22 questions for solar PV explorers  

1. Do you agree with Herman Daly’s principles—don’t take from the Earth faster than it can replenish, and don’t waste faster than it can absorb?
2. Should solar PV evaluations recognize the extractions, water, wood, fossil fuels and intercontinental shipping involved in manufacturing solar PV systems?
3. How should a manufacturer prove that slave laborers did not make any part of its solar PV system?
4. Should evaluations of solar PVs’ ecological impacts include impacts from chemicals leached during PVs’ manufacture?
5. Before it became a solar PV facility, what happened on this land? Was it acquired by eminent domain?
6. Should evaluations assess the ecological impacts of spraying large-scale solar facilities’ land with herbicides to kill vegetation that could dry and catch fire?
7. Does your fire department have a plan for responding to a large-scale solar facility fire on a sunny day—when solar-generated electricity cannot be turned off?
8. Since utilities can’t shut off rooftop solar’s power generation on a sunny day, firefighters will not enter the building: they could be electrocuted. Meanwhile, every solar panel deployed on a rooftop increases a building’s electrical connections and fire hazards. How/can your fire department protect buildings with rooftop solar?
9. Solar panels are coated with PFAs in four places. Panels cracked during hailstorms can leach chemicals into groundwater. Who will monitor and mitigate the chemicals leached onto land under solar panels?
10. To keep clean and efficient, solar panels require cleaning. Per month, how much water will the solar PV facility near you require?
11. Covering land with paved roads, parking lots, shopping malls, data centers…and large solar facilities…disrupts healthy water cycling and soil structure. Should evaluations assess the impact of these losses? How/can you restore healthy water cycling and soil structure?
12. Since solar PVs generate power only when the sun shines—but electricity users expect its availability 24/7—such customers require backup from the fossil-fuel-powered grid or from highly toxic batteries. Should marketers stop calling solar PVs “renewable,” “green,” “clean,” “sustainable” and “carbon neutral?
13. Inverters convert the direct current (DC) electricity generated by solar panels to alternating current (AC)—the kind of electricity used by most buildings, electronics and appliances. (Boats and RVs do not connect to the grid; they use DC—batteries—to power their appliances.) Inverters “chop” the electric current on building wires, generating a kind of radiation. What are the hazards of such radiation? How/can you mitigate it?
14. At their end-of-usable-life, solar PVs are hazardous waste. Who pays the ecological costs to dispose of them?
15. Who pays the financial bill to dispose of solar PV systems at their end-of-usable-life? If you’ve got a large-scale solar facility, did your county commissioners require the corporation to post a bond so that if/when it goes bankrupt, your county doesn’t pay that financial bill?
16. After a solar facility’s waste has been removed, how/will the land be restored?
17. From cradles-to-graves, who is qualified to evaluate solar PVs’ ecological soundness? Should the expert carry liability for their evaluation? Should consumers require a cradle-to-grave evaluation from a liability-carrying expert before purchasing a solar PV system?
18. Do solar PVs contribute to overshoot—using water, ores and other materials faster than the Earth can replenish them?
19. If overshoot is a primary problem, and climate change, loss of wildlife species and pollution are consequences of overshoot, do we change our expectations of electric power, devices, appliances and the Internet?
20. Can you name five unsustainable expectations about electric power?
21. Can you name five sustainable expectations about electric power?
22. In your region (defined by your watershed), who knows how to live sustainably?

RELATED NEWS

U.S. subsidies of semiconductor and green energy manufacturers could reach $1 trillion.

When it opened in 2014, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Mojave Desert was the world’s largest solar thermal power station. Read about its daily consumption of natural gas, the subsidies it used to fund its $2.2 billion cost, its devastation of 3500 acres of desert habitat, its fire, and annual production of electricity.

End-of-life-e-waste (including from solar panels) poisons Ghana, Malaysia and Thailand —and harms children who scour junkyards for food and schooling money. Actual end-of-life-e-waste rises five times faster than documented e-waste. Of course, the vast majority of e-waste occurs during manufacturing (mining, smelting, refining, “doping” of chemicals, intercontinental shipping of raw materials, etc.).

