No Free Lunch: Why There's No Such Thing as Green Electricity

Solar panels are touted as "green" electricity. But they have drawbacks--like using thousands of acres of farmland and being manufactured from toxic metals.

Driving through rural Michigan, dozens of miles from the nearest city, I suddenly run across a construction site. “Watch for trucks,” a sandbag-weighted neon-orange sign warns. I wonder what’s going on. A gravel pit? A new housing development? Half a mile farther, I slow down as the truck in front of me turns into a gravel driveway. And then I see them—solar panels.

What strikes me most is the scale. The rows of solar panels, glinting in the sun, stretch as far as I can see. I drive half a mile past the driveway and I’m still passing them. At that point I pull over to the side of the road and hop out to snap a photo. It doesn’t capture the sheer immensity of the solar field. Only an aerial view could do that. Of course I’ve seen solar panels before, but never on this scale—hundreds of acres, an entire farm growing solar panels instead of crops or trees.

Wind turbines--like these ones in Ohio--also use a lot of land, but farmers can grow crops between them. Their biggest downside is that they are intermittent and unreliable.

Back home, I flip open the farm newspaper and see a headline, “Nuclear Energy Is Farm Friendly.” Huh? Ever since I took a contaminants class in college and learned how cesium-137 from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster contaminated farms and forests and destroyed the local mushroom log industry, I’d thought nuclear power was the most potentially dangerous to farming. But this article points out that nuclear uses less farmland than utility-scale solar.

Compared to wind or solar, a nuclear power plant like this one in southwest Michigan (left) doesn't use much land. But is it a good idea to store nuclear waste right next to Lake Michigan?

Then I read a new book documenting the growing pro-nuclear movement, Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. It’s the most balanced discussion of nuclear power I’ve seen yet, but doesn’t spend much time on some of the biggest downsides of nuclear power—the environmental impacts of uranium mining, national security concerns because we import most of our uranium, and the fact that new nuclear power plants are so expensive that we’ve built hardly any since the 1970s. We can barely keep the existing ones open. And we still don’t have a long-term plan for storing spent nuclear fuel.

Hydropower is reliable, but building big dams like the Glen Canyon Dam causes a lot of environmental impact--and all the good sites have already been used.

Uh…are there any other options? We seem to have maxed out wind power, and that takes a lot of farmland, too. Besides, wind and solar combined can’t provide more than 20–30 percent of total electricity generation capacity without destabilizing the grid because they’re intermittent and unpredictable—and they're already at 17 percent. Hydropower can provide power on demand, but we’ve already used all the best sites for dams. Producing electricity with coal blows up mountains, creates hazardous sludge and ash, causes acid rain, and, of course, produces more carbon dioxide than anything else.

Coal has the largest environmental footprint of any energy source. The mountains of West Virginia are pocked with craters from mountaintop removal mining and with coal sludge impoundments like this one.

That leaves us with natural gas. That’s got its downsides, too. It’s produced with fracking, which sometimes contaminates groundwater. It’s a fossil fuel and releases CO₂ when it burns—although only a quarter as much as coal. But natural gas generators can do something that nothing else except hydropower is good at—quickly cycling up and down to balance load and intermittent renewables. That’s why natural gas is now our leading source of electricity.

Natural gas is reliable, domestically produced, and burns clean. That's why universities like Michigan State rely on it to generate power for their campuses.

Renewable energy dreams notwithstanding, our electricity mix in the US continues to follow an “all of the above” strategy, and there’s no sign that the future will be any different. The problem is that there isn’t actually any “green,” environmentally benign way to generate electricity. It’s a Pyrrhic victory to reduce carbon emissions if we still destroy and pollute the environment. The uncomfortable reality is that the only way to really reduce the environmental footprint of electricity is to use less of it. All the hype about “green” electricity has ignored Barry Commoner’s fourth law of ecology: “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

Here's what our electricity generation mix looked like in 2025: 6% hydro, 7% solar, 10% wind, 17% coal, 18% nuclear, and 41% natural gas. Data from US Energy Information Administration Electric Power Monthly.

As this table shows, every type of electricity generation has environmental consequences. None of them are zero-carbon, because the construction and decommissioning use fossil fuels. The ones that don’t emit CO₂ in the generation process (nuclear, wind, and solar) require environmentally polluting rare metals and produce toxic waste that can’t, as of now, be recycled.