[Jeff] As a consequence of the big push for green energy,
wind farms were rising around the nation,
including near my home in northern Michigan.
[John Wozniak] We’ve done coal and nuclear for years.
We’ve been trying to get in more into the renewable side.
These are the largest in Michigan.
I think its 482 feet total.
[Jeff] How many yards of concrete?
[John Wozniak] It was 800 yards of concrete in the base,
right around 140 tons of resteel.
[Jeff] What are those blades made out of?
[John Wozniak] That’s all fiberglass and balsam.
They’re about 36,000 pounds a piece.
This tower will weigh 800,000 pounds when we’re done.
Then the cell is 220,000 pounds,
and the hub rotor assembly is another 160.
It’s pretty substantial.
[Wind blowing]
[Jeff] They were impressive machines.
[Wind blowing]
[Jeff] But is it possible for machines made
by industrial civilization
to save us from industrial civilization?[Wind blowing]
***
[Group talking together]
[Lowell Mountain, Vermont]
[Jeff] In environmental leader Bill McKibben’s home state
of Vermont, the Green Mountain state,
a site was being cleared
for the installation of wind turbines.
A group of citizens was concerned
about how the construction
might affect the mountains they love.
I joined them for a tour.
[Woman] It’s going to be 21 turbines.
[Group] 21?
[Man] Yeah.
[Man] On this project?
[Woman] In this project, yeah.
The estimate was maybe there would be three full-time jobs.[Man] If the goal is to try to make Vermont the leader
in climate change, I appreciate looking
to the sky in the hopes we can do that.
But more importantly, I’m personally looking
at the ground thinking, this is not the kind of legacy
I want to leave to my kids.
[Wind turbine construction site]
[Man] When I was a kid, we’d go hiking in these woods.
We would be able to drink from the waters
down the hill here, And now you have to question that.
[Jeff] And how long are these towers supposed to last?
[Man] 20-something years, 20 -–
[Woman] I know, it’s just a nanosecond.
It’s a nanosecond.
[Jeff] 20 years?
[Woman] Oh, it’s a nanosecond in the time of energy.
[Jeff] Has anybody considered
that this is mountaintop removal for wind instead of coal?
[Man] Yeah, and we’ve even had people say,
“If you can do mountaintop removal
in Kentucky and West Virginia for coal,
then it’s about time the rest of the country shared
in mountaintop removal, too.”
[Guard truck coming]
[Man] Uh-oh.
[Jeff] You think he’s gonna tell us to move out?
[Man] Probably.
The thing is that you’ve got
to have a fossil fuel power plant backing it up,
and idling 100% of the time.
Because if you cycle up or cycle down,
as the demand on the wind comes through,
then you actually generate a bigger carbon footprint
than if you just ran it straight.
[Jeff] Do you ever go to things where they say,
“That’s just not true.
It doesn’t matter; we’re gonna have a smart grid.”
[Man] It doesn’t make any difference. They still got to have it idling.
Because, let’s just say the wind stopped right now.
Just stopped for an hour.
You’ve got to have that power.
[Jeff] What do you do?
[Man] I’m an environmental health and safety consultant.
I usually work with businesses to help them do things,
but I would never work with scum like this.
[Leaves crunching]
[Man] [Crossing over orange tape line] You didn’t get me on camera doing this, did you?
Not being judgmental or trying to play God,
but we’ve got to deal with population growth
and sustainable resources. We’ve all got to cut back.
All this energy’s supposedly going to heat a water park.
We can find unique and different ways to waste energy.
This is not a Vermont company.
Green Mountain Power will be bought out by Gaz Metro,
and Gaz Metro is owned by Enbridge, as I understand it,
which is a big resource company in Canada
which is exploiting the PowerSands,
that wants to build the XL Pipeline.
See, it’s –-
[Woman] And they’re all in bed together.
[Man] And still we don’t know the whole story.
[Jeff] Have you asked Mr. McKibben to come and see this?
[Woman] He thinks anything renewable is good.
[Jeff] Yeah.
[Woman] That’s what I’ve heard people say.
[Wind blowing]
***
[Up tempo music]
[Jeff] I am in a strange position.
I’m against our addiction to fossil fuels,
and have long been a fan of green energy.
[Crowd talking]
[Jeff] But everywhere I encountered green energy,
it wasn’t what it seemed.
[Hydrogen car exhibit]
[Salesman] This is like a perpetual energy battery.
[Jeff] And where do you get the hydrogen from?
[Salesman] The hydrogen that’s in, the hydrogen is sourced
from any hydrocarbon material.
So you can get it from natural gas; you can get it
from any petroleum oil based product.
***
[Zoo eyes elephant poo as energy source]
[Jeff] I read about a zoo that was said
to be powered by elephant manure.
But it turned out the elephants
didn’t even produce enough manure to heat the elephant barn.[Zookeeper] Yeah, we don’t even really make enough
and what we had, elephant wise, couldn’t even do that.
