It was the week of Valentine’s Day 2021 when temperatures in Texas fell below zero. Unfortunately — due to State subsidies of $19 billion since 2006 — 25% of energy in Texas was provided by renewables. During the Valentine’s Week Storm, the provision of energy provided by renewables fell to 8%, while at one point it reached a deathly low of 1.5%.
The cause of this energy debacle, i.e., renewable energy will only work “when the weather cooperates, but it’s useless when it doesn’t — like when it conjures up a giant snowstorm.” As Jason Isaac explains, “Solar panels don’t capture sunlight and wind turbines don’t spin when covered in snow and ice.” Because of these subsidies for renewables or rather, unreliable energy sources, over a five-day period, “four million Texans lost power . . . Hundreds died, including an eleven-year-old boy who froze to death in his sleep.”
Now that we know what renewables — Wind Turbines and Solar farms — are NOT good for, i.e., renewables are not reliable energy sources when the weather does not cooperate, here’s what they are good for...
According to Michael Schellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress and author of Apocalypse Never, for Prager University:
“Industrial wind turbines—those giant generators of wind power—are the greatest new threat to golden and bald eagles. But the eagles are hardly the only ones threatened. Condors, owls, hawks, and falcons all fall prey to the turbines’ mighty blades.” “Big Wind—and believe me, there’s a Big Wind industry now, just like there’s Big Oil and Big Pharma—claims that house cats kill more birds than wind turbines. That’s true. But whereas cats kill small, common birds like sparrows, wind turbines kill big, threatened- with-extinction and slow-to-reproduce species like bald eagles and condors.” “Indeed, industrial wind farms are killing fields for birds. The more turbines you put up, the more birds you’re going to slaughter.”
Schellenberger states that solar farms “produce an entirely different set of problems, although they are also very harmful for birds.” Case in Point: The solar arrays produce heat up to 900 degrees and when birds fly over them, the birds “simply burn up.”
The construction of a solar farm is like any other kind of huge industrial park where you must clear the entire area of wildlife. “For example, in order to construct the Ivanpah solar farm in California,” as described by Schellenberger, “developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows. The tortoises were then loaded on the back of pickup trucks and caged in pens where many ended up dying.”
Another problem with solar farms is the millions of gallons of water needed to clean the mirrors and to generate power. “Since most solar farms are built in the desert,” water is a “precious resource already in short supply.” As professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas has stated, “When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy.”
And, what pray-tell do they do with the solar panels when they wear out? The solar panels are filled with lead and other toxic chemicals and because it is much less expensive to buy the raw materials, the worn-out solar panels are not recycled and end up in landfills; “or, as the New York Times discovered in a 2019 investigation, dumped in poor African nations.”
According to Schellenberger,
“Wind turbines may have an even worse disposal problem than solar panels. First, they are gigantic—a single blade can be longer than a wing on a jumbo jet. Second, they are made of fiberglass, which has to be cut by a diamond studded saw to be carted away on giant trucks. And, as with solar panels, the only thing to do is bury them, toxic materials and all. This is done, as you can imagine, in enormous pits, creating yet another landfill problem.”
“All this environmental degradation is happening on a relatively small scale right now because we get less than ten percent of our electricity from wind and solar sources. If we really were to embark on a wind and solar buildout of the kind environmentalists advocate, the damage would be much, much greater.”
“Consider this: Today’s energy system requires just a half a percent of the land in the US. If we were to get all the energy we now use from wind and solar, at least 25% of all land in the US would be required.”
“That’s a lot of dead wildlife. Doesn’t sound very green, does it?”
As Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, opines, “Then there’s the waste. Wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries have a relatively short life—about twenty years. . . Putting aside the economics [which make no sense], if your motive is to protect the environment, you might want to rethink wind, solar, and batteries because, like all machines, they’re built from nonrenewable materials.”
So, what are wind turbines and solar farms good for... Really, absolutely nothing... Not good for us, humans; not good for birds and animals; and, definitely not good for the environment. Looks like it’s time to DRILL down for the answers! Stop Government meddling and subsidies, allowing the free market to find real solutions for our environment and energy needs.
Dum Spiro Spero—While I breathe, I hope.
Slainte mhath,
Robert G. Beard Jr., C.P.A., C.G.M.A., J.D., LL.M.