            The new Just Transition Litigation Tracking Tool from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has documented, up to 31 May 2024, 60 legal cases launched around the world by Indigenous Peoples, other communities and workers harmed by “renewable” supply chains. Cases brought against states and/or the private sector in transition mineral mining and solar, wind and hydropower sectors challenge environmental abuses(77% of tracked cases), water pollution and/or access to water (80%), and abuse of Indigenous Peoples’ rights (55%), particularly the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent(FPIC – 35% of cases). These cases should warn companies and investors that expensive, time-consuming litigation can quickly eat up the benefits of such short-cuts.

NOTE TO EDITORS: I tried to post the image I’ve got under “Featured Image,” but I did not get the option to “paste.” So, voila: Please note, I’ve added a caption: Who calls this clean?

https://img.freepik.com/free-photo/electric-farm-with-panels-producing-clean-ecologic-energy_169016-17982.jpg?w=996&t=st=1725380794~exp=1725381394~hmac=da345c6a06bc139856a1cb4c75b98335788d804c1b2085957ad7f1c2ca1d9a45

Who calls this clean?

22 questions for solar PV explorers  

1. Do you agree with Herman Daly’s principles—don’t take from the Earth faster than it can replenish, and don’t waste faster than it can absorb?
2. Should solar PV evaluations recognize the extractions, water, wood, fossil fuels and intercontinental shipping involved in manufacturing solar PV systems?
3. How should a manufacturer prove that slave laborers did not make any part of its solar PV system?
4. Should evaluations of solar PVs’ ecological impacts include impacts from chemicals leached during PVs’ manufacture?
5. Before it became a solar PV facility, what happened on this land? Was it acquired by eminent domain?
6. Should evaluations assess the ecological impacts of spraying large-scale solar facilities’ land with herbicides to kill vegetation that could dry and catch fire?
7. Does your fire department have a plan for responding to a large-scale solar facility fire on a sunny day—when solar-generated electricity cannot be turned off?
8. Since utilities can’t shut off rooftop solar’s power generation on a sunny day, firefighters will not enter the building: they could be electrocuted. Meanwhile, every solar panel deployed on a rooftop increases a building’s electrical connections and fire hazards. How/can your fire department protect buildings with rooftop solar?
9. Solar panels are coated with PFAs in four places. Panels cracked during hailstorms can leach chemicals into groundwater. Who will monitor and mitigate the chemicals leached onto land under solar panels?
10. To keep clean and efficient, solar panels require cleaning. Per month, how much water will the solar PV facility near you require?
11. Covering land with paved roads, parking lots, shopping malls, data centers…and large solar facilities…disrupts healthy water cycling and soil structure. Should evaluations assess the impact of these losses? How/can you restore healthy water cycling and soil structure?
12. Since solar PVs generate power only when the sun shines—but electricity users expect its availability 24/7—such customers require backup from the fossil-fuel-powered grid or from highly toxic batteries. Should marketers stop calling solar PVs “renewable,” “green,” “clean,” “sustainable” and “carbon neutral?
13. Inverters convert the direct current (DC) electricity generated by solar panels to alternating current (AC)—the kind of electricity used by most buildings, electronics and appliances. (Boats and RVs do not connect to the grid; they use DC—batteries—to power their appliances.) Inverters “chop” the electric current on building wires, generating a kind of radiation. What are the hazards of such radiation? How/can you mitigate it?
14. At their end-of-usable-life, solar PVs are hazardous waste. Who pays the ecological costs to dispose of them?
15. Who pays the financial bill to dispose of solar PV systems at their end-of-usable-life? If you’ve got a large-scale solar facility, did your county commissioners require the corporation to post a bond so that if/when it goes bankrupt, your county doesn’t pay that financial bill?
16. After a solar facility’s waste has been removed, how/will the land be restored?
17. From cradles-to-graves, who is qualified to evaluate solar PVs’ ecological soundness? Should the expert carry liability for their evaluation? Should consumers require a cradle-to-grave evaluation from a liability-carrying expert before purchasing a solar PV system?
18. Do solar PVs contribute to overshoot—using water, ores and other materials faster than the Earth can replenish them?
19. If overshoot is a primary problem, and climate change, loss of wildlife species and pollution are consequences of overshoot, do we change our expectations of electric power, devices, appliances and the Internet?
20. Can you name five unsustainable expectations about electric power?
21. Can you name five sustainable expectations about electric power?
22. In your region (defined by your watershed), who knows how to live sustainably?

