The green energy disaster

 Power Line:

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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. Click to enlarge:

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. Click to enlarge:

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?

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There is much more.

The landmass needed to facilitate dependency on wind and solar energy is twice the size of the state of California and that does not include getting the energy to market. What we are talking about is a fool's errand that would make the US dependent on a hostile dictatorship like China.  It is a nutty idea from beginning to end.

But the Biden administration is just screwy enough to try it anyway.  They have taken the US from energy independence to begging OPEC and Russia to produce more oil after cutting domestic production for unsound reasons.