Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) cites “the climate crisis” at almost every opportunity.
President Biden calls it a greater threat than nuclear war.
They and their allies champion “carbon-free” electricity generation by 2035 and nearly fossil-fuel-free energy by 2050. [emphasis, links added]
Achieving “net zero” carbon dioxide emissions will be painless, they assure us. Costs will be so low you’ll need a magnifying glass to see them.
Governments merely have to enact mandates, provide subsidies, and the transformation to “clean” energy will just happen. Almost like in a fairy tale.
Here in the real world, however, we would need literally millions of weather-dependent wind turbines, billions of equally unreliable solar panels, millions of half-ton battery modules for vehicles, billions more modules to back up intermittent electricity generation, millions of transformers, and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines.
All these technologies must be manufactured from metals, minerals, and petroleum extracted from the Earth, via mining on scales unprecedented in human history.
The dollar costs alone — just for a U.S. transformation — are almost incomprehensible.
Science and policy analyst David Wojick calculated that just the batteries needed to back up wind and solar electricity generation in a “net zero” USA would cost $23 trillion — America’s entire 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) — and probably many times that.
Energy and technology consultant Thomas Tanton found that battery backup to replace current U.S. fossil fuel electricity — and convert vehicles, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves to electricity — would cost at least $29 trillion in initial outlays.
Trillions more would be needed to cover financing, repairs, maintenance, replacements, burying broken and worn-out non-recyclable equipment, and building systems strong enough to survive hurricanes.
Professional engineer Ken Gregory determined that grid-backup battery costs could reach $290 trillion (12.6 times the USA’s 2021 GDP), based on actual 2019 and 2020 hourly intermittent electricity-generation data, rather than annual average data utilized in the other studies.
None of these estimates includes the costs of turbines, panels, transmission lines, or transformers.
Energy analyst Francis Menton estimated that New York’s plan to procure 24,000 megawatt-hours of battery storage would provide only 0.2% of what the state would actually need as backup.
But even that would require 300,000 Tesla Long Range 80-kilowatt-hour battery modules — before New York mandates electric automobiles and home heating and cooking systems.
Each of those modules weighs over 1,000 pounds and holds 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
Each one contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and over 550 pounds of aluminum, steel, graphite, plastics, and other materials, energy analyst Ron Stein reports.
To manufacture each module, we must mine 30,000 pounds of cobalt ore (much of it with child labor in the Congo), 5,000 pounds of nickel ore, and 25,000 pounds of copper ore, plus inject and extract 25,000 pounds of brine to get the lithium.
Backing up New York’s peak summertime electricity needs for just 45 minutes (those 300,000 battery modules) would require 3,750 tons of lithium, 9,000 tons of nickel, 6,600 tons of manganese, 4,500 tons of cobalt, 30,000 tons of copper, and 82,500 tons of other materials.
Together, we’d need to mine more than seventy-five million tons of ores for those New York grid-backup batteries — after removing at least as much overlying rock to get to the ore bodies.
Backing up California’s currently planned wind and solar electricity generation would require nearly 310,000,000 Long-Range modules.
Imagine the batteries, materials, and ores that we would need for the entire USA — or the world!
Processing those ores into finished metals requires acids and other chemical processes, and results in extensive toxic wastes that cause horrific air and water pollution if not handled properly.
This is absolutely not clean, green, affordable, ecological, or sustainable.
The bottom line: “Net zero” is aptly named — if what is meant is the sum total of our nation’s bank account and natural resources after it’s implemented.
Top photo of a Tesla industrial battery via YouTube screencap.
Read more at American Thinker
Wind and Solar only have 9–12 year half-lives, at which point their maintenance skyrockets and replacement becomes necessary. Our first generation of wind is already dead, 10s of 1000s of turbines with no plan what to do with them so they are rotting in place. In addition most of the materials cannot be recycled. So, we are already in replacement mode and would have to dedicate a huge part of our economy just to meet replacement while also trying to increase wind and solar. The problem only gets worse as you try to increase the turbines and the problem will never go away.
What was not mentioned is that the half-life of wind and solar is 9-12 years, which means that maintenance escalates at they time and replacement is required. So, while trying to build millions of wind turbines and solar panels, the older ones are failing and need replacement—we are at that point now as the first generation of wind turbines has already failed and we have 10s of thousands of turbines that are dead and rotting in place. There was no plan on what to do with them when they are dead and most or all of the materials cannot be recycled. Quickly we have a catch up program that cannot get ahead without devoting our entire economy to turbines and panels. It is simply unobtainable, period
The liberals are in control and we are at full speed ahead towards net zero. That means unless there is a change in direction net zero will be implement in the only way it can be. Frequent power outages some of which will be long will become the new normal. This is not only inconvenient in homes, but will cause a huge cost in industry.