Debunking "Renewables"

What a misnomer

There’s nothing renewable about the industrial sized wind and solar “farms” or their massive backup batteries, or EV batteries, and they’re far from “free”. A look at the real costs, some of which are hard to quantify, but are nevertheless real.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the actual economics of the overall costs of wind and solar ‘farms’, grid size batteries, battery-powered vehicles, and charging stations knows that every dollar spent on these things has been wasted.

The money has been wasted because we’re not better off; we’re worse off. Our electric bills are zooming up, and our electric power grid is less reliable. Our landscapes and views are despoiled, our flora and fauna are endangered, our eagles and whales are being killed. Our fisheries and those who make their living from them are hurt. Our farmland is shrinking and the cost of food is soaring.

The mining of lithium, rare earth minerals, copper and cobalt, ironically with huge diesel-driven vehicles has become a big industry that tears up thousands of tons of earth in faraway lands. In some mining operations slave labor is used, and some workers are exposed to toxins.

The cost of a new car has gotten out of reach for many of us, yet the auto business is on the skids even with the high prices and subsidies. Many of the big car companies have lost as much on EVs as they make on conventional cars, wiping out their profits.

Landfills are beginning to fill up with tons and tons of waste from damaged or obsolete solar panels and 20 ton wind turbine blades. And it’s only just beginning – it will get much worse because none of the wind farms, solar farms, grid batteries, or EV car batteries last more than a couple decades, three at the most.

Lithium battery fires have destroyed billions of dollars worth of property and some people have been killed. The fires are so hot they’re nearly impossible to put out, certainly not with conventional methods, and the fumes are so toxic that areas downwind of lithium fires need to be evacuated. The fires are unpredictable; they can start spontaneously for no apparent reason.

Car insurance has gone up because of the risk of EV fires. Tow companies don’t want to haul EVs that were on fire – the fires can start up again after they appear to be out. Parking garages, shipping and hauling companies are justifiably wary of them – one EV started a fire that couldn’t be put out and it sunk a ship loaded with thousands of cars.

Our power grid infrastructure is under tremendous strain because most of the solar and wind farms are far from urban centers, so new substations and transmission lines need to be built.

All for what? The effect of all this on global CO2 emissions is negligible. As for global warming after all this, we’re talking about less than 1 degree of difference in average temperatures. Besides, the whole premise of global warming being an “existential threat” is based on fake science.

Just think how much better off we’d be if all those billions and billions of dollars of both private and public money were spent on making our power grid more reliable, with time-proven coal, gas, hydro, and nuclear power plants, and new plants being built as needed. Money also needs to be spent by power companies to upgrade our existing transmission lines and switches and transformers, instead of wasting money on “renewables”.

Instead, our steady, 24/7 reliable power plants are made artificially unprofitable by subsidized competition from intermittent power that temporarily lowers the wholesale price of electricity during temporary sunny or windy periods, to the point where the reliable plants have to be turned on and off rather than running continually. That is not the way to get highest and best use out of any system.

Who benefits?

The wind and solar companies who make profits because of the subsidies.

This is my non-technical summary of where we’re at. But there are plenty of experts I can recommend if you want to dig deeper for technical documentation. Go to Thomas Shepstone’s Energy Security and Freedom, Robert Bryce, EnergyBadBoys, EnvironMental, Energy News Beat, TucosChild, Energy IQ, Azra Dale, David Blackman’s substack, EnergyMusings, and Irina Slav.