A lot has changed since America began developing and building out its electric power system, nowhere more than the mandate for utilities and the public utilities commissions (PUCs) that regulate and oversee them.
A new report from The Heartland Institute details how the electric grid, originally designed and developed by engineers in conjunction with utilities and state PUCs to ensure public utilities provided reliable service at reasonable rates, has shifted due to politicians’ obsession with fighting climate change.
Achieving net zero emissions of carbon dioxide to fight climate change began to supplant providing reliable affordable power as a primary goal set for electric utilities.
Initially, as states began to push renewable energy mandates, utilities fought back, arguing prematurely closing reliable power plants, primarily coal fueled, would increase power costs, compromise grid reliability, and leave them with millions of dollars in stranded assets.
Politicians fixed all that with subsidies and tax credits for renewable power – reliability and affordability be damned.
Heartland’s report details how, in pursuit of net zero, utilities now champion unreliable resources like wind and solar. Because PUCs guarantee a high rate of return for all new power source (wind, solar, and battery) installations, utilities are proposing to build ever more and bigger wind, solar, and battery facilities. The costlier, the more profitable – regardless of their effectiveness providing on-demand power, or the costs on residential, commercial, and industrial ratepayers.
The net zero agenda harms the environment, undermines electric power reliability, human safety, and comfort, and results in higher costs for residential, commercial, and industrial power users.
Dominion Energy, for instance, is one of the most aggressive movers on climate-focused policy. Dominion CEO Robert Blue speaks excitedly about government-forced transitions to wind and solar dominated grids in interviews. And why wouldn’t he? The government has given Dominion special permission to kill marine life with its offshore wind projects that seems wildly out of synch with the alleged greenness of the projects. Dominion asked for, and received, special permission from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to kill and harass whales and other marine mammals regardless of their protected status.
Similarly, onshore wind companies have received special “take limits” from the Fish and Wildlife Service to kill protected Bald eagles and Golden eagles while prosecuting oil companies if a bird is injured or killed on their sites. This is especially insulting when a normal American citizen faces fines and jail time for merely picking up an eagle feather off the ground.
Industrial scale wind and solar requires substantially more land than other energy resources, disrupting ecosystems and destroying wildlife habitat in the process, making their environmental bona fides even more suspect.
Adding insult to injury, wind and solar are not dispatchable resources, meaning they cannot provide consistent power at all times it is needed. Worse still, politicians and utilities are pushing higher rates of electrification for appliances and vehicles despite the fact that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials have repeatedly warned in recent years that adding more demand for electric power while replacing reliable power sources with intermittent renewables is destabilizing the power system.
And, the evidence is clear that environmentalists and utilities are lying when they claim that wind and solar are the cheapest sources of electric power. Rates have risen steeply as wind and solar have increased. For example, Duke Energy’s customers in Kentucky have seen their rates increase 78 percent as coal fired plants were shut down and replaced by “cheap” wind and solar.
It appears that the utilities do not actually care about grid reliability or keeping costs reasonable, only short-term profits. It doesn’t need to be this way; in fact, the U.S. grid was not always this way. Only in recent years, with the obsessive pursuit of net zero, which will have no measurable impact on the weather even if it were achieved, have rolling black and brownouts become common.
Right now, utility companies are sending lobbyists to conservative policymakers in order to fool them into thinking that the utilities have our best interests in mind – they don’t. Meanwhile, consumers have less reliable electricity at a higher cost. Utilities should get back to their core mission of providing affordable, reliable electric power, and stop embracing and promoting ineffective, harmful, net zero ambitions that compromise their core mission, the very reason for their existence.
Linnea Lueken (llueken@heartland.org, X: @LinneaLueken) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute. H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., (hsburnett@heartland.org) is the Director of the Robinson Center.
This article was originally published at www.thecentersquare.com
