How going ‘green’ could wreck the planet

A green transition would demand more land, more materials, and more sacrifice than anyone would like to admit.

In the television show “Landman,” a character played by Billy Bob Thornton lectures a lawyer about the not-so-green consequences of building wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles (EVs):

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.

Center of the American Experiment has long warned about the consequences to the grid, ratepayers, and our environment of going all-in on renewables. Our latest research paper tackles an important question (sans expletives): What are the environmental costs of adopting these technologies on a wide scale? How much material could be needed? What are the environmental and human rights consequences of offshoring our material demands? How much land might it require? How many birds, bats, and whales might be harmed by policymakers’ green dreams? And how might we recycle and dispose of this technology after their short lifetimes are up?

This article adapts the findings of American Experiment’s policy paper, “Shattered Green Dreams: The environmental costs of wind and solar.” It can be found on our website at www.americanexperiment.org/reports.

The materials price of wind and solar

Building the wind turbines, solar panels, battery storage and EV batteries, and transmission lines that would be necessary for global net-zero would easily exceed the supplies of certain minerals and materials. To achieve net-zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency forecasts a doubling of demand for copper, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth elements, quadrupling demand for graphite, and a 10-fold increase for lithium. This is likely to require 50 more lithium mines, 60 nickel mines, and 17 more cobalt mines by 2030, which is precluded by lengthy permitting and high capital costs.

Existing estimates of materials demand, from a 2023 report by the Energy Transitions Commission, suggests that global steel demand will increase by five times its 2022 level by 2050 for global net-zero emissions scenarios. Annual global requirements of 170 million metric tons would about double the U.S.’ annual domestic raw steel production in 2024.

The situation would be just as dire for aluminum if it weren’t highly recyclable. Global average annual requirements amount to 30 million metric tons of aluminum dedicated to clean energy, or 45 times the U.S.’ 670,000 metric tons of primary aluminum production in 2024, and 42 percent of the world’s production.

Copper, the electrification metal, is most likely to stymie net-zero ambitions. The annual requirement for global net-zero would total 20 million metric tons — whereas global production in 2024 only totaled 23 million metric tons. With copper in demand for other uses like electronics, plumbing, and construction, it simply isn’t feasible to dedicate almost all of the world’s copper each year to net-zero technology.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated in 2023 that a U.S. net-zero economy would require a threefold increase in wind energy deployment. That would entail annual demand for nickel of 1,200 percent of 2020 U.S. production. Balsa, a lightweight hardwood in turbine blades, would reach 520 percent of global production annually. The demand for copper for wind turbines alone would reach 30 percent of 2020 U.S. production annually.

Solar panels, which need a wide variety of materials, would also heavily contribute to material demand. If the U.S. were to build the 1,600 gigawatts (GW) of solar that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimated it needs for a decarbonized grid (alongside other sources), this would require annual demands of 3.3 million metric tons of steel, 2.41 million metric tons of concrete, 1.5 million metric tons of other metals and alloys, and 4.3 million metric tons of other materials.

Nuclear is, by a wide margin, the least material-intensive per GW of capacity, especially for steel, concrete, and copper. The energy-density of uranium means that a typical one GW reactor produces the same amount of power as 431 utility-scale wind turbines or 3.125 million photovoltaic (PV) panels. Powering a one-GW nuclear plant for one year produces less than one metric ton of high-level waste, which requires cooling and shielding.

‘Not in Our Backyard’ means squatting in someone else’s

In February 2025, a tailings dam holding acidic waste from a Chinese-owned and operated copper mine contaminated the Kafue River in Zambia. The river supplies drinking water for about five million people in the region.

All sources of energy require the extraction of raw materials, whether it is coal or natural gas for traditional energy sources, uranium for nuclear reactors, or copper, nickel, and cobalt for wind and solar technology. The question is whether these materials are mined safely, under stringent environmental and worker health and safety regulations in the U.S. and other developed countries — or whether the U.S. offshores the consequences to other countries.

Another example, from March 2025, is the breach of multiple tailings storage facilities at an Indonesian nickel-cobalt mine. The heavy metals washing into the river endangered the health of workers and 341 families in the neighboring village of Labota. A subsequent tailings facility collapsed later in March, killing one worker and leaving another two missing.

A 2024 Department of Labor analysis of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s cobalt workers found 44 percent could not refuse hazardous work, 85 percent reported restrictions on their movement, and 52 percent reported children working at their mine site, especially artisanal mines (63 percent).

In Undermining Power: How to Overthrow Mineral, Energy, Economic & National Security Disinformation, the authors write that, “No one would dispute that a highly automated, environmentally sound facility in Wyoming or Texas is vastly preferable to un-regulated, environmentally disastrous mines in remote countries.” The U.S. makes a value judgment each time it decides it would rather offshore a mining project than do it domestically under high environmental and worker health and safety standards.

Wildlife is collateral in pursuit of green dreams

The tangible ways in which Americans interact with and enjoy the natural environment should not be sidelined by the wide-scale deployment of wind turbines and solar panels. Unfortunately, these technologies pose risks to wildlife through noise, habitat destruction, and land development. An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure for vulnerable species.

Offshore wind turbines have faced scrutiny over their potential impacts on the North Atlantic right whale, an endangered species with only about 360 individuals remaining in the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) describe four stressors from offshore wind, including noise exposure, strikes from vessels, entanglement from marine debris, and changes to habitat. Assessing these risks, NOAA and BOEM aim to avoid “issuing new leasing in areas that may impact potential high-value habitat” for the right whale but also assert that “there are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”

Concerns have only grown after two decomposing whales washed up near Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts in 2023, a mere week after the U.S.’ first utility-scale wind farm, Vineyard Wind, began construction nearby. NOAA determined the official cause of death of one of the whales, identified as #5120, to be chronic entanglement.

