How “Green” Wind and Solar Could Trash the Planet

When "clean energy" gets messy

Howdy, everyone. Our friend Sarah recently published an excellent new report on the environmental impacts of wind and solar, and we wanted to share it with our readers. Sarah is a Policy Fellow at our old stomping grounds, the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment, and author of her own Substack, Montalbano Mondays.

Make sure to subscribe to her Substack for more great content.

This week, Center of the American Experiment released “Shattered Green Dreams: The Environmental Costs of Wind and Solar,” which has been in the works for years — Isaac and Mitch actually worked on the earliest drafts of this report. Much ink has been spilled about the devastating impacts for the reliability and affordability of the grid that would result from going all-in on wind and solar.

This report takes a different angle: Policymakers and the public tend to treat wind, solar, and battery storage as unqualified goods for the environment and ignore the costs to our environment, wildlife, and lands. The truth is that every form of energy generation has challenges and benefits. Wind and solar are not as benign as they are made out to be, and for those who care about tangible goals — like protecting endangered and threatened species, preventing human rights abuses overseas, and preserving fertile agricultural lands — these costs should be more important than virtue-signaling one’s “eco-friendliness” with wind turbines and solar panels.

My latest research paper looks at the material demands, the environmental and worker health and safety costs of offshoring material demands, massive land use requirements, the ecological effects on wildlife, and the reasons why recycling isn’t a cure-all.

You can read the full report at https://www.americanexperiment.org/reports/shattered-green-dreams, but continue for the highlights.

What Would Net-Zero Cost in Materials?

Building enough wind turbines, solar panels, battery storage and EV batteries, and transmission lines for global net-zero would easily exceed available supplies for certain minerals.

The International Energy Agency expects that global net-zero would quadruple total mineral demand from 2020 levels, with demand doubling for copper, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths. Graphite demand would triple and lithium demand would increase by a factor of ten. That would need 50 more lithium mines, 60 more nickel mines, and 17 more cobalt mines — by 2030, no less. Inflation Reduction Act subsidies juiced demand for lithium (up 15 percent), nickel (up 14 percent), cobalt (up 13 percent), and copper (up 12 percent) compared to pre-IRA projections.

A 2023 report by the Energy Transitions Commission underscores material concerns, especially for copper, which is saying a lot given this organization is “committed to achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century.” The ETC estimates that global annual demands for steel for an energy transition would total 170 million metric tons through 2050, which is about twice the U.S.’ domestic raw steel production in 2024. Global transition-related annual requirements for aluminum would grow to 30 million metric tons annually, or about 45 times the U.S.’ 670,000 metric tons of primary aluminum production. 30 million metric tons is about 42 percent of the world’s annual production, and the situation would be more dire if aluminum weren’t highly recyclable, with robust secondary supplies.

Most worrisome is copper, which ETC forecasts will require 20 million metric tons annually for an energy transition. The U.S. only produced 1.1 million metric tons of copper and less than 1 million metric tons of secondary copper from scrap. Global production of copper in 2024 only totaled 23 million metric tons. Even assuming that ETC’s assumptions are reasonable, global net zero would need 87% of the world’s primary copper supply every year. That simply isn’t tenable when copper is also needed for electronics, plumbing, construction, and more.

A 2023 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that a U.S. net-zero economy would need a threefold increase in wind energy deployment. Even under business-as-usual levels of wind deployment, NREL found that annual demand for nickel would reach 317% of 2020 U.S. production annually through 2028. At high levels of deployment needed for U.S. net-zero, nickel demand could reach 1,200% of 2020 U.S. production and 30% of U.S. copper production. Demand for balsa, a lightweight hardwood in turbine blades, could reach 520% of global production and carbon fiber could reach 120% of global production. The U.S. also doesn’t have any significant primary production of chromium, gallium, graphite, lithium, manganese, niobium, tin, titanium, and balsa, which would need to be procured overseas.

Speaking of…

Not in Our Backyard Means Squatting in Someone Else’s

It should be apparent that most of these materials are already sourced from overseas, and the same would be true at levels exceeding the many multiples of U.S. production levels needed for net-zero. But where we mine truly matters in minimizing environmental harm as well as bolstering economic competitiveness and national security.

Of 50 critical minerals listed in 2024, the U.S. was 100% import-reliant for 12 of them and more than 50% import-reliant for another 28 of them. The U.S. relies on China for 74% of the rare earth elements it uses, and more than 95% import-reliant in total. Processing is another serious concern, with China dominating the processing of copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earths as of 2019.

The U.S. has strict environmental regulations and labor protections, while many developing countries do not. Considering carbon dioxide emissions, the U.S. powers its grids on less emissions-intensive fuels like natural gas, while China and elsewhere have grids largely-fueled on coal.

