When President Biden speaks, there may or may not be any connection between what he says and the real world. Yes, you need to give every politician some time, as most of what any politician says will fall within the general range of political hype or hype. But even on the list of culpable politicians, Biden can take his lack of connection to reality to a whole new level.
You may have your own favorite among Biden’s absurd statements. To me, the most absurd thing is what he has been repeating for months, which is his energy plan, which includes expanding electricity production from wind and solar along with preventing fossil fuels, will save American families a very specific amount of $500 per year each. This claim has appeared in many places and many formulations. An example in State of the Union speech in MarchBiden said, “Let’s cut energy costs for the average home by $500 a year by fighting climate change.”
Anyone thinking about this topic for even a few minutes can’t believe that building more and more solar and wind power generation facilities as our primary sources of energy will dramatically increase costs. energy for the American people. Even in the early stages of the process, when wind and solar power are less than half of electricity production (and electricity then only accounts for about a third of total energy consumption), you clearly need to be fully backed up from a number of dispersable sources, almost always fossils. fuel, to make your grid work. That means you will have two completely redundant power generation systems, when previously you had only one system to produce the same amount of electricity. Two completely redundant systems can’t be cheaper than just one. Then, if you insist on phasing out fossil fuel backups and replacing them with batteries or some other storage, you have to add that storage cost into the mix. Readers here know that the backup costs for wind and solar power generation with battery storage are indeed enormous, potentially large multiples of the entire GDP of the United States. For more on that topic, check out some of my previous posts, for example here and here.
And this is not just a question of models and projections that can be argued. As more and more wind and solar power generation facilities are added to the grid in various places, there has in fact been an inevitable increase in consumer spending. Steven Hayward at PowerLine in a post on Wednesday reproduce the graphs showing the results for two of the enthusiastic adopters of wind and solar for electricity, California and Australia. Here is the chart for California:
As California gains more and more wind and solar power, its share of electricity to consumers is also on a strong upward trend, growing about 58.3% from 2008 to 2021. Even after that, Adding all that renewable capacity, California’s percent of electricity production from wind and solar in 2020 is still only about a third, according to a new report. February 2022 report from the California Energy Commission. As a result, California hasn’t even begun to face the challenge of phasing out fossil fuel production and trying to support the grid with batteries – which will happen when the percentage of electricity from renewables is not linked. continues to exceed 50%. But note the red dotted line near the bottom of the graph: 41 states with “low penetration” of wind and solar energy only experienced 9.5 percent growth from 2008 to 2021.
And here is a chart of Australia:
After a steady decline for decades, Australia’s consumer electricity prices have doubled since 2005. The doubling has coincided with the rapid addition of new wind and solar power generation facilities since the dawn of time. that point. And as with California, Australia’s electricity generation from intermittent renewables remains at less than 50% of its electricity production, meaning the huge cost increase inherent in eliminating redundancy. whether fossilization has not yet begun to any significant extent.
Similar patterns in electricity prices skyrocketing as renewable generation increases can be found in other places with high levels of renewable energy penetration, such as Germany and Denmark.
With these and many more like them out there, Biden continues to double down on his claim of a supposed “savings” of $500 per family per year from the green energy transition plan. mine. In one an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on May 30Biden put it this way:
Earlier this year, dozens of executives from America’s largest utility companies told me my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bill by $500 and speed up the process. our conversion process from energy produced by autocrats.
That line eventually got the Washington Post’s “fact-checker,” Glenn Kessler, on the job. Kessler’s June 2 work titled “Biden’s great claim for $500 in annual electricity savings.” Kessler began by following up a White House transcript of a meeting Biden held in February with the group of utility executives. No mention of the expected $500 savings in “annual utility bills”:
But when we locate transcript In Biden’s conversation with utility executives on February 9, we found no reference to $500 in electricity savings. This number is also not mentioned in White House readings of meeting.
When Kessler asked the White House about the source of Biden’s phone number, he was then referred to a report by the Rhodium Corporation that expected savings of about $500 per household by 2030 not from chemicals. lower utility bills, which is largely due to consumers switching to electric cars. Putting aside for a moment whether consumers switching to electric cars could save anyone as the government tries to destroy the grid, Kessler points to glaring flaws in Biden’s statement:
But he didn’t hear that [$500 figure] from utility executives. And the report he cites is not about household utility bill savings. Most of the claimed savings come from a reduction in driving costs. And the estimate is in 2030 – when he’s no longer president, even if he’s already served a second term.
Kessler then gave Biden four Pinocchios.
Read the rest of the article here.
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