The Hidden Costs of Green Energy
In this day of steadily rising energy costs, increasing difficulty in finding readily accessible supplies of non-renewable resources, aging power production and transport facilities and environmental awareness individuals, local government and private utilities are turning towards renewable energy resources at an increasing rate. Many of these entities tout the benefit of their decisions as “green” and “environmentally friendly”. The real cost of these projects is often ignored completely either through true ignorance of the facts or in an attempt to be duplicitous about the damage that is really being done.
In 2013 4,751 MW of new photovoltaic (PV) capacity was installed representing a 41 percent increase in deployment over installation levels in 2012 (Solar Industry Data, 2014).
While this might mean a reduction in non-renewable resources (referred to as NRR’s going forward) burned, it also represents a drastic increase in the use and production of numerous toxic chemicals that result from the PV manufacturing process.
According to Dustin Mulvaney, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at San Jose State University, the production of PV panels begins with the creation of Silicon wafers, a process that uses and/or produces sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide both of which are known as caustic chemicals that can be dangerous to the eyes, lungs and skin.
As the production process continues corrosive chemicals like hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid and hydrogen fluoride are used along with phosphine or arsine gas in the doping of the semiconductor material. Even after these items are made, the use of toxic products continues. Mulvaney once again points out that lead is often used in solar PV electronic circuits for wiring, solder-coated copper strips, and some lead-based printing pastes.
While numbers for more recent years weren’t readily available, it was reported by the State of California that seventeen companies, which had forty-four manufacturing facilities in California, produced 46.5 million pounds of sludge and contaminated water from 2007 through the first half of 2011 (Dearen, 2013). While most of this waste was disposed of in-state, approximately three percent (more than 1.4 million pounds) was transported to nine other states including Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Nevada, Washington, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona (Dearen, 2013).
If the world were to make the move to one-hundred percent solar energy like some propose (Waller, 2013) we would need to produce hundreds of thousands (of not millions) of tons of contaminated sludge, use carcinogenic materials and continue to expose workers to phosphine gas, hydrogen fluoride and lead.
As the winds of the debate on the benefits of solar power continue, we shift our attention to our efforts to harness the very power of the wind itself. In 2012 the United States installed a record 13.2 gigawatts of new wind energy production come online accounting for (at the time) 6% of the nation’s total generating capacity (Woody, 2013).
However, as the capacity of wind turbines increases, so too does the risk they pose. Every year wind installations injure, maim, and kill hundreds of thousands of birds in clear violation of federal law (Fisher, 2013). While this is a problem unique to wind turbines, they have a common problem with other forms of energy generation: the need for Rare Earth Minerals (REM’s).

According to Dawn Stover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a 2 megawatt (MW) wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium (Stover, 2011). These minerals are mined almost exclusively in China, which has an estimated ninety-five percent of the world’s known reserves of Rare Earth Minerals. REM’s are typically obtained by strip-mining, the process of removing existing earth and vegetation above the mine site, which is known to be devastating to local flora and fauna. The