Danish author: The myths of renewable energies

 Danish author Björn Lomborg of think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center considers renewable energies an eyewash. Neither are they low in price nor do they contribute to halt the climate change. He develops some interesting arguments in german newspaper WELT:

Are Renewable Energies Competitive? We hear constantly that wind and solar energy are conquering the world. They are free and - we are told - cheaper than fossil fuels. But why is Germany spending 18 billion euros this year on subsidizing solar and wind energy? In the current discussion about renewable energy, a little is actually true and a lot is misleading.

Technically speaking, it's true that an extra kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by the cheapest and most effective new wind and solar systems is cheaper than fossil fuels. In Germany, according to the Fraunhofer Institute, these best-case technologies generate an average of one kilowatt hour of electricity for 5.2 cents for solar and 6.1 cents for wind energy. Compared to the average price of a new lignite power station that produces a kilowatt hour for 6.3 cents, it seems absolutely logical to build more and more wind and solar systems.

The dirty drawbacks of supposedly "clean" renewable energy

Interesting angle by Jason Hickel in Foreign Policy: 

"The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs."

 (...)

"In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions—and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron."

(...)

"The problem here is not that we’re going to run out of key minerals—although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of overextraction. Mining has become one of the biggest single drivers of deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss around the world. Ecologists estimate that even at present rates of global material use, we are overshooting sustainable levels by 82 percent."

You can read the rest of this interesting piece via the below link:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/06/the-path-to-clean-energy-will-be-very-dirty-climate-change-renewables/