As I have pointed out many times, every major advance in human technology has been accompanied by, and enabled by, an increase in energy density of a society's primary fuel. This has always been the case, as humans moved from wood and dung to charcoal, to coal, then to oil and natural gas, and finally (so far) to nuclear fission.
These are facts, and facts are stubborn things. But the "green" energy crowd, who are pushing for wind and solar power, are determined to take us not only backwards but catastrophically so.
At his Substack, independent journalist Robert Bryce has some interesting facts and figures. He begins:
As I explained last week, power density is perhaps the most important — and yet least understood — metric in physics. Indeed, many people who work in the energy and power sectors don’t understand it. In addition, the Iron Law of Power Density — which says the lower the power density, the greater the resource intensity — helps us understand why wind and solar energy cannot, will not, ever be able to power our society. In addition to their incurable intermittency and dependence on the weather, they require too much land and other resources.
That's sort of Physics 101. And Mr. Bryce has done the math.
Now, (Energy Return on Energy Invested) EROEI. The importance of this metric is obvious: we want maximum return on the cash we put in the bank or the stock market. We also want maximum return on the energy we spend. Just as it takes money to make money, producing energy always requires using energy. Whether it’s chopping wood for the fireplace, the diesel fuel needed to run the generators that power a drilling rig, or the electricity needed to spin the centrifuges that enrich the uranium fuel that we put in our nuclear reactors, we have to spend energy to get energy. And the less we have to spend, the better.
Here's that chart:
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) June 8, 2026
Note that the energy return on energy invested, from nuclear power, is far and away the winner. It's not even close. Wind and solar have a perfectly pathetic return on energy invested; worse than biomass, which is primarily wood and dung. When you're worse than dung, well, there's no coming back from that. Even early steam engines were better, but nuclear power takes the cake, and it's not even close.
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But the second part of this discussion, the kilograms of metals and minerals needed per megawatt of capacity, that wind and solar really lose out. Here's that chart:
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) June 8, 2026
Notice that offshore wind is perfectly horrendous, with onshore wind and solar not far behind. Even nuclear power, on this metric, doesn't do as well as coal, and natural gas, a secure, mature technology, is the winner.
Then, there's something called capacity factor:
Capacity factor is another critical metric needed to understand our energy and power systems. Capacity factor measures how much energy is produced by a given power plant relative to how much it can produce at peak capacity. Solar plants have relatively low capacity factors because the sun doesn’t shine at night. Coal and nuclear plants generally have high capacity factors because they often provide baseload power and their output doesn’t depend on the weather. The capacity factors used in the graphic came from a paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was authored by Natanael Bolson, Pedro Prieto, and Tadeusz Patzek.
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) June 8, 2026
This is the measure of the kilograms of metals and minerals per megawatt/hours of production, and again, candidly, offshore wind bites it. Solar actually comes in worse than onshore wind, with natural gas again the prohibitive winner: in fact, as Mr. Bryce notes, offshore wind requires 27 times the metals and minerals to produce one MWh than natural gas.
That's a prohibitive loss for those darlings of the climate scolds and "green" energy advocates. The numbers - the facts - are brutal.
Here's the thing: While nuclear power factors in the top spot in only two of the three metrics, that metric is a key one: Energy out vs. energy invested. That is energy density in a nutshell, and nuclear power, smartly applied in such new ways as small modular reactors, also has the strategic benefit of making it easier to decentralize our power grid. Instead of huge transmission lines running for many miles, small communities, like the one I sit in as I write this, in Alaska's Susitna Valley, could have their own local, high-density, efficient, and clean electricity source.
It's an interesting concept.
These metrics are interesting in particular because they take in two aspects of this issue: Physics and economics. The cost of wind and solar is prohibitively higher than traditional sources; if we take nothing else away from these facts, we must take that.
Every major advance in human technology has been the result of an increase in energy density of that society's primary energy source. This happens for reasons of physics, and as we see here, for reasons of economics, as well. That's something that the climate scolds and green energy advocates will never understand - but the rest of us had better retain that information and vote accordingly.
