The environmental impacts of wind, solar, batteries, and other technologies are important and not getting the attention they deserve. Both the full life cycle of manufacturing and also the land use impacts need to be properly accounted for. The productivity of wind and solar tend to be wildly exaggerated while their impacts on the landscape minimized. There is growing resistance in rural areas to industrial renewable energy, and for good reason. I would not want to live less than a mile from a large wind turbine, they have a dramatic impact on people's quality of life, especially if you are directly in its wake or shadows, it will make your home unlivable. And while rooftop solar is great, productivity is relatively trivial. Cutting down forests and razing 1 sq km of intact ecosystems to build 100MW of solar is going in the wrong direction environmentally if you ask me. We need ecosystems intact so they can pull down carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into soil and life, more than we need new sources of electronics waste.
The environmental impacts of wind, solar, batteries, and other technologies are important and not getting the attention they deserve. Both the full life cycle of manufacturing and also the land use impacts need to be properly accounted for. The productivity of wind and solar tend to be wildly exaggerated while their impacts on the landscape minimized. There is growing resistance in rural areas to industrial renewable energy, and for good reason. I would not want to live less than a mile from a large wind turbine, they have a dramatic impact on people's quality of life, especially if you are directly in its wake or shadows, it will make your home unlivable. And while rooftop solar is great, productivity is relatively trivial. Cutting down forests and razing 1 sq km of intact ecosystems to build 100MW of solar is going in the wrong direction environmentally if you ask me. We need ecosystems intact so they can pull down carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into soil and life, more than we need new sources of electronics waste.