RELATED NEWS

U.S. subsidies of semiconductor and green energy manufacturers could reach $1 trillion.

When it opened in 2014, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Mojave Desert was the world’s largest solar thermal power station. Read about its daily consumption of natural gas, the subsidies it used to fund its $2.2 billion cost, its devastation of 3500 acres of desert habitat, its fire, and annual production of electricity.

End-of-life-e-waste (including from solar panels) poisons Ghana, Malaysia and Thailand —and harms children who scour junkyards for food and schooling money. Actual end-of-life-e-waste rises five times faster than documented e-waste. Of course, the vast majority of e-waste occurs during manufacturing (mining, smelting, refining, “doping” of chemicals, intercontinental shipping of raw materials, etc.).

            The new Just Transition Litigation Tracking Tool from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has documented, up to 31 May 2024, 60 legal cases launched around the world by Indigenous Peoples, other communities and workers harmed by “renewable” supply chains. Cases brought against states and/or the private sector in transition mineral mining and solar, wind and hydropower sectors challenge environmental abuses(77% of tracked cases), water pollution and/or access to water (80%), and abuse of Indigenous Peoples’ rights (55%), particularly the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent(FPIC – 35% of cases). These cases should warn companies and investors that expensive, time-consuming litigation can quickly eat up the benefits of such short-cuts.

NOTE TO EDITORS: I tried to post the image I’ve got under “Featured Image,” but I did not get the option to “paste.” So, voila: Please note, I’ve added a caption: Who calls this clean?

https://img.freepik.com/free-photo/electric-farm-with-panels-producing-clean-ecologic-energy_169016-17982.jpg?w=996&t=st=1725380794~exp=1725381394~hmac=da345c6a06bc139856a1cb4c75b98335788d804c1b2085957ad7f1c2ca1d9a45

Who calls this clean?

by Katie Singer

In the event that a developer wants to install a utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) facility near you, consider yourself blessed with opportunities. You can shake up your assumptions about “clean, green” energy. You can learn how to present the technology’s not-so-sunny sides so that neighbors and legislators who believe that solar PVs cannot possibly have problems…actually hear you.

With humility, you can insist that the developer and your county’s planning department show you a professional engineer’s report certifying that all of the project’s hazards are mitigated.

Honestly, you might rather plant turnips or watch your child’s ballgame, but you should learn where this solar facility’s generated power will go, and if the array will connect to the grid.

If health and safety matter more to you than money—and you can suspend belief that solar PVs are renewable, safe and problem-free, proceed to Step 2: Get legal advice so that your county permits the facility only if your conditions are met.

Installation

Insist that the developer use only raw materials sourced from companies that can verify worker and environmental protections.

From installation to “decommissioning,” the developer must carry liability insurance for the project—not self-insure.

How much water will the developer use during construction? Where will it come from? Where will wastewater go? To protect groundwater, will used construction water need treatment?

The developer must keep all soil on the site. Only 400 acres (say) of land can be disturbed at a time to prevent stormwater runoff. (A big rain after a clear-cut would result in disaster.) After clearing an area (i.e., of shrubs or trees) the developer must plant grass within X number of days in order to hold soil and prevent sediment run-off. The developer must set up stormwater basins.

Your county staff, planning commissioners (if so equipped) and board of supervisors will have to evaluate against their ordinance about stormwater runoff and sediment in waterways—and/or land use issues specific to your topography.

Operations

Panels hold chemicals, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs). In a hailstorm (say), panels can crack. Your county can require monthly soil testing in specified locations to ensure that no chemicals leak into the soil. If chemicals leach into soil, what will the developer do?

