"... Among the minority who deal in facts is Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. If you haven’t already, it is well worth while keying in to his presentation on February 9, 2021 to the U.S. House Energy Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change. Here’s just a taste:
- Building a single 100-MW wind farm requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of nonrecyclable plastics for the huge blades.
- A storage system to back-up such a wind farm would require using at least 10,000 tons of Tesla-class batteries.
- The tonnage in cement, steel, and glass is 150% greater for solar than for wind, for the same energy output.
- Under the scenarios for clean energy imagined by the World Bank, the 700 tons of neodymium currently mined would need to increase by between 1,000 and 4,000 percent. Indium by as much as 8000%. Cobalt by 300 to 800%. Lithium by more than 2,000%.
- The Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney, concluded last year that the supply of elements such as nickel, dysprosium, and tellurium will need to increase by 200 to 600%.
As Mills explains, while the minerals required are there, digging them up will be daunting and pricey. Count among the costs: environmental degradation; increased threats to the West’s national security in view of China’s dominance in many of the supply chains; the use of child labour in countries not so sensitive to human rights; the massive amounts of energy required to mine, transport and process these exotic minerals; and, the bottom line, the demise of reliable and affordable hydrocarbon power...Read all.
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