Green Energy’s Hidden Costs Are Wrecking Landscapes And Power Bills

Energy analyst Robert Bryce maintains a database showing that, as of November 2025, local communities have rejected or restricted 595 wind, 475 solar, and (more recently) 72 large-scale battery projects. [some emphasis, links added]

Many don’t want the installations blanketing wildlife habitats, scenic vistas, croplands, or their backyard viewsheds; especially when the unreliable electricity is exported to faraway, power-hungry, virtue-signaling cities; and particularly when they are expected to help pay for installations and transmission lines that serve another state: North Dakota ratepayers to help Minneapolis, for example.

Other locals worry about health risks posed by light flicker, low-frequency noise, and infrasound.

Many people also get riled up over the real costs of “green” energy – the total actual costs … versus deliberately lowballed costs that advocates emphasize.

This opposition is not only an American phenomenon. French and other European towns are also raising concerns, as are others around the world.

A recurrent sales pitch is that wind and solar power costs are declining and are now lower than coal, gas, or nuclear electricity, ensuring lower prices for consumers. The claims leave out important but studiously unmentioned costs – economic, environmental, and human.

“Save with renewable energy” promotions typically look only at initial costs associated with installing wind turbines and solar panels, which often come from China and are manufactured with cheap labor, using materials extracted with child labor, in mines and facilities with minimal or no workplace safety or environmental safeguards, with every phase fueled by oil, natural gas, or coal.

Promoters also ignore sneaky subsidies paid via taxes and hidden charges on electric bills. They ignore payments to companies for not producing electricity when they must shut down because of high winds or when generation exceeds supply or grid capacity.

They don’t mention the costs of constructing, maintaining, and operating duplicative backup systems: coal- or gas-fired power plants that must operate full-time at low throttle and go full-bore whenever wind and sunshine are inadequate. Or the mining and pollution involved in manufacturing all these technologies.

Grid-scale backup batteries cost tens of billions of dollars and carry significant fire and toxic emission risks, as with the 300-megawatt battery inferno at Moss Landing, California.

Offshore oceanic wind turbines must be replaced frequently due to salt spray and storms. Hailstorms can destroy entire solar panel installations. The trillions of dollars keep adding up.

High-voltage transmission lines, often hundreds of miles long, cost $1-8 million per mile – for concrete, power lines, transformers, towers 50-200 feet tall, and warehouses of other equipment.

No wonder states and countries are obsessed over climate cataclysms, net zero, and wind and solar have outrageous electricity rates.

Germany now has the developed world’s highest domestic electricity prices; Britain has its highest industrial rates. Average prices for Europe’s heavy industries are double those in the United States. U.S. states heavily reliant on wind and solar likewise pay exorbitant prices.

When families cannot afford electricity or gas, their homes are frigid, and thousands die every winter from illnesses they would survive if they had proper heat.

Even France, which generates two-thirds of its electricity with nuclear power and leads Europe and the world in this regard, is betting big on solar, plus some wind.

President Emmanuel Macron’s government intends to install millions of solar panels on “wastelands” and along freeways, while protecting “the beauty of our landscapes.”

The French Parliament has mandated that parking lots larger than 1,500 square meters (16,145 square feet; 80 vehicles) be 50% covered with solar panels. The government claims this electricity will equal the output of ten nuclear power plants, producing a total of 10 Gigawatts on about 13 square miles of land.

It’s a fantastical assertion.

A 1-GW solar installation requires 4,000-5,000 acres (6-8 sq. mi.), so ten will cover roughly 70 square miles. That’s nearly twice the land area of Paris, if entire parking lots are covered by panels. Can there possibly be that many appropriately sized outdoor lots in France?

Moreover, actually generating Gigawatts with photovoltaic solar requires sunlight! France averages about 2,000 hours a year (23% of total annual hours). So legislators will have to conjure up many more parking lots covered in solar panels. Or compel the sun to shine longer and brighter.

Unless France builds more coal and gas power plants, it will also have to spend tens of billions of euros to install hundreds of thousands of grid-scale batteries to store much of that electricity for nighttime and cloudy-day needs, diverting electricity from homes to batteries.

Perhaps the Macron government recognizes these obstacles. It’s blanketing, not just roadsides, “wastelands” and parking lots, but farmlands, meadows and forests all over France.

Seventeen solar projects are being fast-tracked in the Lot River Valley region alone. Macron officials are having thousands of trees chopped down there to “plant” Chinese solar panels next to the Causses du Quercy regional natural park, home to Saint Cirq Lapopie – France’s “most beautiful village.”

Tourists come to the Lot Valley to enjoy its stunning cliffs, historic villages, vineyards, superb cuisine, and outdoor activities – not to see wind turbines, solar panels, battery “farms” and transmission lines.

But when national governments make “climate stabilization” and “saving the planet” their top priority, destroying villages, scenery, croplands, and habitats becomes a minor inconvenience.

So does the fact that much of the pseudo-sustainable electricity will likely be exported to Belgium, Switzerland, and CERN, or to Spain during its next massive blackout.

The German government even bulldozes ancient villages to mine dirty, low-quality lignite coal, because it opposes nuclear power plants … and refuses to frack for natural gas for backup power.

This craziness could be coming to your neighborhood, as governments commit varying degrees of environmental vandalism and economic suicide in pursuit of solutions to the imaginary “climate crisis.”

Sometimes a wildly “green” state or provincial government preempts local zoning laws that could otherwise be used to reject wind, solar, battery, and transmission line projects, so that “70% green energy by 2030” goals can be met by building in rural areas to serve high-voter urban areas.

Climate-obsessed national governments often act to control local voices and choices in pursuit of “decarbonization” even without being bound by international treaties.

However, nations frequently trample on both state and local needs and concerns by signing onto Kyoto and Paris climate agreements that impose “tyranny by treaty” and thereby let unelected, unaccountable international politicians and bureaucrats rule in contravention of national laws and even constitutions.

President Trump took America out of the Paris climate pact, President Biden put it back in, and Trump 47 removed the US again in 2025. The cycle could repeat at the national or state level, as elections install new governments. Virginia is already finding that out, as its Clean Economy Act gets a “progressive” political power boost, though Trump just suspended its offshore wind project.

Voters and ratepayers need to wake up to these realities – and vote ideologues out of power before they destroy the planet in misguided attempts to save it. What a Happy New Year that would bring!

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, and human rights. Special thanks to researcher T.H. Platt, author of The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain (Amazon), for assisting with this article.