Solar panels are electrical equipment. All electrical equipment poses fire hazards. To reduce risk of fire, your county can specify how long grass (or other vegetation) can get before it must be cut.

If a fire does occur during the day, the solar panels will not stop collecting sunlight and converting it into electricity: you cannot de-energize solar panels. Firefighters cannot spray burning panels with water—because water conducts electricity, and water will not put out a solar panel fire. It can only cool it. At a public hearing in Spotsylvania, Virginia, the county’s fire chief said he would not try to extinguish a solar PV fire. He would just hose down everything near it. In the event that the array catches fire, what is your county fire chief’s plan?

If the project includes a battery electric storage system (BESS)

Batteries provide high energy storage. One BESS battery can be the size of a small trailer. If you get a short and a discharge, you end up with arcing and extremely dangerous, toxic fires. (At a BESS in Moss Landing, California, one battery caught fire on September 20, 2022. Nearby residents were not allowed to leave their homes, open their windows or run ventilation systems for nearly 24 hours. Roads and businesses were closed. This BESS was designed and maintained by PG&E and Tesla; the September 20 fire was the plant’s third fire since it opened in April, 2022.)

For a data base of BESS failure events, see  https://storagewiki.epri.com/index.php/BESS_Failure_Event_Database

Your county can require the developer to provide a professional engineer’s “sealed” report that all fire hazards have been evaluated and mitigated; and this BESS will not catch fire like the one at Moss Landing or others listed in the database.

To keep cool, batteries require a cooling system. How much water will this cooling system use? Where will it come from? Where will this BESS’s wastewater go? To protect groundwater, will it need treatment?

End-of-Life

When the facility is no longer efficient enough to be profitable, either all panels will be replaced and all wires (and batteries, if there’s a BESS) will be upgraded—or the developer will abandon the project. Require the developer to post a bond so that the county will not be burdened with decommissioning costs if the developer walks away. Sending panels to a recycling center is very expensive. What will happen with the (toxic, flammable) batteries at their end-of-life?

To write up conditions that you aim for your county board of supervisors to approve, you will need:

• a land-use lawyer to provide guidance and appropriate language.
• money for the lawyer.
• to learn your county’s restrictions about discuss issues with commissioners who vote. In any case, you’ll need friendly relations with your permitting commission’s staff.
• an articulate, thoroughly informed, well-mannered and even-tempered person to speak with county staff.
• You might also need a professional engineer (PE).
• If the developer claims that the solar facility will benefit your county economically, you will need to hire an economist to evaluate these claims.
• Do not expect coverage from local media. To educate the public, you’ll need well-written, well-referenced brief entries posted on social media.

Ask if the county has in-house experts to evaluate a solar facility’s chemical run-off, fire hazards and economics etc. If not, then the county can require the developer to provide funding so that the county can hire expert-consultants chosen by the county to evaluate the facility.

For resources, visit the website maintained by Citizens for Responsible Solar: https://www.citizensforresponsiblesolar.org/. See their solar toolkit at https://www.citizensforresponsiblesolar.org/solar-toolkit. See also Kansans for Responsible Solar: https://westgardnersolar.com/utility-scale-solar-health-and-safety-concerns/

For an example of final conditions approved by Spotsylvania, VA’s Planning Commission—which does not include a BESS—visit: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ea0NyIBLdyPHaD__P9nBnoUbDGVwrqHV/view
For general info about rarely-discussed problems with solar PVs, visit www.OurWeb.tech/letter-43.

Katie Singer writes about the energy, extractions, toxic waste and greenhouse gases involved in manufacturing computers, telecom infrastructure, electric vehicles and other electronic technologies. She believes that if she’s not aware that she’s part of the problem, then she can’t be part of the solution. She dreams that every smartphone user learns about the supply chain of one substance (of 1000+) in a smartphone. Her most recent book is An Electronic Silent Spring. She currently writes about nature, democracy and technology for Meer.com. Visit www.OurWeb.tech and www.ElectronicSilentSpring.com.

n August 10-11, 2019 Green Party members in St. Louis joined others from across the state to hear from the leading contenders for the party’s nomination for President: Dennis Lambert, Dario Hunter, David Rolde, and Howie Hawkins. All had a very clear understanding that it would be futile to support a Democrat, because, even though they often use sweet-sounding words, once they are in office their actions have little, if any, difference from Republicans.