We would need a lot more.
[Jeff] More elephants?
[Zookeeper] Yep, more elephants, or more manure.
[Woman] [Laughing]
***
[Jeff] Ethanol plants also seem
to have a secret ingredient.
[Man] This is the most productive farmland in the world,
and we’re not that far west of the biggest coal mines
in the world, as well.
So we bring the two together, and have an ethanol plant.
[Jeff] Great, so ethanol was reliant on two things:
a giant, fossil-fuel based industrial agricultural system
to produce corn, and even more fossil fuels
in the form of coal.
All of this in the attempt to replace fossil fuels?
It was enough to make my head explode.
[Pulsating music]
***
[Jeff] I was getting the uneasy feeling
that green energy was not going to save us.
And I wasn’t the only one.
[
Richard Heinberg, Author, The End of Growth] I’ve counted something
like 25 different alternative energy options.
So surely, among all of those,
there are enough sources
of energy to keep us living basically
the way we are in perpetuity.
But that’s not the reality.
Currently we’re getting, in some cases,
no energy from these potential options.
[Nature: Climate Change
Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?, by Richard York]
[Jeff] Richard York, of the University of Oregon,
published a study in the Journal Nature
in which he posed a question, “Do non-fossil energy sources
actually replace fossil fuels?”
[Richard York, Environmental Sociologist, University of Oregon] What we implicitly assume, often,
is that the substitute pushes out
the thing you want it to substitute for.
What you find is,
nations that add non-fossil energy sources do not seem
to see a particular suppression of fossil fuels.[Jeff] That’s pretty mind blowing.
You’ve got billions of dollars being spent,
and green energy is not even replacing fossil fuels?
[Richard York, Environmental Sociologist, University of Oregon] They don’t even know that that’s a question, yes.
***
[Nina Jablonski, Anthropologist, Penn State University] The story that we’re in, right now, is okay,
we’re in ecological hot water,
but there are technological fixes.
And if we’re just creative enough,
if we’re just ingenious enough,
and if we just work hard enough, we will triumph.
Seeking technological fixes, one after another,
is simply going to lead us to another level
of catastrophe, sooner rather than later.
[Richard Heinberg, Author, The End of Growth] We want to believe that these things are going to be available
for us, so if we get a little worried,
and somebody comes up with a new thingy and promises
that this will do it for us, we want to believe it.
[Guitar strums]
***
[Jeff] Because we’re a little worried,
are we desperate to accept any idea that sounds alternative,
or green?[Guitar strumming]
[Jeff] Are we avoiding looking too closely
because we don’t want to know the answer?
Ozzie Zehner, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley
and Northwestern University, was asking some
of the same questions.
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] I mean, I thought that solar
and wind were probably very good solutions.
I mean, it wasn’t really even that long ago.
One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion
that alternative technologies, like wind and solar,
are somehow different from fossil fuels.
What I hear a lot of times is solar cells
are made out of sand.[Salesman] Have you ever thought about solar panels?
The main ingredient
that makes them work is silicon, or sand.
[Salesman] This is the raw material chips
are made of, sand.
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] They don’t use sand at all.I’ll show you what –
So this is one of the ingredients,
it’s actually mined quartz.
[Rocks clattering]
[Rock exploding]
[Announcer] Spruce Pine, North Carolina,
regarded as the finest source of high purity quartz
in the world, for semiconductor, solar,
and communication applications.
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] You can’t use sand because sand has too many impurities.
So you start with very high quality quartz,
and a very high quality coal. And then you put
those two together into an arc furnace, and you melt them.[Saleswoman] The quartz is then melted with coal
in a large furnace, at temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees.
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] And so you need more coal to do that.
I’ll get another coal out.
When we melt these together,
we get silicon metal and carbon dioxide.
And the carbon dioxide just goes off.
And you got rid of the carbon,
and you left the silicon metal.
This is not clean coal. [laughing]
[Jeff] Not clean coal.
Ozzie Zehner said it was an illusion
that renewables were replacing coal, or any fossil fuel.
Environmental groups continue telling a different story.[Michael Brune, Executive Director, Sierra Club] We’ve already seen more than 25%
of the U.S. coal fleet has already either retired,
or is on a schedule to retire.
[Jeff] Coal plants were closing, but Ozzie explained
that well meaning people were being misled.[Reid Gardner Power Plant, Nevada]
[Man] NV Energy’s now going to go ahead and shut down the plant,
and go with renewable,
one of the largest solar plants.
And that is going to happen right behind me.
[People clapping]
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] Since you can’t replace a coal plant with solar,
they’re actually replacing the coal plant
with two natural gas plants.
And natural gas is a fossil fuel.This is the Las Vegas Co-Gen natural gas plant.
This is one of the facilities
that’s replacing the coal plant that’s being shut down.
