The Green No Deal

One does not like to indulge excessive optimism, but, by all the data we have, the Green New Deal has failed. Obviously, some benighted souls continue to run around with their end-of-the-world signs, but most people have figured out that the policies promoted by the GND are wasteful and inefficient.

It turns out that the Green New Deal is a formula for less energy at higher prices. How is it possible that we did not all see it at the time?

Case in point-- California. It has been a laboratory for green policy. The results are not pretty. They are, in effect, pretty awful. Climate change counts as dogma in California, and its application is killing the state.

Joel Kotkin tallies up the cost:

Gasoline in California, according to AAA, which tracks national gas prices daily, costs an average of about $4.78, compared with $3.16 nationally. The cost of electricity in the state is now the highest in the continental U.S., at 30.22 cents per kilowatt hour.

You might want to blame the discrepancies on greed — Big Oil practicing price gouging, as Gov. Gavin Newsom has suggested, and utilities lining their shareholders’ pockets. But at the pump and on your light and power bill, California’s high energy prices are better understood as a self-inflicted wound, traceable to the state’s quixotic green energy policy.

California practices zero-carbon policies. How has that been working out?

Overall, California’s zero-carbon climate policies — pushing EVs as your next car purchase and heat pumps to cool and heat your house — rely largely on electricity that in turn depends on expensive, and intermittent, energy sources, such as wind and solar. Come hell or high water, California’s leaders are trying to regulate, tax and incentivize their way to electricity that is 100% carbon-free by 2045.

Yes, indeed… renewables. It sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately, sun and wind are expensive and not totally reliable.

Funnily enough, the new policies create jobs in red states:

Worse, green technologies largely developed and embraced by Californians, such as EVs and their batteries, now mostly create jobs in red states. One reason expanding microchip firms, including Nvidia, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor, have located new facilities in Arizona or Texas and not in California is because of more favorable energy costs there than here. Electricity costs are a major factor in chip manufacturing.

There’s more to it. Excessive regulation and a bloated bureaucracy have aggravated the problem:

In fact, recent analyses say California will face “acute electricity shortages” over the coming decade. Not least among the reasons: a dragged-out, exorbitantly expensive and unpredictable permitting process; the difficulty in finding appropriate locales for wind turbines and solar farms; and, ironically, objections from locals and environmentalists who don’t want renewable facilities in their backyards. Case in point: Moss Landing, where a toxic fire in a battery plant, coupled with plans for offshore wind turbines, have turned locals against green policies.

Of course, the wealthy do not notice the high prices for gas and electricity. Middle income and poor people bear the brunt of the policies:

California can only prosper if it can develop affordable, reliable energy from all sources, including the state’s fossil fuel supplies. Without a change of direction, the trajectory is building toward a neo-feudal future — a state widely divided between the few rich and the many struggling.

As it happens, Europe has been leading the way in green policies. By adapting them Germany has seriously damaged its industrial base. And Great Britain is suffering bloated energy bills. 

As it turns out, renewables are more expensive.

Bjorn Lomberg reports:

Ask families in Germany and the UK what happens when more and more supposedly “cheap” solar and wind power is added to the national power mix, and they can tell you by looking at their utility bills: It gets far more expensive.

The idea that power should get cheaper as we get more green energy is only true if we exclusively used electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

But modern societies need power around-the-clock. When there is no sun and wind, green energy needs plenty of back-up, often powered by fossil fuels. What this means is that we pay for not one but two power systems.

Other countries have had the same problem.

 One study looking at China showed that the real cost of solar power on average turns out to be twice as high as coal, while a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels.

The country that has gone the furthest with green policies is Germany. As you know, it has been working out poorly.

Look at Germany, where 34¢ per kWh is more than twice the US cost and nearly four times the Chinese price.

Germany has installed so much solar and wind that, at full capacity, it could produce two-times Germany’s electricity demand.

In reality, on days with plenty of wind and sun, renewable energy produces close to 70% of Germany’s needs. Such days get excited press attention.

The press hardly mentions the days that are dark and still. Twice this winter, when all of Europe was cloudy and nearly windless, solar and wind delivered less than 4% of the daily power Germany needed.

Battery technology can’t cope: Germany’s entire battery storage runs out in about 20 minutes.

That leaves more than twenty-three hours of energy that needs to be powered mostly by fossil fuels. The result: during these lulls, Germany saw some of the costliest power prices, with wholesale prices reaching a phenomenal $1 per kWh.

There you have it. The Green No Deal.