The energy transition to wind, solar, and utility-scale batteries is simply unworkable.

“Shattered Green Dreams: The Environmental Costs of Wind and Solar” is a new report by Sarah Montalbano and the Center of the American Experiment. In it, Montalbano explains how the environmental, material, and technological flaws and limits of so-called renewables are systematically ignored by policymakers. As the Mackinac Center’s Seven Principles of Sound Energy Policy make clear, all energy sources, including politically favored ones, have an environmental impact.

“Sunshine and the breeze are nonpolluting,” explains Montalbano, “[b]ut building wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries to harvest and store wind and solar resources entail environmental costs in the mining of raw material.” While proponents of net-zero policies may sometimes acknowledge this, the problem cuts deeper than most will admit.

“Under a global net-zero scenario, the IEA [International Energy Agency] estimates that total mineral demand from clean energy technologies will at least quadruple from 2020 levels. Electric vehicles (EVs) and battery storage account for almost half of total mineral demand growth, growing 10 times over 2020 levels to reach global net-zero emissions by 2070.” Other resources, like rare earth elements and graphite, see their demand quadruple, while demand for lithium increases by an order of magnitude.

Meeting the increased demand for copper will require that we mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all of human history up to 2018, according to the International Energy Forum. To achieve full vehicle electrification, 55% more copper would need to be mined beyond that baseline.

“A 2023 report by the Energy Transitions Commission predicts that global steel demand will increase by five times its 2022 level by 2050 under a global net-zero emissions scenario,” Montalbano writes. “[D]emand for steel, aluminum, and copper account[s] for 95% of total end-use material requirements for global net zero.” “Almost all of the world’s copper” would need to be committed to the net-zero effort, Montalbano finds. Given copper’s presence in key consumer technologies, not to mention the rapidly growing needs of AI data centers, wasting copper on subsidy-reliant green technologies is a policy failure.

Wind energy faces bottlenecks, too. Constructing blades for wind turbines requires balsa wood, for example. Annual U.S. demand for it “would reach 520 percent of global production” if the U.S. were to have a net-zero economy. Or consider carbon fiber: wind power would consume “440% of U.S. production and 120% of global production annually.” (This dour data comes courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an advocate for wind and solar.) With numbers like these, one can rightly say that renewables aren’t renewable.

Montalbano also considers the ecological impacts of wind and solar, detailing how wind turbine blades have, for decades, killed millions of birds. To add insult to injury, turbines disproportionately kill large birds of prey that reproduce slowly and are thus harder hit by each death. “I’ve seen them just decapitated,” one researcher said of what wind turbines in Spain have done to birds.

Not to be outdone, solar thermal plants such as the nearly defunct Ivanpah Solar Plant in California can incinerate birds at temperatures of up to 1,000°F. Their charred and smoking corpses fall from the sky, prompting employees at the plant to call them “streamers.” Environmentalists who are eager to shut down fossil fuel developments for the slightest of offenses should remember that wind and solar energy disproportionately kill key species, including eagles and hawks. In short, the claim that transitioning to wind or solar will help save wildlife species from the effects of climate change are dubious, at best.

While a net-zero policy imposes significant costs on the wildlife, it fails to achieve its stated aim. A successful effort to achieve net-zero emissions in the U.S. would lower the global average temperature by a mere 0.01 degrees Celsius in the year 2100.

Some conservation groups, as Montalbano explains, have confided in the U.S. Department of Energy that “they have not observed any direct benefits to species from solar development.” These groups “expressed concern about over-emphasizing benefits that solar may provide to species and habitats.”

Wind and solar’s impact on land use is worse than advertised. “Almost 800 average-sized wind turbines would be needed to match the output of a 900-megawatt nuclear reactor,” Montalbano says, citing MIT’s deputy director of research for the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. “Doing the same with solar panels would require around 8.5 million panels.”

Montalbano also explains the findings of a recent peer-reviewed study: “The land required for electricity generation under all decarbonization scenarios would at least double (current use), with one scenario requiring land use on the order of 500 to 900 million hectares by 2030.” That’s “roughly the same as the total land area of the United States,” according to one Breakthrough Institute researcher.

Solar also threatens to take some of the country’s best farmland out of production. Roughly “83% of new solar projects are installed on farmland, and ‘almost 50% (are) placed on the most productive, versatile, and resilient’ farmland according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” Montalbano says, citing the American Farmland Trust.

“Rooftop solar,” notes the report, “is more expensive to construct and operate than utility-scale solar due to its distributed infrastructure” and other factors. Even without rooftop solar, over one million miles of transmission lines will need to be built to achieve net-zero goals through wind and solar. It would take roughly 1,400 years to obtain the required permits and build the lines, Montalbano writes.

This American Experiment report highlights why wind and solar both received such low scores on the Mackinac Center’s “Grading the Grid” report.

“Shattered Green Dreams” presents some key findings: Clean energy isn’t clean, assumptions underlying recycling are overly optimistic, and the technological advances needed to enable a net-zero energy transition are, at best insurmountable. We highly recommend the report.

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