Renewable Energy Depends on Fossil Fuels

Wind turbines cannot be mated to make more wind turbines

Those championing the anti-fossil fuel movement are so clueless and blinded by green ideology that they either do not know or refuse to admit that fossil fuels are essential components of everything we depend on in modern life, not just gasoline.  Do they not understand that everything we eat, wear, live in, and use depends on fossil fuels?  Even commodities not directly derived from fossil fuels are transported by ships that burn heavy fuel oil, airplanes that burn jet fuel, and trucks that burn diesel or gasoline.

Fossil fuels are the basis of modern life.  Therefore, the idea of deliberately forcing up the price of gasoline to make people drive electric cars is absurd on its face and is an attack on modern life.  Such policies will cause human suffering, crash the economy, and ultimately fail.

More importantly, renewable energy sources are heavily dependent on fossil fuels.  Like all energy sources, so-called renewables such as wind and solar must be harvested with a machine built out of something.  For example, a wind turbine cannot be mated with another wind turbine to make baby wind turbines.  Hundreds of materials, all dependent on fossil fuels, must be mined, manufactured, and processed before being used to construct a wind turbine, and then the parts must be transported to the wind farm by trucks and assembled.

A standard General Electric 1.5-megawatt wind turbine stands 260 feet high, is made mainly of steel, and weighs 164 tons.  The giant blade assembly weighs more than 36 tons and is made of non-recyclable plastic.  Of course, plastic is made from natural gas and crude oil, and there are no substitutes (ask Lego which has been searching for a replacement for plastic unsuccessfully for years).   A completed wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel rebar and 2,500 tons of concrete.

The rotor is the critical component of wind turbines because that is where the shaft rotated by the wind converts that rotation to electricity.  A wind turbine uses about a ton of each of four rare minerals:  neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.  The largest source of these and other rare earth minerals is China.

All components of wind turbines must be transported to the wind farm.  Most of the components of wind turbines are manufactured in China. They are transported by ships to the U.S.  Ships burn diesel or bunker fuel, the bottom-of-the-oil-barrel gunky, dirty, and usually high sulfur oil, some of which is so thick that it must be heated to flow into the engines.  Burning this stuff produces significant air pollution. 

Once the ship docks in the U.S., the wind turbine parts are transferred to trains and trucks. Each wind turbine blade is 110 ft to 124 in length and weighs 11,500 pounds.  Many states require a lead truck with danger flags and a pole in the air to ensure that the wind turbine blade doesn’t hit an overpass and a following truck that displays danger flags to warn drivers about the dangerous convoy they have encountered.  This is for one blade.  A wind turbine has three blades, so the convoy of 9 trucks required to transport the blades for one wind turbine requires at least nine trucks, all of which burn diesel fuel.

Before the tower, blades and generator are installed, a very large and deep hole is dug with earth-moving equipment that all burn diesel fuel.  The hole is filled with reinforcing steel rebar before filling it with cement which, of course, has been mined with diesel-burning earth-moving equipment and processed in natural gas-fired kilns.

The point is that wind turbines are heavily dependent on fossil fuels and cannot exist without fossil fuels.  The notion that wind turbines can replace fossil fuels is absurd.  They depend on fossil fuels for their existence. 

With all this in mind, consider the plan currently being implemented, which is designed to force up the price of fossil fuels such as crude oil and natural gas to force a transition away from them.  If that plan was somehow successful, how would wind turbines be built?  They couldn’t.  Neither could solar panels, which are even more dependent on fossil fuels.

The current attempt to eliminate fossil fuels by limiting drilling permits and access to federal lands is lunacy.  Fossil fuels cannot be eliminated.  This plan will damage the economy and make life miserable until such policies are stopped and reversed.