You’ll probably soon hear about the “five myths about green energy,” if you haven’t already. They’re the talking points of a book to be published this week, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
He wrote a short piece in the Washington Post recently, and while “Mythbusters” is one of my favorite TV shows, it seems to me that he’s missing a few facts.
For instance, he argues that solar and wind power have big footprints: “A nuclear power plant cranks out about 56 watts per square meter, eight times as much as is derived from solar photovoltaic installations, and that “The real estate that wind and solar energy demand led the Nature Conservancy to issue a report last year critical of ‘energy sprawl,’ including tens of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines needed to carry electricity from wind and solar installations to distant cities.”
To a degree, that’s a fair criticism. But the compact nuclear power plant he cites also involves one or more uranium mines and their dumps for waste rock, along with various mills and processing plants and their tailings piles, a place to store spent fuel, a transportation network, plus transmission lines. A coal-fired plant has a similar sprawl, from mine to ash pile.
So if he wants to compare footprints, that’s fair — but only if includes the entire footprint, rather than just using the little toe of the nuclear plant and the entire sole of the solar plant.
Another of his “myths” is that green energy would reduce American imports from unsavory regimes. There are quite a few oil exporters, he argues, but many forms of green technology, like high-capacity batteries and wind turbines, rely on rare-earth chemical elements known as lanthanides. And “China controls between 95 and 100 percent of the global market in these elements.”
Thus “adopting the technologies needed to drastically cut U.S. oil consumption will dramatically increase America’s dependence on China.”
But anyone who follows the mining industry over time knows that when demand increases, prices rise, and previously undeveloped mineral deposits turn into working mines. China has no monopoly on lanthanide deposits; there are known deposits in Australia, Canada, and California — all with savory regimes and reasonably friendly to the United States.
Perhaps in his book, Bryce has the room to address some of these issues that conflict with his mythological arguments. But from what has appeared so far, he’s not making solid arguments.
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