Renewable energy alone will not relieve us from the harms we are witnessing from the age of the oil-based society.

It may sound contradictory to open with but renewable energy is an urgent step that needs to have been made years ago. For over a century the world has depended on a finite resource. A finite resource where to extract it and consume it has had such an effect on the environment it has come to define a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

Renewable energy integrates our energy infrastructure into the cycles of replenishment in the natural world. rather than constructing an infrastructure as an externality to nature we must become integrated.

Many assess renewable energy for its cost saving potential and as a pathway to ‘open source’ energy production. These are important advantages for both commercial and household consumers following energy and cost of living hikes in recent years.

A fully renewable energy infrastructure eliminates greenhouse gases vital to none less than our species survival. But understanding the praxis that brought us to brink is the difference between an energy transformation and simply plugging in to a different source.

Theorist Ulrich Beck understands the modern world as one grappling not with natural risks but the ones it has created itself. While many benefit from the ‘goods’ of modern industrial progress the ‘bads’, the consequences, will soon affect all. The pursuit of singular goals – profit and expansion – and the over enjoyment of these rewards has prolonged high-risk activity until reaching breaking point.

This rationale was behind the reckless salt mining that caused land collapses across Cheshire at the turn of the 20^th century; why Wall Street traded on a housing bubble until the market was flooded with defunct assets in 2007. The sentiment was notoriously captured by Chuck Prince, then CEO of Citigroup“…as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing!”  In other words, driving a taxi towards a cliff edge to keep the meter running.

The crisis brough about by fossil fuel dependence is neither limited to region nor sector; the climate as we know it has changed. The ‘bads’ will be felt by all.
Renewable energy sources will not further climate change but many old harms and new risks still lie in wait should only transform our energy supply and not our tendency to dance as long as the music plays…

Intelligent PV integration

Across the UK PV integration has been impressively diverse. Last spring the Energy and Net Zero Secretary announced that all new homes would be fitted with solar panels. Agrivoltaics shows how PV can integrate into farms, doubling the utility of crop and livestock fields.

Expanding PV growth must not come at the expense of other measures of sustainability. When only one metric for success – profit, market share - is pursued the harms caused on the way become an invisible byproduct. Sustainable initiatives possess that same risks - if only energy output is valued in PV expansion, deforestation and de-wilding become likely means to its end.

Dependence on ‘resource hotspots’

As PV makes strides in becoming a key energy source across Europe demand for regionally exclusive materials. 95% of PV panels are built using polysilicon a resource that China holds 45% the world’s supply.

Investors have flocked to the renewable energy sector faster than supply chain assessments could properly take place. Reports of forced labour and child labour from China’s XUAR (Xinjiang-Uyghur autonomous region) in the production of polysilicon have damped optimism surrounding PV growth and show renewables have shifted ‘resource hotspots’ to new locations.

When a new resource comes into high demand the local environment and people often suffer. The area is turned into a high-extraction, high-production economic zone with social and environmental concerns pushed aside. Where there lie existing social tensions, the stake are raised to control the new resource elevating tension into conflict; marginalisation into suppression, expulsion, or genocide. 

The race for lithium

Echoing polysilicon, the emergent demand for lithium batteries have given rise to new resource hotspots in Australia, Chile, and China. While more globally dispersed, a concentration of critical resources habours social and ecological risks.

Lithium extraction has shifted environmental damages to the back of supply chains in the EV sector. The extraction process is energy intensive and degrades soil fertility. The globalised economy has put thousands of miles between manufacture and consumption; for EVs to be a genuinely sustainable alternative to ICEVs, there can be no separation between the supply chain and the final product.

‘The means are the ends’

Renewable energy alone does not solve longstanding conflicts for resources or narrow visions of success at the expense of other metrics. If pursued as a singular goal with an over emphasis on end user satisfaction many of the harms of unsustainable practises will be repeated. A deeper transition is to be made. One that believes in a naturalist philosophy and one of solidarity with the global community as a whole.

Sustainability is a process not an outcome. While the burden does lie on the corporations with the broadest shoulders to dissolve their world-killing practises. And to individualise the problem is part of the problem itself. You can thank BP for that with their ‘carbon footprint’ advertising campaign. Our part is to adopt a different culture and each uphold a responsibility, one that has fallen to us from hands full greed, to buy and invest sustainably.