The wind blows and the sun shines without costing anyone a dime. Compared to fossil fuels or nuclear energy, which require mining and drilling, powering society with these free renewable sources of energy must be the most efficient choice, right?

So the thinking goes. But unfortunately, the thinking often stops there, before policymakers consider the problems involved in harnessing the power of the wind and sun.

You have to build wind turbines and solar panels out of materials that aren’t exactly compostable. Wind turbines, solar panels, and the batteries that prop them up are made of non-renewable, critical elements that must be mined from the earth, just like nuclear and fossil fuels. But given wind and solar power’s unreliable nature and low energy density, these materials are needed in far greater quantities.

The Iron Law of Power Density explains this fundamental principle.

“The lower the power density, the greater the resource intensity,” writes energy reporter Robert Bryce. Because solar and wind generate very little energy per square meter and do so intermittently, we must build substantially more infrastructure to capture that fleeting output. Consequently, significantly more resources are needed to achieve the same performance that a reliable coal, gas, or nuclear plant could deliver.

A 2024 case study from the University of Texas at Austin compared the entire life cycles of natural gas, wind turbines, solar panels, and energy storage. The study examined 18 kinds of environmental impacts. Wind, solar, and batteries scored worse than natural gas in most of them.

Wind and solar do have comparatively less environmental impact when they have been installed and are generating electricity. However, “most environmental impacts associated with wind, solar, and [energy storage] facilities occur during sourcing of raw materials, their processing and refining, and, to a lesser extent, the manufacturing of equipment. Many of these impacts are associated directly with local air emissions or particulate matter, NOx and SOx but also the use of water resources and discharges to land and waterways.”

Crucially, the researchers found that wind and solar are respectively 33 and 23 times worse than natural gas in terms of mineral resource scarcity. When battery storage is considered, their impact increased by orders of magnitude, making them 421 and 412 times worse, respectively.

“Although the combined capabilities of wind, solar, hydropower, and geothermal technologies have the potential to harness near limitless amounts of energy from our environment, they are not free from the limitations of resource availability,” notes the pro-wind and solar Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “On the contrary, the clean energy transition will require economic mobilization on a scale not seen since the industrial revolution, and will strain the global production of silicon, cobalt, lithium, manganese, and a host of other critical elements.”

Wind turbines and solar panels do not last forever, and disposal of these materials add to their overall impact. Although they are frequently marketed as having a 25-year life cycle, “repowering” (the replacement of critical parts) often takes place after just 10 years – precisely when the federal Production Tax Credit expires.

“In essence,” write energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, “the lucrative federal subsidies paid to wind turbine operators are creating a perverse incentive to prematurely refurbish or replace wind projects long before the end of their useful lifetimes.” Repowering allows wind turbine owners to exploit taxpayers for another decade, and the parts being replaced are usually the exact ones that use critical resources.

We aren’t remotely close to running out of fossil fuels, either. We have more than 400 years of accessible, proven coal reserves in this country alone. Due to technological improvements in exploration and extraction, “U.S. natural gas proved reserves have increased nearly every year since 2000,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

At the current consumption rate, the U.S. has more than 200 years of oil supply from technically recoverable resources, 130 years for natural gas, and 900 years for coal. Meanwhile, the wind will blow and the sun will shine into the foreseeable future, but access to indium (needed for solar cells) or neodymium (needed for wind turbines and EVs) is far less certain.

If you want to see a truly renewable energy source, look to biomass/biofuels. Generating energy from burning plants is what mankind has done for most of our impoverished history. We switched from biomass to fossil fuels because coal was more energy-dense, burned longer, and, as a result, was often cheaper. Today, popular biofuels like corn ethanol remain orders of magnitude less effective than wind and solar, let alone natural gas or nuclear.

Wind turbines and solar panels have benefited from the positive connotations of the word “renewable” for decades. The problem is that they aren’t renewable. You could fairly label them “alternative” energy, considering that a grid can’t primarily rely on them. “Weather-dependent?” Most definitely. But if wind turbines and solar panels qualify as renewable energy, renewables aren’t renewable.

Joshua Antonini is the energy and environmental policy research analyst at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He joined the Mackinac Center in May 2022 as an environmental policy intern and moved to his current position in May 2023.