The four GP candidates who came to Missouri are all progressives with very few political disagreements between them. But Dario Hunter and Howie Hawkins stood out as the two with the best ability to verbalize a wide variety of Green policies for national and international audiences. Of these two, Hawkins has the best understanding of the subtleties of Green outlooks and a history of being with the organization for the long run.

Hawkins, a Green for over 30 years, was a member of the Green Party USA years before the Green Party of the US (GPUS) existed. When forerunners of GPUS were having their first meetings, they tried to exclude Hawkins from their discussions. But he insisted on his democratic rights, was finally accepted, and gained a strong appreciation for the rights of political minorities which he continues through today.

Hawkins has participated in writing multiple proposals that are now accepted Green Party perspectives. He engages in vigorous debate on various Green perspectives, paying close attention to views he disagrees with. His lifelong dedication to labor, social justice and anti-war causes means that he does not vacillate on issues such as funding military adventures, unlike politicians such as Bernie Sanders.

However, Hawkins’ deep ties to the traditional progressive outlooks have not left him well-prepared to cope with environmental problems. Thus, he developed ideas for the Green New Deal (GND) even before the Democrats did. But like the Democrats and other Green Party candidates, Hawkins’ support for a GND fails to understand the limits to economic growth on a finite planet. The GND is based on the false idea that the only way to provide job security is by expanding production and does not consider shortening the work week.

The GND does not consider the extremely damaging consequences of infinite expansion of solar, wind, and hydro-electric power, including water contamination, toxic poisons, driving indigenous people off their land, species extinction, and, ironically, massive production of CO2. A realistic approach to a warming earth would recognize that solar and wind power can be a viable alternative to fossil fuels only if they are part of a massive decrease in the overall use of energy.

Hawkins and other GP candidates have very similar views of the GND and they all stand head and shoulders above Democrats who collaborate with the same corporations that cause environmental devastation. Howie Hawkins is the candidate for president who is our best hope for looking beyond narrow vote-getting to develop a genuinely environmental approach to climate catastrophe.

by Stan Cox

Hurricane Irma passes by the eastern end of Cuba (NOAA)

At the People’s Climate March back last spring, all along that vast river of people, the atmosphere was electric. But many of the signs and banners were far too focused on electricity. Yes, here and there were solid “System Change, Not Climate Change” – themed signs and banners. But far too many of the slogans on display asserted or implied that ending the climate emergency and avoiding climatic catastrophes like those that would occur months later—hurricanes Harvey and Irma and the mega-wildfires in the U.S. West—will be a simple matter of getting Donald Trump out of office and converting to 100-percent renewable energy.

The sunshiny placards and cheery banners promising an energy cornucopia were inspired by academic studies published in the past few years purporting to show how America and the world could meet 100 percent of future energy demand with solar, wind, and other “green” generation. The biggest attention-getters have been a pair of reports published in 2015 by a team led by Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, but there have been many others.

Despite a growing body of research that has debunked overblown claims of a green-energy bonanza, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and other luminaries in the mainstream climate movement have been invigorated by reports like Jacobson’s and have embraced the 100-percent vision. And that vision is merging with a broader, even more spurious claim that has become especially popular in the Trump era: the private sector, we are told, has now taken the lead on climate, and market forces will inevitably achieve the 100-percent renewable dream and solve the climate crisis on their own. In this dream, anything’s possible; Jacobson even believes that tens of thousands of wind turbines installed offshore could tame hurricanes like Katrina, Harvey, and Irma.

The 100-percent dream has become dogma among liberals and mainstream climate activists. Serious energy scholars who publish analyses that expose the idea’s serious weaknesses risk being condemned as stooges of the petroleum industry or even as climate deniers. Jacobson has even suggested that he might take legal action against NOAA scientist Christopher Clack and twenty coauthors whose critical evaluation of his work was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June.

