The entire thing is a long read but read it you must. Here’s some of what you’ll learn and this is just from the executive summary.
- $1 million invested in green energy only produces 50 million kWh over 30 years while $1 million invested in fossil fuel produces 300 million kWh over 30 years.
- Solar and wind are approaching their limits of efficiency and the gains made in the coming years won’t be enough to make a difference.
- 1,000 years of production from Tesla’s Gigafactory (at its current capacity) could only make enough batteries for 2 days worth of U.S. electricity demand.
This is enlightening to know how efficient our current systems are as compared to “green” technologies. So-called “green” technologies are not really green to begin with. All the energy, chemicals, and heavy metals that are required for the technology are likely more harmful than the environment the technology is supposed to save.
This “new energy economy” rests on the belief—a centerpiece of the Green New Deal and other similar proposals both here and in Europe—that the technologies of wind and solar power and battery storage are undergoing the kind of disruption experienced in computing and communications, dramatically lowering costs and increasing efficiency. But this core analogy glosses over profound differences, grounded in physics, between systems that produce energy and those that produce information.
Manhattan Institute
In the world of people, cars, planes, and factories, increases in consumption, speed, or carrying capacity cause hardware to expand, not shrink. The energy needed to move a ton of people, heat a ton of steel or silicon, or grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature whose boundaries are set by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, and thermodynamics—not clever software.