@PuffyC ..
.which are several orders of magnitude worse?... This is only true if the view window is restricted to your local environment.
@Fuddy:
Good quoting. However, it covers only a small part of what the effects are in total, only the installations while they are in use. The valuation of the over-all effects can only be complete when everything is taken into account, not only that, that is in your direct environment and in your wallet. It starts with children mining the minerals (expected remark: that can be done industrially, but reality is that children do it, the same reality that also includes oil well accidents. Both should not happen.), then refining and processing them which uses so much energy that already there the energy balance goes deeply into the red and the use of fossil energy is impossible to exclude. Then follows the whole production process, which uses even more energy for e.g. melting the glass. How many kW is needed for melting 1 metric ton of glass at 1500Celcius/2750F ? How many windmills and solar panels are necessary for that, considering their real and not their theoretical capacity?
Then come the windmills, each made of hundreds of tons of steel and each with three enormous wings made of glassfibre in epoxy or PU resin. Making glassfibre also requires molten glass and the used epoxy resins come from fossil sources. The leading edges of those wings erode at a very high rate (pictures on google) spreading dust and particles all over the place and blown all over the environment with the wind. That degeneration can be so much that every few months a ton of epoxy and fibre is needed for repairs.
The actual sorrows while using them you already quoted.
Then comes the end of life. Solar panels are not recyclable at all. Windmills give steel, but the wings are also not recyclable and do not fall apart or rot away over time, so after 10 - 15 years thousands of these things have to be buried, just like spent nuclear fuel, only with a few tens of thousands times as much in quantity related to the amount of energy one can get out of each weight unit.
The argument that wind and solar are clean energy is as goal-directed as saying that an electric car does not cause any pollution; if everything is included and considered and accounted for, the balance is maybe even. If you say: "Ah, my electricity bill is almost zero, so I contribute to the green world", you are telling yourself a fairytale, honestly, especially when it is subsidised and thus paid for by everyone.
About a year ago I found a comparison of the total pollution, including really everything from zero to end of final recycling, of a gasoline car, a Diesel and a fully electric one, all in the smaller Tesla category; this investigation was not based on a statistical model but on real accountable data. Because of its production, the electric one started so far worse below the other two that only after 180,000km it came even with the gasoline car and did not reach the level of the Diesel until around 280,000km. (A good and well-adjusted modern Diesel is much more efficient and much less polluting than a gasoline engine) All that was assuming that the electric car did not need a new battery in that period. I did save that link of that investigation somewhere on my machine, but at the moment I can't find it; if I have some more time coming weekend, I will put it up. If you can't wait that long, google is at your service.
Geothermal: The only country in Europe that has all of its energy free from geothermal sources is Iceland. From what I know all the others, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, are completely dependent on gas and oil. In Norway they drilled to abt. 1,500 metres and there might be something coming from that, but it is still in research whether that is viable and can pay off. Here in New Zealand we get a bit less than 20% out of geothermal. The efficiency of 300-400% that you mention is a figure from a theoretically ideal expansion/compression heat pump at 20 Celsius environment temperature, the input of energy necessary for liquefying the gas by compression; into geothermal you do not put any electricity at all except for some pumping of water into the ground.
@Egon: No offense, but you did not answer my question and came with a value-free opinion. That is laudable, of course, but hardly a contribution to any discussion.
The real problem is, that by now there are 4-5 billion too many people on this earth, especially after the over-exploitation of especially the last hundred years. In the history of two centuries mankind has used the resources that have been built up over few million years and those are finite and not timely replenished in quantity. Mankind can try to stretch it with etherical efforts, but time will come that there really is no more energy and way insufficient food (the predator-prey cycle) and then it is back to living from what in real time is replenished, as in Roman times. Back to less than 1 billion people, left over after starvation and inherent wars. Don't come with something irrelevant that by then people will be able to live on other planets or in space; that is like in the fifties, when they predicted that by 2000 all cars would run their own atomic reactor. A fully recirculating economy is not possible, not even in the most idealistic survival theory; that pesky thing that is called entropy, losses that always and unavoidably occur, always wins. But I am digressing into philosophy there. Sorry.