Jacobson’s team and others cling to the idea of 100-percent conversion because they (rightly) want to eliminate fossil and nuclear energy, and they foresee that any future supply gap left by a shortfall in renewable generation is going to be filled by those dirty sources. That is indeed stated or implied by many of the opposing analyses, including the Clack study. But the two sides also share other basic assumptions. They both have tried to design scenarios that satisfy all future demand for energy solely through industrial production, technological improvements, efficiency, and markets, without any strict regulatory limits on the total quantity of energy consumed in production and consumption. The 100-percenters believe such a scenario is achievable while their critics conclude that it is not, but they agree on the ultimate goal: a permanent high-energy economy.

That part of the dogma, not the “100-percent” part, is the problem. America does need to convert to fully renewable energy as quickly as possible. But juxtaposing the 100-percent scenarios that promise a permanent high-energy economy with critiques showing such projects to be futile should lead us to a different vision altogether: that, at least in affluent countries, it would be better simply to transform society so that it operates on far less end-use energy while assuring sufficiency for all. That would bring a  100%-renewable energy system within closer reach and avoid the outrageous technological feats and gambles required by high-energy dogma. It would also have the advantage of being possible.

Waking up from the dream

The pursuit of the 100-percent dream didn’t start with the 2015 Jacobson et al. papers, and critiques of it didn’t start with Clack et al. For example, there was a 2015 paper by Peter Loftus and colleagues that critically examined 17 “decarbonization scenarios.” Then earlier this year, a study by a group of Australian researchers led by B.P. Heard rated the feasibility of 24 published studies describing 100-percent renewable electricity scenarios.

The Heard group concluded that among the research papers they evaluated (which included several with Jacobson as lead author), none “provides convincing evidence that these basic feasibility criteria can be met.” They found a wide range of technical flaws in the proposed systems. Most scenarios assumed unprecedented and deeply unrealistic improvements in energy efficiency (in terms of kilowatt hours consumed per dollar’s worth of output). Because the chief renewable technologies, wind and solar, fluctuate continuously in their output and regularly drop to zero output, they must be backed up with large supplies of “base load” electricity if all demand is to be met without interruption; no studies managed this without ecologically destructive levels of biomass burning or wildly unrealistic estimates of hydroelectric output. Scenarios did not account for the overcapacity and redundancy that will be needed if a high-energy economy is to function in an increasingly unpredictable global climate. (This year, the people of Texas, Florida, and the West in particular can attest to the deep impacts of that unpredictability.) Studies did not account for the expected four- to five-fold expansion of the power transmission infrastructure that will be required to accommodate renewable energy. And they did not address the difficulties of maintaining voltage and frequency of alternating current within extremely tight limits (a necessity in technologically dependent societies) when a large share of the supply is from wind and solar. This all adds up, writes the Heard team, to a systemic “fragility” that will render futile all attempts to deliver the promised output of electricity when it is needed.

The Loftus group found several of the same weaknesses in the studies they examined. But they singled out scenarios in papers by Jacobson and Delucchi, the World Wildlife Fund, and Worldwatch. Those scenarios had in common two assumptions that Loftus and colleagues regarded as out of the realm of reality: efficiency improving at as much as 3 to 4 times the historic rate, and buildup of renewable generation capacity at many times the rate at which today’s total electric generation capacity was built up in past decades. They concluded that it would be “premature and highly risky to ‘bet the planet’” on the achievement of scenarios like those.

Unrepealable limits

In their PNAS publication, the one that prompted Jacobson to hint at a lawsuit, Clack et al. critically examined two Jacobson papers from 2015, one of which was a widely hailed “roadmap” for plentiful, 100-percent renewable energy in all 50 United States. In addition to “modeling errors,” much of the Clack critique is aimed at the assumed ubiquitous deployment of technologies that either don’t yet exist or are only lightly tested and can’t be scaled up to the huge scales envisioned. They include underground thermal energy storage for virtually every building in the country, a full air transportation system run entirely on hydrogen(!), wind farms covering 6 percent of the entire land surface of the 48 contiguous states, an outrageous and unrealistic increase in ecologically harmful hydroelectric power, and a buildout of electricity generation capacity that hurtles along at 14 times the average rate of capacity expansion in the past half-century.   

