Not so enthused about solar panels, or wind power

Solar energy is clean and free, they say. But if things sound too good to be true, you know they are fake.
Solar panels don’t grow on trees; they are manufactured and doing so creates the dirtiest hazardous waste you can imagine. Solar energy companies don’t tell us that manufacturing of solar panels is fossil fuel intensive, from mining of crystalline silicon and transforming it to silicon wafers and that they produce millions of tonnes of hazardous waste each year. The toxic waste is transported by trucks or by rail – running on fossil fuel – to places a hundred, sometimes a thousand miles away for storage and treatment. And they never mention problems dealing with solar panel junk.
I’ve heard the price of solar panels is cheap, costing 60 cents per watt. That is not cheap; it is price slump because demand is declining due to their impracticability and inefficiency. The solar panel fad is over. Suntech, world largest solar panel maker, has just filed for bankruptcy. Another industry giant, Germany’s Q-Cells, went bankrupt last April.
Same with wind energy, wind turbines don’t sprout from ground. They are expensive to build, require meticulous maintenance, and yet unreliable. Since wind current is unsteady, wind turbines are intermittent and need conventional power plants for backup. Moreover, wind farms are ugly (imagine if Don Quixote lives to see them) and they make humming noise that drives you crazy (Search Google for Wind Turbine Syndrome). Environmentalists would hate this, but we can always bulldoze a vast area of forest to build wind farms, can’t we?
People still believe in things that sound too good to be true. They fall for con artists and Ponzi schemes. Now they believe wind and solar energy are absolutely clean and free. I’ll pick a benzene generator over windmill generators and solar panels anytime.  
Somsak Pola  
Samut Prakan