Clean, affordable, and reliable energy is the goal everyone wants, or so the proponents of "renewables" like wind and solar energy loudly proclaim at every opportunity. The problem is, the solutions that climate scolds come up with are not affordable, they are not reliable, and when you take all of the factors into account - production of the systems and disposing of them when they reach the end of their useful lives - they are not clean.
And that's where it gets interesting. Nuclear power is clean, and with improving reactor technologies will become more so - but permitting and regulatory issues jack up the cost. But now, two new studies are showing that, for electrical generation, as ClimateRealism's James Taylor points out, the champion remains natural gas.
Policymakers on both sides of the political aisle increasingly advocate for affordable, reliable, and clean energy. This is for good reason – modern society requires energy that is affordable and available on demand. Environmental concerns are also very important. Together, affordability, reliability, and cleanliness form the three pillars of ideal energy policy.
Two new analyses evaluate competing electrical power sources and produce an affordable, reliable, and clean scorecard. The two analyses – one published by Northwood University and the Mackinac Center, and the other published by my public policy organization, The Heartland Institute – independently reach near-identical findings.
A look at the Mackinac Center's analysis of the environmental impact of wind and solar power is telling; on wind, that study reports:
Wind energy has large environmental impacts from the need to rapidly expand mining to source critical or transition minerals, to its need for backup generation or battery sources, to its immense requirement for land, to visual impacts, to a growing list of impacts on wildlife.
And on solar power:
Like wind, solar energy has large environmental impacts from the need to rapidly expand mining to source critical or transition minerals, to its need for backup generation or battery source, to its immense requirement for land, to visual impacts, to a growing list of impacts on wildlife. Most importantly, solar manufacturing in China is stained by the use of “forced labor” (slavery).
The opprobrium for the preferences of the climate scolds just keeps piling up.
See Also: CO2 Is Greening the Earth, and That's a Good Thing
Wind Power May Be Putting Eagles at Risk of Extinction
So natural gas is, at the moment, the most affordable and reliable energy source. As of December 2022, the United States has 691 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of recoverable natural gas, minimum.
Of course, the cost factor for wind and solar is hidden, in part, behind a wall of subsidies. The Obama and Biden administrations were both overly fond of these subsidies, beginning with President Obama's pompous pronouncements about sea levels beginning to fall. That's another issue; not only is it not the legitimate role of government to pick winners and losers in the energy markets, but there is also no constitutional authorization for the federal government to do what they have been doing in energy markets - namely, addling the relative costs of "renewables" with a long-handled spoon.
Mr. Taylor also points out:
Taking all the above factors into account, a peer-reviewed analysis of full-system levelized costs of competing power sources shows wind power is seven times more expensive than natural gas power and solar power is 10 times more expensive. That explains why most of the world – and nearly all the developing world – is building natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plants rather than wind and solar power facilities.
7 and 10 times more expensive, in addition to being less reliable, intermittent, and damaging to the environment - you know, that environment that the climate scolds almost never live in or even see, although they constantly proclaim their undying concern for "the environment" at the cost of those of us who live out in the environment - or, as we call it, the country.
This, folks, is why the climate scolds, like the animal rights nuts before them, are slowly fading away. The more serious work that is done analyzing the facts behind the generation alternatives, the more the costs are analyzed, the more the realities come to light, the poorer the arguments of the climate scolds become. And, as happened with the animal rights nuts, it comes to light that their solutions are actually more harmful than the problems they perceive.
Rest assured, as these facts and figures come more and more into the light of day, we'll continue to report them here; sunlight is, after all, the best disinfectant.