But even if it were physically possible to achieve all of those scaleups, and even if Congress found a way to repeal and replace Murphy’s Law, the full-blown 100-percent dream could not be realized. In a series of papers published since 2010 (e.g., a 2016 paper in Energy Policy), Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery of Monash University in Australia have identified several crucial factors that will limit the total global output of renewable electricity. For example, renewable technologies exploit the windiest or sunniest locations first, and, as they expand, they move into less and less productive territory. There, their construction and operation will require as much energy input as before, but their output will be lower.  Furthermore, because of inherently intermittent generation, much of the electric power from wind and solar will have to be stored using batteries, hydrogen, compressed air, pumped water, or other means. It will then have to be reconverted to electricity and transmitted from often remote regions to places where people and businesses are concentrated. The result is a severe shrinkage of the net energy available to society, because much energy is expended or lost during both conversion and transmission. Finally, all production of wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and especially hydroelectric energy has an ecological impact on the landscapes where it occurs. So if we are to halt our degradation and destruction of the Earth's natural ecosystems, it will be necessary to declare large areas off-limits to the energy sector.

Moriarty and Honnery show that given all of these factors, expansion of renewable energy will hit a brick wall, a point at which as much energy is required to install and operate electric facilities as they will end up generating in their operating lifetimes. But even before that point is reached, it will have become pointless to expand generation capacity that has lower and lower net output. They conclude that as a result, future renewable output “could be far below present energy use.”

What are we hoping  for?

A generally overlooked but crucial point about high-energy, 100-percent renewable proposals is that they seek to meet future demand patterns in a way that would leave in place today’s great distortions in access to energy and other resources. The American economy would carry on uninterrupted with its overproduction, overconsumption, and inequality, while billions of people in poorer regions and countries would not get the access to energy that’s required for a minimally good quality of life.

The 100-percent scenarios themselves, as well as the critiques of them, hold one especially valuable lesson. Unintentionally, they show in stark terms why rich countries need to start planning to live in the renewable but lower-energy world envisioned by Moriarty and Honnery rather than the high-energy world that the mainstream 100-percent scenarios envision. The world that the latter scenarios would create, one focused on maintaining current profligate consumption levels, would not be a green and pleasant one. Herculean quantities of physical and mental labor power will have been expended, boundless physical resources (including vast tonnages of fossil fuels) will have been consumed, and countless entire ecosystems across the Earth’s surface will have been sacrificed to generate more electricity. All of that would make for a pretty grim world. With society having zeroed in singlemindedly on acquiring enough energy to keep driving, flying, and overproducing as much as we want, there’s no reason to expect that other problems, including enormous distortions in economic and political power and quality of life, along with racial and ethnic oppression, would have been solved.     

Some in the climate movement believe in the 100-percent dogma and the dream it holds out: that the (affluent) American way of life can keep running forward in time and outward in space without breaking stride. There are others who know that to be an impossibly rosy vision but urge the movement to limit public discussion to such green dreams, because talking about a regulated, low-energy economy would crush hope and enthusiasm at the grassroots.   

But the debate about hope ignores the relevant question: what are we hoping for? If our hope is to deploy solar and wind capacity that maintains indefinitely the current throughput of energy in the world’s affluent societies, then, yes, the situation is hopeless. But there can be other hopes that, although they’re looking dim for now, are at least within reach: that greenhouse warming can be limited sufficiently to allow communities around the world who are currently impoverished and oppressed to improve their lives; that access to food, water, shelter, safety, culture, nature, and other necessities becomes sufficient for all; or that exploitation and oppression of humans and nature be brought to an end.

There’s always hope, as long as we don’t confuse dreams with reality.

Stan Cox is on the editorial board of Green Social Thought and co-author, with Paul Cox, of  How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia.

