Question and Clarification Opinions/Values on Clean Energy

Hi! I'm new here and just finished the policies training. I was wondering about the general organizational opinion/values on certain aspects of clean energy. While solar panels and EVs are great, they currently require mining (although I think a great area of work can be done in recycling our resources) which pollutes the environment. While clean energy is better for the environment, the process to get there is environmentally and socially straining. What is the defense for this?

Thank you!! I'm happy to be here :)

4 Replies

Hi and welcome, @Grace LaTourelle! This blog post I wrote a few years ago may help answer your questions 🤓

That was very helpful, thank you! It also reminded me of the resiliency of nature and how while we immediately would need to mine for certain materials, hopefully recycling objectives in the future will allow the environment to heal and solutions to emerge. Thanks again!
Pete Marsh
556 Posts

@Grace LaTourelle, welcome to CCL and the forums!

You're absolutely correct that mining has environmental impacts - as do essentially all modern human activities. There's a lot of talk on the internet about how horrible the impacts of mining will be as we scale up the quantities of copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, etc that we need for the clean energy transition.

But most folks who are wailing and gnashing their teeth about the “horrors” of renewable energy are inexplicably silent on the impacts of coal, oil and gas - the fossil fuels that have caused great damage to our atmosphere, water, land, ecosystems, and our lungs. Whenever your cranky uncle ;) tells you to “look over there!” at wind turbine blades or solar panels being put into a landfill, think about two things: (1) that those blades or panels probably generated energy for 20-25 years before reaching end of life; and (2) that the fossil fuels they're replacing leave large impacts too. Coal ash, criteria air pollutants, oil spills like Deepwater Horizon, gas leaks like Aliso Canyon, and more.

Michael Thomas wrote well about this in his Substack newsletter, “Distilled.” His article “A Fossil Fuel Economy Requires 535x More Mining Than a Clean Energy Economy” quantifies the difference. The key here is that manufacturers are now designing turbine blades, solar panels, and batteries for very high percentages of recyclability at end of life, so they won't go to landfills at all. A circular economy will be very hard to achieve for many products, especially low cost and consumer-facing products. But a 10 or 20-year old EV battery contains all the minerals that it had when it was manufactured, highly concentrated. So it's less expensive to crush and grind the battery, and separate the minerals, than to go out and mine new minerals at lower concentration. There are at least seven companies already doing this for used batteries. And before the EV battery is recycled, it will probably live a second life as stationary grid-tied energy storage for 10 or 20 more years.

Over the next several decades, fossil fuel will be replaced by five near zero-carbon energy sources: solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. We'll also build many types of energy storage so that the grid can handle peaks and troughs in demand: lithium ion batteries get a lot of the buzz currently, but there are several other chemical storage technologies, plus gravity based, compressed air, and more. Clean energy isn't the only energy that needs storage: coal is stacked in massive piles near power plants waiting to be burned over the next several days: that pile of coal is a big chunk of potential energy, WAITING IN STORAGE until it is turned into heat or into steam > rotational energy > electricity at the instant it is needed. Same with the thousands of oil tanks on hillsides all over the country, and methane storage cylinders. Even the pipelines, trains, and trucks that move fossil fuels are part of energy storage, not just the distribution we normally associate with them.

Agan, welcome, and thanks for asking!

That makes sense! I tend to be hyper sensitive to mining as a Minnesotan and someone active in the Save the BWCA cause. However, yes, I totally see and understand how clean energy in this way will set up a sustainable future. Thanks for taking the time to reply to my question!

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