Are wind and solar power the answer to our energy needs? There’s
a lot of sun and a lot of wind. They’re free. They’re clean. No CO2
emissions. So, what’s the problem?
Why do solar and wind combined provide less than 2% of the
world’s energy?
To answer these questions, we need to understand what makes
energy, or anything else for that matter, cheap and plentiful.
For something to be cheap and plentiful, every part of
the process to produce it, including every input that goes into it,
must be cheap and plentiful.
Yes, the sun is free. Yes, wind is free. But the process of
turning sunlight and wind into useable energy on a mass
scaleis far from free. In fact, compared to the other sources
of energy -- fossil fuels, nuclear power, and hydroelectric power,
solar and wind power are very expensive.
The basic problem is that sunlight and wind as energy sources
are both weak (the more technical term is dilute) and unreliable
(the more technical term is intermittent). It takes a lot of
resources to collect and concentrate them, and even more resources
to make them available on-demand. These are called the diluteness
problem and the intermittency problem.
The diluteness problem is that, unlike coal or oil, the sun and
the wind don’t deliver concentrated energy -- which means you need
a lot of additional materials to produce a unit of energy.
For solar power, such materials can include highly purified
silicon, phosphorus, boron, and a dozen other complex compounds
like titanium dioxide. All these materials have to be mined,
refined and/or manufactured in order to make solar panels. Those
industrial processes take a lot of energy.
For wind, needed materials include high-performance compounds
for turbine blades and the rare-earth metal neodymium for
lightweight, specialty magnets, as well as the steel and concrete
necessary to build structures -- thousands of them -- as tall as
skyscrapers.
And as big a problem as diluteness is, it’s nothing compared to
the intermittency problem. This isn’t exactly a news flash, but the
sun doesn’t shine all the time. And the wind doesn’t blow all the
time. The only way for solar and wind to be truly useful would be
if we could store them so that they would be available when we
needed them. You can store oil in a tank. Where do you store solar
or wind energy? No such mass-storage system exists. Which is
why, in the entire world, there is not one real or proposed
independent, freestanding solar or wind power plant. All of them
require backup. And guess what the go-to back-up is: fossil
fuel.
Here’s what solar and wind electricity look like in Germany,
which is the world’s leader in “renewables”. The word erratic leaps
to mind. Wind is constantly varying, sometimes disappearing
completely. And solar produces little in the winter months when
Germany most needs energy.
Therefore, some reliable source of energy is needed to do the
heavy lifting. In Germany’s case that energy is coal. So, while
Germany has spent tens of billions of dollars to subsidize
solar panels and windmills, fossil fuel use in that nation has not
decreased, it’s increased -- and less than 10% of their
total energy is generated by solar and wind.
Furthermore, switching back and forth between solar and wind and
coal to maintain a steady flow of energy is costly. Utility
bills for the average German have gone up so dramatically that
“energy poverty” has become a popular term to describe those who
cannot pay -- or who can barely pay -- their electricity bills.
If those bills one day go down, the reason will not be more
solar and wind energy, but lower oil and coal prices.
There’s no free lunch. And there’s no free energy. And that very
much includes the highly expensive energy from the sun and the
wind.
I’m Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress, for
Prager University.