from wind at 9.6 cents per kilowatt hour. But, when the wind is not blowing the cost of wind power increases to 15.1 cents per kilowatt hour if natural gas is used as the back-up fuel and 19.2 cents per kilowatt hour if coal is used as the back-up fuel. The cost of nuclear power is the lowest at 2.1 to 4.0 cents per kilowatt hour.
California boasts that their 11,000 wind turbines generated 14.3 million MWh in 2018. But their Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, with its 2 reactors, generated 17.9 million MWh in 2018 and has generated that much annually for the past 33 years.
Diablo Canyon is 90% reliable and supplies 9% of California's carbon-free electricity. However, a state already plagued by rolling blackouts, they want to close Diablo Canyon and replace it with an electricity system that is dependent on the wind.
Many people have been taught to fear nuclear power because of accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. The fact is, since 1970, these are the only three accidents in the world involving reactor core damage.
At Chernobyl approximately 30 men died from radiation. At Fukushima an 8.9 magnitude earthquake created a 45 foot-high tsunami. The tsunami killed 19,000 people. It damaged 3 reactors but no one died from radiation. At Three Mile Island no dangerous amount of radiation was discharged outside of the facility. The people of Harrisburg, PA would actually receive more radiation from a chest x-ray than they received as a result of the accident.
Because of three accidents in half a century, we spend billions on energy sources that depend on the weather. They are totally unaffordable without huge government subsidies, triple the cost of electricity, generate electricity less than 30% of the time, put electricity grids at a risk of collapse, cannot prove they significantly eliminate CO2 and greenhouse gases, devastate millions of acres of land, forests, mountains and bays, displace and kill wildlife and endanger the population with millions of tons of undetectable toxic chemicals and radioactive waste that end up in our landfills and oceans.
But the rush to renewable energy has been a free-for-all in which get-rich-quick companies exploited ridiculously generous tax breaks and peppered the States with PV panels, heliostats and wind turbines. It has been a scam that is working well as long as they can blame all the destruction and expense on saving the planet.
Nuclear plants last 65 years, not the 20-25 year lifespans of solar panels and wind turbines. When nuclear reactors are decommissioned about 99% of the radioactivity is associated with the fuel which is removed following the shutdown. The remaining radioactive waste comes from steel that has been exposed to neutron irradiation. But that steel can be recycled for other nuclear plants.
When solar panels and wind turbines age, they are often abandoned. The Carrizo Plain solar facility, built in 1983 was abandoned the late 1990s. The first windfarms appeared in 1981. Today, dozens of those wind farms are abandoned, left rusting and slowly decaying. In some areas the smaller turbines with their telltale lattice-work towers, will soon get upgraded to larger. But no one mentions what will happen to the discarded steel towers and useless turbines.
But that's far from the truth. Most people haven't considered that we pay twice for renewable energy. Once in taxes that finance its billions in subsidies and a second time in our electric bill. Large-scale renewable energy farms create more pollution, more destruction, more danger, more expenses, and more jobs than they do electricity.
So, with both wind and solar farms generating less than 30% of their installed capacity, and according to the Renewable Energy association, that one megawatt of potential output actually powers only 164 homes. Not 1,000 homes.
Most people seem to feel we are on the right track with renewable energy, arguing that their low production can be overcome by building "more" solar farms and erecting "more" wind turbines.
Well, consider this. The U.S. has 1.4 million solar farms, some with over 8 million PV panels. So, there are already trillions of PV panels in use, but they generate less than 1% of the nation's electricity. The U.S. has 58,000 wind turbines (20% of them in Texas). They generate 6% of the nation's electricity. Compare those colossal numbers to the 99 nuclear reactors in the U.S. that generate 20% of the nation's electricity.
Nuclear vs Solar
Palo Verde has offset the emission of almost 534 million tons of carbon dioxide (the equivalent of taking up to 84 million cars off the road for one year); more than 278,900 tons of sulfur dioxide; and 681,000 tons of nitrogen oxide.
Nuclear energy is the cleanest, most reliable and the only energy source that can produce more electricity than oil, coal or gas and eliminate CO2 and greenhouse gases. It takes millions of tons of oil or coal to produce the same amount of electricity as one ton of uranium.
Few people know that solar energy is NOT environmentally friendly. It creates 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. Solar panels only last 25-30 years and they can be broken by lightening or during hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
And, this is not to even mention the environmental damage done by making solar panels in the first place. The manufacturing of silicon solar cells requires furnaces running at 2,000ยบ C and involves a witch's brew of chemicals. The furnaces emit CO2 and some of the chemicals and byproducts are tens of thousands times more harmful than CO2.
Solar panels are mostly glass and plastic so the cost of recycling them can be more than the value of the materials recovered. In Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) panels the glass is infused with toxic minerals. So, the recycling process for CdTe panels must include a step to separate the toxic minerals from the ground up glass.
The problems of solar panel disposal is going to explode soon and little is being done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment. A growing number of environmental scientists and even solar industry leaders are voicing concern about what happens to discarded solar panels. And still the U.S. has no plan, no regulations and no money set aside for the disposal of PV solar panels.
Wind Power
Turbine generators use permanent magnets that are made from rare earth elements. A single 2 MW wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium.
These rare earth minerals are mined almost exclusively in China. But as mining spreads to countries like Malaysia and Brazil, scientists warn about the dangers of toxic and radioactive waste that is generated on an epic scale from the mining and processing of rare earth minerals.
