Reality Bites Wind

It is an article of faith among many governments that we are in the midst of a transition from fossil fuel energy to “renewable” wind and solar. (Notably absent from this consensus are China, India and Russia.) In fact, no such transition is underway; wind and solar account for only a derisory portion of the world’s energy consumption, despite countless billions in subsidies. Nor will any such transition happen at any time in the future.

One of the fundamental problems with wind and solar is that they are ridiculously low-intensity. As a result, it requires a vast quantity of raw materials to produce a modest, and unreliable, amount of energy. Did you know that a single wind turbine requires 8,000 pounds or more of copper? Like me, you probably have no concept of what it takes to produce that quantity of copper, or of the vast amounts of fossil fuels that are needed to create just this one component of a wind turbine. Wind and solar installations are parasitic: they cannot be produced without using enormous quantities of fossil fuels.

This thread is one of the best explanations I have seen of the absurdity of wind turbines, as it relates to a single raw material: copper. Please read the whole thing, and bear in mind that copper is just one of a number of minerals that wind turbines and their mythical “batteries” require in enormous quantities. Cobalt and lithium are among the others.


I don’t suppose anyone has made a serious effort to compare the amount of energy needed to produce a wind turbine and its long transmission line–copper is just one of the many raw materials that are needed–with the amount of energy the turbine produces over its pitifully short lifetime.

A final thought: prices for commodities like copper and lithium are already skyrocketing. If Western governments continue in their mad obsession with “green” energy, those prices will be utterly out of sight. This means that every projection that anyone has made of the ultimate cost of a wind and solar economy is vastly too low. It also means that the cost of pretty much everything else we buy, from cars to cell phones and anything that requires equipment to produce, will also rise beyond the resources of the average consumer. No one has yet plumbed the depth of the disaster that awaits if we continue on our present course.

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