The report reviews only three case studies — from just 2024 and 2025! — that demonstrate the lack of responsible stewardship in Chinese-owned mines overseas. For instance, a February 2025 collapse of a copper mine’s tailings dam in Zambia contaminated the Kafue River, which provides drinking water for 5 million people. The mine is owned by Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, majority owned by state-run China Nonferrous Metals Industry Group.

In Indonesia’s nickel mines, for instance, whistleblowers allege a “production first, safety later” culture and 101 deaths have been reported between 2015 and the first half of 2024. In March 2025, multiple tailings dams breached at an Indonesian nickel-cobalt mine, washing into the river and endangering the 341 families in the neighboring village of Labota. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Department of Labor found 44% of cobalt workers could not refuse hazardous work, 85% had their movement restricted, and 52% reported children working at their mine site, which was especially true for artisanal mines (63%).

The U.S. makes a value judgment every time it decides it would rather offshore a mining project than do it domestically under high standards.

Wind and Solar Need Massive Land Footprints

As @Robert Bryce [2] [3] wrote in his report for American Experiment, “Not In Our Backyard: Rural America is Fighting Back Against Large-Scale Renewable Energy Projects in 2021,” academics “have minimized the land-use needs of renewables” and the problem is “fundamentally about physics.” The low energy density of wind turbines and solar panels poses a fundamental physics problem: more land area must be dedicated to electricity production than energy-dense sources like coal, natural gas, and nuclear. One needn’t imagine the consequences for other uses of land, like agriculture, grazing, and logging.

The Brookings Institution estimates that wind turbines and solar panels need at least 10 times as much land per unit of power produced as coal- or natural gas-fired power plants. Because nuclear fuel is so energy-dense, a 1,000 MW nuclear plant needs only 1.3 square miles of land area. Generating the same amount of electricity from solar needs between 45 and 75 miles, and wind needs between 360 and 3,360 square miles.

Vaclav Smil in his 2010 book Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate suggests that if the U.S. were to meet its current electricity needs with wind energy, it would take a land area twice the size of California.

Indeed, one peer-reviewed study estimates the land area needed under 10 global renewable energy scenarios, including those of the IEA, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, and others. All scenarios would require at least a doubling of the land used for electricity generation, with the lowest being the IEA’s “business-as-usual” scenario that still includes a healthy share of oil, gas, and coal. One scenario with high electrification and wind and solar adoption would need between 500 and 900 million hectares.

The total land area of the U.S. is only 980 million hectares. Global net-zero could take nearly as much land as the entire U.S.

Sacrificing this much land to electricity generation means forfeiting many other worthwhile uses of land, including agriculture (though many wind and solar farms are attempting “agrivoltaics” in the spacing between infrastructure. 83% of new solar projects are installed on farmland, and almost 50% are installed on “the most productive, versatile, and resilient” lands, according to the American Farmland Trust.

A Note on Recycling, Disposal, and the Garbage Left Behind

Proponents tend to treat recycling as a panacea for material demands, but recycling is likely to fall short of its promises. As the Energy Bad Boys described in “Disposable Power Plants: Wind and Solar Are the Single-Use Plastic of the Power Plant World,” wind turbine lifespans are only about 20 years, and solar panels only last about 25 years. Natural gas and coal plants can last between 40 and 60 years, while nuclear plants are 60, going on 80. Wind and solar must be replaced more often, which compounds material and environmental concerns.

The U.S.’ financial incentives make a mess of the decommissioning and recycling issue, too. The generating output of wind turbines declines over time, which means repowering occurs well before expected end-of-life. In 2021, the Department of Energy found that partially repowered turbines had a median age of 10 years, with repowering primarily motivated by financial and regulatory reasons, including “to re-qualify for the [Production Tax Credit].” Wind turbine blades are made of fiberglass or carbon fiber, both difficult and uneconomic to recycle, which means 2.2 million tons of wind turbine blades are expected to enter landfills by 2050. However, Figure 9 (from the 2024 Land Based Wind Market Report) shows that partial repowering declined in 2023 compared with the three gigawatts per year repowered in 2019 and 2020.

U.S. waste from solar panels is expected to add up to seven to 10 million tons by 2050. Today, only 10% of solar panels are recycled due to cost ineffectiveness, which means many degraded solar panels are shipped overseas to operate at lower efficiency (which also exports disposal and recycling hazards).

Final Thoughts

All forms of energy entail environmental impacts of some sort, and accounting for the environmental impacts of wind, solar, and battery storage show that they are far less than the unqualified good that proponents suggest.

While researching this paper, I was told no less than three times that I needed to watch the TV show “Landman,” in which a character played by Billy Bob Thornton lectures a lawyer about the not-so-green consequences of renewable technology:

“Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete or make that steel and haul this (expletive) out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that (expletive) thing or winterize it? And it’s 20-year lifespan. It won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it.”

It would have been unthinkable ten years ago for a mainstream TV show to point this out. It’s my hope that “Shattered Green Dreams” helps communities and policymakers make informed choices by bringing the existing research (sans expletives) into one place.

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