In the last post, I concentrated on the impacts on renewable energy due to the weather risks. In this post, I will focus on the costs of the landscape and the environmental impacts. This is because without considering these two factors, some supporting researches and arguments would underestimate the actual costs of renewable energy.
“A fundamental credo of being green is that you cause minimal interference with the landscape. We should be farming less land, logging less forest and trawling less ocean – disturbing the landscape less and sparing land for nature. But all of these renewable sources of energy are incredibly invasive and aggressive with regard to nature. Renewables may be renewable, but they are not green,” said researcher Jesse Ausubel, at the Rockefeller University in New York (http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/07/renewable-energ.html).
Biomass requires land to plant trees, and those trees can be used only for the Biomass production. During the time that Biomass has a high return, people would use their land that could be used for food production to plant more Biomass plants. As a result, there would be less agricultural products in the market, which could raise the price of those products in the future. In addition, in order to grow Biomass trees, it requires a lot of water during the production process, up to 50,000 gallons per megawatt-hour (http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-biomass-for-electricity.html#.VRNFhpOwWHw).
Solar panels require a lot of water in the processes of washing mirrors and cooling equipment. For example, solar power plants that use wet-recirculating technology with cooling towers use about 600-650 gallons of water per megawatt-hour of electricity produced (http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-solar-power.html#bf-toc-1).
The process of making solar panels is not clean. In the past, manufacturers used \ (SF6), which is about 22800 times more harmful to the environment than CO2, in the production process. Although, now those manufacturers change to nitrogen Trifluoride (NF3), it is still 17200 times more dangerous than CO2 (http://www.dw.de/despite-bright-potential-solar-power-struggles-to-stay-clean/a-16858170). Also, the typical solar panels lifespan are about 20-30 years. As a result, after the expected lifespan, the process of destroying the dead solar panels could cost a very high price.
Mega hydropower, dams, supply about 7 percent of the world’s electricity, which is equal to the share of all other renewable energy sources combined, BP’s energy outlook 2014. Though mega hydropower are widely used, the cost of electricity per unit is expensive. The average cost of electricity per kWh produced by hydropower is 0.85 cents (http://www.wvic.com/Content/Facts_About_Hydropower.cfm). On the other hand, the fossil fuels cost only 0.16 cents per kWh (http://www.energyandpolicy.org/value-of-solar-versus-fossil-fuels-part-two). There are many environmental impacts caused by mega hydropower. For example, biodiversity around the area decreases because mammals and fish cannot migrate between the area above and below the dams, and the flow of the water changes. As a result, animals around the area have to change their behavior and some of them may die. Moreover, mega hydropower causes poor water quality because the changes in water composition, which includes temperature, dissolve oxygen and nutrient status.
In the end, the difficulties of calculating the actual costs of renewable energy could be another reason that discourages people to invest in renewable energy.
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