What would you think if someone told you that one of the most important early champions of wind power touted it precisely because he thought it couldn’t work for advanced, industrialized societies?
“Aww, can’t be true”?
Well, it can be, and it is.
In “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), Martin Heidegger—one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers, argued that “modern technology … puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.” Instead, we should adopt “unreliable energy flows,” as current environmental guru Michael Shellenberger puts it.
Shellenberger isn’t lauding Heidegger, though. He’s pointing out, in “The Reason Renewables Can’t Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant To,” that “Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy.”
(By the way, we at the Cornwall Alliance prefer to call them “wind factories” and “solar factories.” Farms grow plants and animals. These are factories, plain and simple—and they rob plants and animals of vast stretches where they could grow.)
Shellenberger cites “the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables.” Quite right. The energy density of coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear are scores to over 1,000 times that of wind or solar. That makes generating electricity from wind and solar inherently more expensive. And their intermittency makes them unreliable sources. The more electricity fed into the grid from them, the more unstable the grid.
Shellenberg’s whole article is well worth reading.
