Costs of Alternative Energy

Alternative energy is widely considered to be the wave of the future. As this world slowly sheds the ties that bind it to an economy driven by fossil fuels and pollution, the costs of alternative energy have to be dealt with.

First and foremost, there is the difficulty of making alternative energy economically viable. For the cost of building a small wind farm one could reasonably build several standard coal-burning power plants, and likely produce more electricity overall. This would have a grave environmental cost in the long-run, but in the short term alternatives simply are not viable economically.

A secondary problem is the scarcity of useful alternative technologies. California has expansive wind farms, so too does Denmark and other developed countries. It is easy for American companies to build solar energy farms, or windmills. But most nations do not have the technology to make their own, and they lack the funds to purchase them from overseas.

Another somewhat hidden problem is the scarcity of resources. Electrical circuitry and photovoltaic cells require special resources to produce. These resources, called “rare earth elements,” are difficult to find and unevenly distributed around the world. Despite having an abundance of nearly every other natural resource, the United States in particular has much less access to “rare earths” as it would prefer.

One nation has a particular abundance of these resources, and they are using that leverage to their advantage.

The People’s Republic of China has spent much of the last several years using its huge accumulations of foreign currency to purchase raw materials and natural resources around the world. At the same time, the nation already had a large proportion of the world’s available “rare earths” in its own backyard.

According to The New York Times, the United States Congress is already uneasy about American military dependence on Chinese raw materials. There is a potential that, if alternatives are not found, much of our “green” economy could be equally dependent on foreign resources.

Making matters worse, the location of these “rare earths” could not possibly be worse for the green movement. China has notoriously low environmental and safety standards. Chinese mining companies have polluted groundwater, destroyed ecosystems, gutted wilderness, and ruined farmland in search of “rare earth” metals.

In essence China is destroying large chunks of the environment as it feeds the industries geared toward saving the environment. When opponents to alternative energy argue that the costs outweigh the benefits, one need look no further than China for an example.

Rare earth mining companies have championed cleaning up their business, but they are still years away from implementing new methods.

Alternative energies are supposed to “save the world” from itself, but it is impossible to make reasonable headway if we sacrifice one ecosystem for another.