Pseudo-green energy will
wreak devastation, pretending to prevent exaggerated climate harm
Paul Driessen
“We had to destroy the
village in order to save it.” The infamous Vietnam
era quotation may or may not have been uttered by an anonymous US Army
major. It may have been misquoted, revised, apocryphal or invented. But it
quickly morphed into an anti-war mantra that reflected attitudes of the time.
For Virginians and others
forced to travel the path of “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy, it will
redound in modern politics as “We had to destroy the environment in order to
save it.”
Weeks after Governor Ralph
Northam signed Virginia’s “Clean Economy Act,” which had been rushed through a
partisan Democrat legislature, Dominion Energy Virginia announced it would
reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To do so, the utility
company will raise family, business, hospital and school electricity
bills by 3% every year for the next ten years – as these customers and state
and local governments struggle to climb out of the financial
holes created by the ongoing Coronavirus
lockdown.
Just as bad, renewable
energy mandates and commitments from the new law and Dominion’s “integrated
resource plan” will have major adverse impacts on Virginia and world
environmental values. In reality, Virginia’s new “clean” economy exists only in
fantasy land – and only if we ignore “clean” energy CO2 emissions, air and
water pollution, and other environmental degradation around the world.
Dominion
Energy plans to expand the state’s offshore wind, onshore solar and battery
storage capacity by some 24,000 megawatts of new “renewable” energy by 2035,
and far more after that. It will retain just 9,700 MW of existing natural gas
generation, and only through 2045, build no new gas-fired units, and retire
6,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation. This will reduce in-state carbon
dioxide emissions, but certainly won’t do so globally. The company intends to
keep its four existing nuclear units operating.
To “replace” some of its
abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel electricity, Dominion intends to
build at least 31,400 megawatts of expensive, unreliable solar capacity by 2045.
The company estimates that will require a land area some 25% larger than 250,000-acre
Fairfax County, west of Washington, DC. That means Dominion Energy’s new solar
facilities will blanket 490 square miles (313,000 acres) of beautiful croplands,
scenic areas and habitats that now teem with wildlife.
That’s almost half the
land area of Rhode Island, eight times the District of Columbia, 14 times more
land than all Fairfax County parks combined – blanketed by imported solar
panels. Still more land will be torn up for access roads and new transmission
lines. All this is just for Dominion Energy’s solar panels.
The panels will actually
generate electricity maybe 20-25% of the year, once you factor in nighttime
hours, cloudy days, and times when the sun is not bright enough to generate
more than trifling electricity.
Dominion and other
Virginia utility companies also plan to import and install 430 monstrous
850-foot-tall bird-chopping offshore wind turbines – and tens of thousands of
half-ton battery packs, to provide backup power for at least a few hours or
days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The batteries will
prevent the economy from shutting down even more completely during each outage than
it has during the Corona lockdown. Similar policies across America will impact hundreds
of millions of acres.
Most of these solar
panels, wind turbines and batteries – or their components, or the metals and
minerals required to manufacture those components – will likely come from China
or from Chinese-owned operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America ... under
mining, air and water pollution, workplace safety, fair wage, child labor,
mined land reclamation, manufacturing and other laws and standards that would
get US and other Western companies unmasked, vilified, sued, fined and shut
down in a heartbeat.
It is those minimal to
nonexistent laws and regulations that govern most of the companies and
operations that will supply the “clean” technologies that will soon blight
Virginia landscapes and serve the new “clean” Virginia economy. As Michael
Moore observes in his new film, Planet
of the Humans, other states that opt for “clean” energy will face the same
realities.
Thus far, no one has
produced even a rough estimate of how much concrete, steel, aluminum, copper,
lithium, cobalt, silica, rare
earth metals and countless other materials will be needed. All will require
gigantic heavy equipment and prodigious amounts of fossil fuels to blast and haul away billions of tons of rocky
overburden; extract, crush and process tens of millions of tons of ores, using
acids, toxic chemicals and other means to refine the ores; smelt concentrates
into metals; manufacture all the millions of tons of components; and haul,
assemble and install the panels, turbines, batteries and transmission lines, setting
them on top of tens of thousands of tons of concrete and rebar. All of it
beyond Virginia’s borders.
No one has tallied the
oil, natural gas and coal fuel requirements for doing all this “Virginia Clean
Economy” work – nor the greenhouse gases and actual pollutants that will be emitted
in the process.
Nothing about this is
clean, green, renewable
or sustainable. But Virginia politicians and Dominion Energy officials have
said nothing about any of this, nor about which countries will host the mining
and other activities, under what environmental
and human rights standards.
Will Virginians ever get a
full accounting? Just because all of this will happen far beyond Virginia’s
borders does not mean we can ignore the global environmental impacts. Or the
health, safety and well-being of children and parents in those distant mines,
processing plants and factories.
This is the perfect time
to observe the environmentalist creed: think globally, act locally. Will that
be done?
Will Dominion and Virginia
require that all these raw materials and wind, solar and battery components be responsibly sourced? Will it require
independently verified certifications that none of them involve child labor,
and all are produced in compliance with US and Virginia laws, regulations and ethical
codes for workplace safety, fair wages, air and water pollution, wildlife
preservation, cancer prevention and mined lands reclamation? Will they tally up
all the fossil fuels consumed, and pollutants emitted, in the process?
Science journalist,
businessman and parliamentarian Matt Ridley says wind turbines need some 200 times more
raw materials per megawatt of power than modern combined-cycle gas
turbines. It’s probably much the same for solar panels. Add in the millions of
wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of backup batteries that
would be required under a nationwide Green New Deal, and the combined US and
global environmental, human health and human rights impacts become absolutely mindboggling.
If you ignore all the land
and wildlife impacts from installing the wind turbines, solar panels,
batteries and transmission lines – you could perhaps call this “clean energy”
and a “clean economy” within Virginia’s
borders. But not beyond those borders. This is a global issue, and the world would likely be far better off if we
just built modern combined-cycle gas turbines (or nuclear power plants) to
generate reliable electricity – and avoided all the monumental human and
ecological impacts of pseudo-renewable energy.
When it’s time to select
sites for these 490 square miles of industrial solar facilities, will Virginia,
its county and local governments, its citizens, environmentalist groups and
courts apply the same rigorous standards, laws and regulations that they demand
for drilling, fracking, coal and gas power plants, pipelines, highways, timber
cutting and other projects? Will they apply the same standards for 850-foot-tall
wind turbines and 100-foot-tall transmission lines as they demand for
buried-out-of-sight pipelines?
Virginia’s Clean Economy
Act will also plunge almost every project and jurisdiction into questions of race,
poverty and environmental justice. Dominion Energy and other utility companies
will have to charge means-tested rates (even as rates climb 3% per year) and exempt
low-income customers from some charges. They will have to submit construction
plans to “environmental justice councils” – even as the companies, councils and
politicians ignore the rampant injustices inflicted on children and parents
slaving away in Chinese, African and Latin American “clean energy” mines,
processing plants and factories.
Government officials, utility
industry executives, environmentalists and anyone else who promotes wind,
solar, battery and biofuel energy need to explain exactly how they plan to address
these issues. Future town hall meetings and project approval hearings promise
to be raucous, entertaining and illuminating.
Paul Driessen is senior
policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles
on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
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