Last month, the social-media giant Facebook announced plans to build a new data center near Odense, Denmark. The expansion of server capacity was needed, the company said, to support "richer content" such as live-streaming and virtual reality.

The Facebook executive who made a public announcement of the decision (live-streamed, of course), noted that the new facility would have the "smallest footprint possible" and be "powered by 100 percent clean and renewable energy." Well, not exactly.

Recent reports by Rasmus Svaeborg for the Danish newspaper Information tell a different story. What may resemble, at least in the view from Silicon Valley, an exercise in green corporate responsibility will actually mean a big increase in Denmark's contribution to greenhouse warming.

Data centers consume prodigious quantities of electricity to power servers and keep them cooled down. The Danish government estimates that server farms now planned or under construction—primarily Facebook's and another being built by Apple in the town of Viborg —will add 4 million megawatt-hours, or about 13 percent, to the nation's current annual electricity consumption. Between now and 2040, server farms will account for a whopping one-third of the expected increase in Denmark's electricity demand.

Facebook and Apple are eager for their new data centers to share the bright green aura that surrounds Denmark's strong wind-energy commitment. But only about half of the country's electricity is supplied by renewable sources, so there's no spare green energy available to cover Silicon Valley's needs. The increase in national power consumption spurred by the new facilities will have to be generated from nonrenewable sources.

So the two corporations won't have "the smallest footprint possible" on Danish soil; they'll actually be substantially boosting the country's carbon output. Under the European Union's carbon emissions quota system, the server-powered increase in Denmark's emissions is supposed to be balanced by reductions in other countries' emissions. But that won't happen. Svaneborg quotes Peter Birch Sørensen, chair of the Danish government's Climate Council, who explains, "There is still a huge surplus of allowances [in the EU system], so increased emissions from Denmark will not cause lower emissions from other EU countries."

On its own, the prospect of getting green facelifts would not have been enough to entice the two corporations to set up shop in Denmark. According to Svaneborg, the crucial inducement was the ongoing rollback of an electricity tax called the Public Service Obligation (PSO). The elimination of the PSO will save the typical Danish household the equivalent of only a few dollars on its monthly bill. But it also means, writes Svaneborg, that the government will supply renewable electricity to businesses (including the new data centers) "at a price that is below production costs," in effect encouraging them to consume more power and cause more emissions.

There are additional ways in which repeal of the tax could hamper efforts to reduce Denmark's dependence on fossil fuels. Revenue from the PSO was earmarked exclusively for renewable energy development. Now, funds to foster new wind farms will have to come out of the taxpayer-supported general budget, where they will be politically vulnerable in every year's round of government budgeting and appropriation.

The PSO was introduced to avoid this very state of affairs, during the liberalization of the power sector in the 1990s, and it's a key reason why Denmark can offer tech companies such a green bounty of wind energy today. The country's renewable energy capacity was carefully cultivated over many years with a subsidy from every Danish power customer. Now Facebook and Apple have simply arrived for the harvest.

Given their vast cash reserves and self-proclaimed commitments to green energy, the two corporations could have built their own wind farms to power their new server farms, rather than piggybacking on Denmark's renewable-energy efforts. But even that would not have solved the deeper problem: wind and solar development, whoever is doing it, is a perpetual game of catch-up. Across the globe, whether in countries like Denmark who have vigorous clean-energy development or in slacker countries like the United States, capitalism's uncanny ability to crank out new electricity-dependent goods and services is easily capable of outstripping the buildup of renewable energy capacity.

Growth in technologies designed to curb air pollution (such as electric cars), to soften the impact of greenhouse warming (such as air conditioning), to purvey entertainment that can provide comfort in a world on the brink (such as streaming video), and to provide myriad other services threatens to scuttle our best efforts to wean society from fossil-fueled electricity.

Global efforts to curb greenhouse emissions were derailed last year by American voters. And America's image-conscious corporations are doing nothing to get things back on track when they play the "powered by 100 percent renewable energy" shell game.

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) and Paul Cox (@Paul_Cox) are the authors of “How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia.” Write to them at cox{at}howtheworldbreaks.com.