Onshore wind also poses risks to bats and birds, which are susceptible to direct collisions with turbine blades as well as habitat loss, fragmentation, and displacement. One migratory bat species, the hoary bat, could see population declines “by as much as 90 percent in the next 50 years.” The study authors state that “conservation measures to reduce mortality from turbine collisions” must happen soon.

Wind turbines strike many birds every year, likely between half a million to one million in the U.S. alone. Other estimates suggest U.S. median annual fatalities of 1.8 birds per MW of wind capacity, though both may be significant underestimates due to study methods. What matters more than quantity is that birds of prey, seabirds, and shorebirds, which are slow to reproduce and more vulnerable, are victims of wind turbine strikes more often than other species.

Solar panels aren’t blameless, either, as birds and bats can collide with solar panel equipment and transmission lines. One estimate from California alone suggests annual fatalities of 267,000 birds and 11,000 bats due to solar panels, and that construction grading for solar eliminates the habitat of 300,000 birds annually in the state. Solar panels may also create a “lake effect,” because the reflectiveness of utility-scale panels resembles bodies of water. Some solar facilities using massive mirrors incinerate birds that get too close — the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert is responsible for at least 6,000 incinerated birds every year.

Is it worth sacrificing concrete environmental goals, like protecting endangered and threatened species, biodiversity, and habitats, for energy from low-density, intermittent sources that kill and disturb marine life, birds, and bats in the process?

Going green needs massive land footprints

Wind turbines and solar panels face a fundamental physics problem: Their low energy density means that more land area must be dedicated to electricity production than energy-dense sources like coal, natural gas, and nuclear. This has predictable consequences when it comes to other uses of land, like agriculture and grazing.

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 — about twice the capacity of the Prairie Island nuclear plant in Red Wing, which hosts the two smallest operating reactors in the U.S. Comparable electricity generation from solar would need between 45 and 75 square miles, and wind would need between 260 and 3,360 square miles.

A 2010 estimate from Canadian scientist and distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba Vaclav Smil suggests that if the U.S. were to rely entirely on wind turbines for its electricity, we would need about 1.8 terawatts of new generating capacity over 900,000 square kilometers — about twice the size of the state of California.

One peer-reviewed study estimates the land area needed under 10 global renewable energy scenarios. All scenarios would expect land use for electricity generation to at least double, and one scenario would require between 500 and 900 million hectares by 2030. One author of the study puts it aptly: “the latter figure is roughly the same as the total land area of the United States!”

With few exceptions, land that is being used for electricity generation isn’t useful for anything else, though collocating farms with wind turbines and installing solar panels in “dual use” areas like parking garages and rooftops may work for certain applications. Agricultural concerns are compounded considering that 83 percent of new solar projects are installed on farmland.

Local surface temperatures could be affected, too. A 2018 study by Harvard University researchers suggests that large-scale renewable deployment in the U.S. would increase average surface temperatures over the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius, or 0.432 degrees Fahrenheit. The study authors say that the warming effect is “actually larger than the effect of reduced emissions for the first century of its operation.”

The physics of energy density means that the footprint of wind and solar in the U.S. could grow so large that it sacrifices too many other worthwhile uses of land.

The garbage left behind

What happens when wind and solar facilities reach the end of their useful life? Wind turbines only last for 20 years and solar panels for only 25 years, while coal and natural gas plants have operational lifespans up to 60 years and nuclear up to 80 years.

The generating output of wind turbines declines over time, which means repowering occurs well before their expected useful lives. In 2021, the Department of Energy found that partially repowered turbines ranged between nine and 16 years old, with a median age of 10 years. This is primarily motivated by financial and regulatory reasons, including “to re-qualify for the [Production Tax Credit].”

Decommissioning wind installations entails six months to two years of work, with large concrete foundations usually remaining in the ground instead of being removed. Wind turbine blades are made of fiberglass or carbon fiber, both challenging and uneconomic to recycle, which means 2.2 million tons of wind turbine blades will enter landfills by 2050.

Solar panels face similar challenges and replacement incentives, with U.S. waste expected to total between seven and 10 million tons by 2050. Only about 10 percent of solar panels are recycled today due to cost ineffectiveness, despite 85 percent of the panels being recyclable materials like glass and plastic. Degraded solar panels are often shipped overseas to operate at lower efficiency, but this is just exporting, not solving, disposal or recycling hazards.

Battery storage systems must also be recycled or correctly disposed of to avoid toxic chemicals from leaching into the environment. Recyclers are not yet prepared to handle the module-sized batteries found in grid-scale backups or electric vehicles. The chemicals in lithium-ion batteries may also cause fires due to thermal runaway, which can happen when batteries are damaged. The Moss Landing battery storage facility in California experienced a fire due to thermal runaway in January 2025 that likely emitted heavy metals fumes and evacuated 1,200 nearby residents, some of whom reported feeling ill in the aftermath.

Conclusion

Energy policy should be driven by facts, not surface-level assumptions. All forms of energy entail environmental impacts, and an honest accounting of the negative impacts of wind, solar, and battery storage shows that they are far less than the unqualified good that proponents would suggest. The material intensity, land use demands, wildlife impacts, and lifecycle challenges of wind and solar may simply prove too much sacrifice to stomach.