Obama’s Renewable Energy Fantasy

THE COMING DARK AGES: Obama’s Renewable Energy Fantasy.

On June 30, one day after the Supreme Court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of mercury emissions from power plants, President Obama committed the United States to the goal of generating 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. This would nearly triple the amount of wind- and solar-generated electricity on the national grid.
The EPA ran afoul of the law by failing to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before it acted to reduce mercury emissions from coal-power plants. There is no objective cost-benefit analysis that could justify the president’s target for renewable energy.
Recently Bill Gates explained in an interview with the Financial Times why current renewables are dead-end technologies. They are unreliable. Battery storage is inadequate. Wind and solar output depends on the weather. The cost of decarbonization using today’s technology is “beyond astronomical,” Mr. Gates concluded.
Google engineers came to a similar conclusion last year. After seven years of investigation, they found no way to get the cost of renewables competitive with coal. “Unfortunately,” the engineers reported, “most of today’s clean generation sources can’t provide power that is both distributed and dispatchable”—that is, electricity that can be ramped up and down quickly. “Solar panels, for example, can be put on every rooftop, but can’t provide power if the sun isn’t shining.”
If Mr. Obama gets his way, the U.S. will go down the rocky road traveled by the European Union. . . .

It’s not just the costs–which are substantial by any measure–of President Obama’s war on coal and other fossil fuels. It’s the negative impact on daily lives. When I lived in Ireland as a Fulbright scholar in the winter/spring of 2011, one of the most shocking things was the inability to buy a real and bright lightbulb. I looked literally everywhere–hardware stores, home improvement stores, grocery stores. But there were no bright bulbs to be bought, at any price. They were all these “energy efficient” bulbs– no brighter than 60 watts, and even those did not strike me as providing as much light as the incandescent 60w bulbs I had known back home.  It was so dark in our house–even with all the lights on–that I had to buy a little desk lamp with a halogen bulb, so that I could have sufficient light for reading.
So if President Obama’s agenda is to force the U.S. to go the way of the EU, energy-wise–with or without our legislative branch’s approval–be prepared for (literal) darkness.

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Posted at 6:19 pm by Elizabeth Price Foley