Limitations of Renewables and Second Thoughts About Their Future

Can a factory powered by renewable energy make renewable-energy items from start to finish?

The child in me often wants to simplify things. I’ve wondered about renewables. Could a solar farm make enough energy to make solar panels, their mounts and inverters? Could a wind-farm-powered factory make wind turbines, gearboxes and the poles they stand on?

And if they’re powered exclusively by renewable energy sources, can they do it as quickly, reliably and affordably as factories powered by conventional energy?

I’ve often wondered whether renewable energy, in its current forms, is the right path to take, or whether this is just another irresponsible knee-jerk reaction to fear. We’re scared of what the past may have done to the long-term future.

I know why we want to do it, and I understand the intention behind our reaction. We recognise that we’ve been dirty people and want to clean up our act. The water got dirty. The air became filthy. Ice caps are melting, and there aren’t enough trees. We’ve realised we’ve done a lousy job as Earth’s custodians, and we want to fix it.

So what do we do?

Our answer has been a simple one: switch from smoky energy generation to something without smoke. If we don’t see smoke, we believe we’ve made a positive change. But believing smokeless renewables will make the problem go away is foolish.

Renewables require many more stages to become renewables. Raw materials have to be brought from various locations, altered and fused together in ways that make them productive. And to do that, we’ve got to use more energy.

Put a pin in that.

It’s okay to burn more energy if what comes out is a long-lasting alternative. We want the word renewable to mean something more than a brand name or a catchphrase.

Solar renewables are a twenty-year renewable electricity resource. Some folks are now on their second generation of solar panels, with their first dumped into landfill. Twenty years isn’t exactly acceptable for something that’s supposed to last longer than the former way electricity was generated.

Wind farms sound nice, too. They have a thirty-year lifespan—half that of coal-fired power stations. They use thousands of hectares of land to produce a small portion of a community’s total electricity needs, and only on windy days.

To me, the mathematics are off; things are wrong, skewed by the lens of commercial optimism and environmental fear.

As I said, I get the intention. It’s our method that needs revising. Have we led ourselves toward a place that’s worse off than where we already were?

Coal, gas and oil come out of the ground ready to use. We don’t have to do much to them except transport them to the generator’s location to get the electricity we need.

Mother Nature put billions of years of energy into making coal, gas and oil, and we simply tap into it.

A solar panel or a wind turbine doesn’t come out of the ground ready to do its work. It comes as independent minerals from different places. We truck them to sites where we inject copious amounts of electricity to shape them into their familiar forms. We truck the finished products to their final locations, hoping they’ll last long.

Ergo, renew-ables.

My solar panels came from China. There’s a good chance the raw materials, silicon and aluminium, came from my country. There’s a 70% chance my country’s coal-fired machinery powered the Chinese generator that powered the factory that made those panels. I didn’t see the smoke my panels created, so they’re essentially greenwashed before landing on my doorstep. No harm, no foul.

sarcasm inbound

I’m producing clean, green, smokeless electricity from my own roof, like many of my fellow eco-aware citizens. I feel good about it.

sarcasm ends

And then there’s the serious second half of the equation. When renewables reach their end of life, what happens to them?

Recycling renewables isn’t a high priority, so most of them end up in landfill. Rechargeable batteries contain substances that are more toxic to the environment than nuclear waste. If their compounds reach our water and food sources, we’re doomed.

I understand why we want to change the world, but save the planet? How do we save ourselves from going down another rabbit hole of ignorance?

It doesn’t take a super-scientist to see that an energy deficit exists, and unless those renewables last hundreds of years at a time, we’re solving one problem by creating another.

Here’s a humorous social media image that’s been circulating that shows some of what I’m talking about.

It’s not entirely correct, as the van is diesel-powered and the generator is actually a battery bank. But you get the idea.

We mostly blame big business for the source of climate-related problems, but they are only part of it. Everyday people like you and me call for that energy and make up the demand component. They make it because we need it. Our hospitals, schools, commerce and industry call for it. Every one of us plugs into the electrical network. None of us thinks to disconnect and go without. We do the exact opposite. We buy more devices, and demand even more electricity. It’s as much an us problem as anyone else’s.

It needs a new community-wide mindset to start the process. It requires a new energy source to beat the system. With neither on the horizon, we’re destined to chase this line of action until we reach a point where we realise we’ve done it wrong.

If we halved our population and doubled our green canopy, we might put part of the problem on pause. Instead, we believe plugging a vehicle into an electrical socket will right the wrongs.

With luck, we’ll stop that nonsense soon. Perhaps we’ll go beyond our collective ego and set a standard for our species’ existence. Instead of thinking we’re the top brain at the top of a food chain, we’ll come to learn that we’re a single link in a very long circular one. We can’t manage every link, so we’ll stick to managing our own. It’s about time we found our proper place and learned to stay within boundaries, our limitations. I’d hate to think we started yet another brilliant idea, loaded with good intentions and great virtues, only to create a brand new problem for future generations to deal with.

We’ve been wrong before, many times.

—Michael