When Renewables Meet Their Limits to Growth
By The Honest Sorcerer, January 2025
Renewable energy is a myth. It is a delusion we tell ourselves when we want to ignore the painful realities that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible, that some day we are going to run out of fossil fuels.
Both windmills and solar panels require enormous amounts of energy to produce. Windmills also require massive amounts of concrete and steel, and miles of copper. Both require plenty of diesel fuel to get the materials to the plants where they are made and the finished product to their ultimate destination and installed.
The time to start thinking about how we might then live is now … before we completely run out of the energy and resources we need to go about our days.
In Their Words…
Contrary to the clever marketing trope, “renewables” are nowhere close to being renewable — hence the scare quotes around their name. They are “re-buildable” at best, but mostly not even that. Simply put many materials they are built from are neither recyclable nor can be made without using copious amounts of fossil fuels. So while the power of the sun and the wind remains practically limitless, the resources required to build the many essential — but completely non-recyclable — components of wind turbines and solar panels is not.
The sooner we face the music, and accept that it was fossil fuels which have made industrial civilization possible, the sooner we can start adapting to their eventual depletion, and at least begin to mitigate the many harms their used caused to the planet. Pinning our hopes on unicorns such as “renewables” or “carbon capture and storage” only delays meaningful action, and accelerates the drawdown of the last remaining viable reserves of fossil fuels and minerals. Not a good idea, if you ask me.