Wind turbines are as tall as 30-story buildings with blades as wide as a passenger jet's wingspan. These large turbines must be spaced 5 to 10 blade diameters apart which requires the clearing huge stretches of land. Massive wind installations are expensive and rely heavily on large government subsidies.
Wind farms are built outside of populated areas and far from major cities. Transmission lines, at a cost of $1.9 million per mile, must be built to carry electricity to consumers over long distances.
The average cost of a wind turbine is about $2 million per megawatt. The cost of offshore developments is 5 times more than the cost of onshore developments as construction and maintenance must all be handled by ship and helicopter.
The lifespan of wind turbines is about 20 years. Offshore turbines don't last as long. Salt water is far more damaging than the sun and rain. Every turbine requires preventive maintenance checkups two to three times per year and repairing wind turbines is difficult with workers making repairs while up over 300 feet in the air.
Wind energy needs locations where wind speed is high. It turns out there is considerable overlap between the places where there is a lot of wind and where there are migratory bird routes as well as a lot of lightning strikes.
Although the blades appear to move slowly, they can reach speeds over 170 mph at the tips. Ecologists are seriously concerned about the number of protected species such as golden eagles, burrowing owls, red-tailed hawks and falcons that are being shredded each year by wind turbines.
The risk to birds is highest at night, when the blades and towers are cloaked in darkness. The argument that millions of birds are killed annually by house cats and flying into buildings and other structures would be acceptable if wind energy was supplying plenty of cheap, dependable, carbon-free electricity. But it does not!
Wind turbines get more than their fair share of lightning damage as compared to buildings and towers of a similar height.
Wind turbines are noisy. A study in Sweden measured the noise of wind turbines to be 5 to 10 decibels louder than the noise of a chainsaw at a distance of 120 yards with wind speeds of 28 mph, the wind speed at which turbines perform their best.
Thermal Solar Power
So here's the "bright idea" being used to capture energy from the sun without the hazards of toxic PV panels. Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) or Solar Thermal Plants.Ivanpah Solar Electric is the world's largest Solar Thermal Plant. It has 173,500 double-mirrored heliostats which turn to keep focusing sunlight toward "boilers" located on top of three 40 story towers. The boilers create steam that is then piped to steam turbines, which generate electricity.
A CSP plant can store the heat of solar energy in molten salts, which enables them to generate electricity day or night. However, at night CSP plants burn fossil fuels to keep the water in the boilers heated so electric production can start up more quickly when the sun comes up each morning.
Of course, birds unfortunate enough to fly through the 800° to 1,000° Fahrenheit beams of sunlight aimed at the towers while chasing after insects that are attracted by the mirrors, are instantly incinerated. Employees at Invanpah call them "Streamers" because of the trail of smoke they leave behind as they fall from the sky.
The cost of electricity from Invanpah is over 21 cents per kilowatt hour. The cost of PV solar is about 12.2 cents per kilowatt hour. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates generating electricity from wind at 9.6 cents per kilowatt hour. But, when the wind is not blowing the cost of wind power increases to 15.1 cents per kilowatt hour if natural gas is used as the back-up fuel and 19.2 cents per kilowatt hour if coal is used as the back-up fuel. The cost of nuclear power is the lowest at 2.1 to 4.0 cents per kilowatt hour.
California boasts that their 11,000 wind turbines generated 14.3 million MWh in 2018. But their Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, with its 2 reactors, generated 17.9 million MWh in 2018 and has generated that much annually for the past 33 years.
Diablo Canyon is 90% reliable and supplies 9% of California's carbon-free electricity. However, a state already plagued by rolling blackouts, they want to close Diablo Canyon and replace it with an electricity system that is dependent on the wind.
Many people have been taught to fear nuclear power because of accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. The fact is, since 1970, these are the only three accidents in the world involving reactor core damage.
At Chernobyl approximately 30 men died from radiation. At Fukushima an 8.9 magnitude earthquake created a 45 foot-high tsunami. The tsunami killed 19,000 people. It damaged 3 reactors but no one died from radiation. At Three Mile Island no dangerous amount of radiation was discharged outside of the facility. The people of Harrisburg, PA would actually receive more radiation from a chest x-ray than they received as a result of the accident.
Because of three accidents in half a century, we spend billions on energy sources that depend on the weather. They are totally unaffordable without huge government subsidies, triple the cost of electricity, generate electricity less than 30% of the time, put electricity grids at a risk of collapse, cannot prove they significantly eliminate CO2 and greenhouse gases, devastate millions of acres of land, forests, mountains and bays, displace and kill wildlife and endanger the population with millions of tons of undetectable toxic chemicals and radioactive waste that end up in our landfills and oceans.
But the rush to renewable energy has been a free-for-all in which get-rich-quick companies exploited ridiculously generous tax breaks and peppered the States with PV panels, heliostats and wind turbines. It has been a scam that is working well as long as they can blame all the destruction and expense on saving the planet.
Nuclear plants last 65 years, not the 20-25 year lifespans of solar panels and wind turbines. When nuclear reactors are decommissioned about 99% of the radioactivity is associated with the fuel which is removed following the shutdown. The remaining radioactive waste comes from steel that has been exposed to neutron irradiation. But that steel can be recycled for other nuclear plants.
When solar panels and wind turbines age, they are often abandoned. The Carrizo Plain solar facility, built in 1983 was abandoned the late 1990s. The first windfarms appeared in 1981. Today, dozens of those wind farms are abandoned, left rusting and slowly decaying. In some areas the smaller turbines with their telltale lattice-work towers, will soon get upgraded to larger. But no one mentions what will happen to the discarded steel towers and useless turbines.
Updated September 24, 2019
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