This is the Sun Peak generating facility.
This is the second natural gas plant
that was used to replace the coal plant.
And you hear the same story in Iowa.
[NewsWoman, Covering the Corridor] Instead of using energy generated
by coal-fired power plants,
the solar farm will now avoid
about 2.1 million pounds of carbon pollution.
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] But then they’re building a larger natural gas plant.
This is a 650 megawatt natural gas plant.
That’s four times more megawatts
than the coal plant over there that it’s replacing.
And they’re doing the same thing in North Carolina,
which was that subject
of that Years of Living Dangerously series.
[YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY]
[Mary Anne Hitt, Director, Beyond Coal] Duke Energy operates a coal plant right
outside of Asheville that is the biggest source
of climate pollution in western North Carolina.
And we are working to retire that plant,
and replace it with clean energy.
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] But what they don’t tell you is
that we’re also building a larger natural gas facility.[Duke Energy Spokesman] So we’ll be retiring a two-unit 376 megawatt coal plant.
We’ll invest $750 million
to build a state-of-the-art natural gas plant.
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] When Michael Brune stands up and talks about clean energy,
he’s using solar cells and wind turbines.
[Michael Brune, Sierra Club] This is the new world [pounding on his heart]: 100% clean energy.[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] When Michael Bloomberg stands up and says,
“Cleaner energy,” he’s talking about natural gas.
[Michael Bloomberg] Create cleaner energy, solar, wind and natural gas.
[Ozzie Zehner, Author, Green Illusions] In fact, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign actually coincides with one of the largest expansions
of fossil fuel production that we’ve ever pulled off.
Most of that being natural gas.
[Jeff] Ozzie’s assertion that renewable were not replacing fossil fuels,
if true, would upend all of our assumptions
about green energy and what was going to save us.[Tranquil piano music]
[InterSolar Expo: The World’s Leading Exhibition Series for the Solar Industry, San Francisco, California]
[Jeff] What would happen if I asked the same question
to industry insiders?
Like, where do solar panels come from?
[Salesman] Well, you do have to start with a mine [PV Silicon]
[Jeff] Wait till you see my -–
[Salesman] [Laughing]
[Jeff] Or, what’s stopping us from running the world
on 100% solar and wind?
[Salesman] Well, intermittency is one of the major challenges.[Saleswoman] Good stability.
[Salesman] The sun’s everywhere, except when it’s not there.
[Adriann McCoy, Electrical engineer] There’s a lot of developers that were flocking
to California, wanting to connect their solar farms
and wind farms.
And the utilities would turn to me and my team
to help them look at what the impact to their grid would be.
[Jeff] When we add solar cells,
or wind turbines to a grid,
do we get to shut off a coal plant?
[Adriann McCoy, Electrical engineer] That’s certainly the goal.
The problem is,
or the different is that, renewable are intermittent.
All of a sudden, a cloud cover could come over,
and your solar generation could drastically decrease.
And if you don’t have something else there
to meet whatever the load is at that moment,
then you’re going to have power outages.
[Jeff] So we don’t get
to turn a fossil fuel power plant off
when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing?
[Philip Moeller, Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner] Well, it’s not that easy.
We need to be able to back up that power
to keep the system steady all the time,
so it doesn’t collapse.Most likely that’s through fast-acting gas plants,
but also what we call the base load plants,
either nuclear or coal that are on all the time,
but that maybe can be dialed down during the day,
and dialed up when demand starts rising.
[Jeff] Does it affect the efficiency
to turn fossil fuel power plants on and off?
[Philip Moeller, Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner] Oh, yeah.
They don’t like to be dialed up and down.
It does make, that’s wear and tear for them.
[Adriann McCoy, Electrical engineer] Turning them on, turning it off -- there’s energy used
and lost. And any time, kind of like when you turn on your car and off,
you use a little extra gas to get it turned on.
I do still think you have
to maintain a base load of some kinds.
[Jeff] What’s the solution then?
[Salesman] You need energy storage.
[Philip Moeller, Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner] Without storage, you can’t count on it.
[Adriann McCoy, Electrical engineer] If you can store the energy that’s created off
of things that are intermittent, like solar and wind,
if you can store that, now you’re reducing your need
for a base load.
[Jeff] But would adding storage,
like batteries, increase the carbon footprint?
[Salesman] Yeah, absolutely.
In a big way, actually.
And as more energy storage gets on the grid,
it has a mass scale implication.
[Piano music]
[Jeff] When I looked up how much battery storage
there is, it was less than one-tenth
of one percent of what’s needed.
In a couple of years, they begin to degrade,
and need to be replaced a few years later.
I learned that the solar panels don’t last forever, either.
[Salesman] Some solar panels are built to last only 10 years.
So it’s not as if you get this magic free energy, right?I don’t know that it’s the solution,
and here I am the salesman, helping to sell the materials
that would go into photovoltaics.
***