Recycling uses even more energy than producing from scratch and also has a huge environmental impact from the (non renewable) products used in the process and never ends with a product that's as high quality as what it began as.
Remember the three Rs, reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order as the environmental benefits go down when going from one to the other.
It's a limited resource as well because the infrastructure is built using limited resources, the energy that gets transformed into electricity might be limitless, but you can't transform it once you can't built the infrastructure anymore.
We just act like it's not the case at the moment the same way we acted like petrol would never run out 100 years ago.
A waste is a waste is a waste, all energy production comes with an environmental cost. While we're wasting green energy our neighbors use dirty energy, if we stopped wasting 25 TWh we could sell the surplus to our neighbors so they reduce their carbon footprint OR we simply could have went without wasting earth's resources to create the infrastructure necessary to generate that 25 TWh.
Because creating more infrastructure to generate more energy is a waste of resources and still pollutes a whole lot even if it's "green energy"?
What do you think happens with the ecosystem behind a dam? See these lakes? Look at the scale at the bottom of the map to give you an idea how big they are. Well, they're not lakes, they're reservoirs, land that was flooded because a couple of rivers now have seven dams on them.
Same for solar panels and wind turbines, the resources necessary to build them didn't come from nowhere, it comes from huge mines that destroy the land they're on.
We're wasting the equivalent of Slovakia's annual electricity usage and instead of pushing people to start being responsible our government will just force the State corporation to increase its capacity.
What's funny is that if we were talking about the quantity of petrol that we use no one would question the fact that it's stupid to not push people to stop wasting it...
The 25 TWh includes waste by companies as well but over here the biggest commercial users generate their own electricity. Still doesn't explain why hotels and offices just leave lights on at night... Or why people leave lights turned on in rooms they're not in in the middle of summer while they're trying to cool their house using AC! My province is the world leader in private pools (they use a shit ton of electricity in a cold climate, 70% of electricity needs on average for houses that have one) at twice the US average (the leading country)...
Sure, utilities need to be nationalized (like they are here), it's still ridiculous that we're flooding land by building hydro dams so we can be the place where we have the most private pools per capita or people can run their AC 24/7 even if it's 20° outside... Instead we should be working towards getting people to reduce their energy usage.
Better than the alternative, over here it's so cheap that people waste it and the government wants to increase production instead of forcing us to be responsible. There's about 25 TWh we could save and instead we're investing to produce an extra 10 TWh from wind turbines... At least we're already 100% green, but still...
Part of the reason why you can't afford your bills is climate change and it's going to get worse, doesn't prevent people from taking their car to drive 500m to drop their kids to school!
I dream of a world where leaders realize that we all live on the same planet and everyone would would be much happier if we cooperated together instead of competing.