The Price Tag of a Green Energy Transition Just Keeps Getting Higher

October 28, 2021

The Biden administration is pushing lawmakers and regulators to move away from reliable and affordable fossil fuels and switch our energy grid to unreliable renewable energy sources like solar and wind. As we’ve pointed out time and time again, depending on renewable energy sources to power our grid will lead to energy shortages and blackouts like we’ve seen in the past.

The New York Times reports on these energy shortages:

Seven months after workers finished installing solar panels atop the Garcia family home near Stanford University, the system is little more than a roof ornament. The problem: The local utility’s equipment is so overloaded that there is no place for the electricity produced by the panels to go.

“We wasted 30,000-something dollars on a system we can’t use,” Theresa Garcia said. “It’s just been really frustrating.”

Eco-extremists are set on their path to overhaul our entire energy sector to unreliable renewable energy sources without the infrastructure to backup such a massive transition. The issue with renewable energy like wind and solar is that they are unpredictable. If the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, they can’t deliver electricity to customers.

We previously reported on how Europe’s poor energy policies to eliminate fossil fuels has led to energy price spike and shortages, “But renewables don’t provide reliable power around the clock, and wind power this summer has waned across Europe and in the U.K., forcing them to turn to gas and coal for backup power. Yet demand for these fossil fuels is also surging across Asia and South America, where drought has crimped hydropower…”

Renewable energy is so volatile that the reverse is also a problem: when natural resources are thriving and producing more electricity, it overloads the electrical transformers and forces them to shut down or blow up. Yes, blow up.

The New York Times went on to report, “During a heat wave in August 2020, an aging transformer at an electrical substation in downtown San Jose, which is about 25 miles from where the Garcias live, blew up. That blacked out the homes of tens of thousands of people, some for days.”

These electric grid overloads aren’t uncommon, and if the Biden administration plans to overhaul our energy grid to renewables, we’d have to overhaul the infrastructure technology of every electric grid in the country.

Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of Grid Edge, a division of Wood Mackenzie said, “It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade the distribution networks across the country to meet the country’s clean energy goals.”

The price tag of this green energy transition just keeps going up, and that bill is going to be pushed onto American citizens who will already be paying more in household energy costs.