Democrats have flirted with the idea of blaming Republicans for soaring electricity prices. Massachusetts wrecking ball Maura Healey gave it a whirl, but she wasn’t the best poster girl for the campaign. Her energy priorities haven’t just spiked electric rates; they are economically untenable. There isn’t enough money in all of New England to achieve it or replace it as it ages, or to address loss and replacement cost for battery farms that burn up – a common ecological catastrophe the Greens never talk much about.
Not just unreliable intermittent energy but reliable brownouts, blackouts, and an exodus of industry as job creators flee the unaffordable green energy plantation the Democrats have planned.
Unaffordable energy as a matter of policy is an unwritten Democrat party plank. Obama ran on ending coal, which was producing 50% of all the electricity in America, with no plan to replace it. Large-scale, pricey solar boondoggles made cronies and honors-rich while adding to the national debt. Solar made electricity cost more, even when subsidized, as energy generators scrambled to bring Natural gas online to replace coal.
Ironically, emissions went down because of gas, solar, or wind, but at a price consumers and businesses had to pay every day.
Biden rode into his gig promising to end fossil fuels altogether. The Dems pieced together Green New Deal ideas on the back of other omnibus bills, laundering more money to cronies while the regulators made doing business so expensive that, before Biden’s autopen finally went silent, only 20% of America’s electricity was coming from coal.
Coal was cheap, abundant, and it still is, but every plant that closed drove up electric rates. Unreliable and more expensive wind and solar could never replace them, but that was never the plan. The goal was, as with healthcare and everything else the government touches, to lower use by driving up cost. To make energy, like health care, air travel, and everything else, a luxury that the political class could dole out for good behavior.
Consider the priorities. Hydro was not counted as green. Nuclear was not counted as green, and they used the regulatory state and lawfare to make it too expensive to develop. Biomass was not green until they discovered it cost more and sounded green, despite being a significant polluter on par with coal. Higher cost was always the first priority, followed by unreliability.
Emissions never mattered. Biomass is very dirty, and Lithium storage, EVs, solar, and offshore wind don’t reduce emissions – they offshore them. The war on coal was about driving up prices and decreasing electric supply and access.
Democrats made electricity cost more. If permitted, they’ll make it even more expensive while making it less accessible.
To hide this, they have more recently been amenable to including hydro. They are willing to flirt with hydrogen, but that’s still very expensive, maybe, not because it is tennable but because it is expensive. Small-scale nuclear roll off their tongues, but they object to Trump and Republicans’ efforts to remove regulatory hurdles erected, not for safety, but to make it unaffordable. Democrats will say small-scale, then make it too expensive to develop.
