President Biden and his appointees frequently talk about a clean energy future in which carbon-emitting fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are all replaced by windmills and rainbows. But that future is a lot colder and darker than they admit.
Four million Texans found themselves without power this past week. Frozen windmills are not exclusively to blame, as some have suggested, but Texans are nevertheless getting a small taste of what it is like to live with unreliable power. For some of them, it is an unpleasant reminder of what it was like before they got out of California.
Federal and state subsidies have helped make the Lone Star State a national leader in wind power even though it is blessed with fossil fuel riches. Wind represents more than 25% of its generating capacity, and in warmer seasons, it works OK. But this winter, unusually cold weather hit Texas’s enormous wind farms and froze the turbines. The amount of electricity produced from wind suddenly plunged to levels 60% below those of the week before.
Frozen windmills are part of a larger problem. A nuclear plant was also forced offline, and the natural gas supply, delivered to the generators through uninsulated pipelines, was sufficiently disrupted by the cold that it caused the loss of one-third of that fuel’s much larger anticipated generating load. But the failure of windmills and their role in the subsequent loss of power are still important, because so many of them ceased abruptly and also because so many in the Biden administration have called for increased dependency upon wind power nationwide.
Biden administration officials have called for nonrenewable power, gas, coal, and even nuclear, to be shut down. Maggie Thomas, the chief of staff in Biden’s new Office of Domestic Climate Policy, stated flatly in a June interview that “there is no role for natural gas” in the nation’s energy mix, not even in the short term. She voiced this bizarre, extreme, and ignorant opinion even though it is natural gas that has allowed the United States to lead the world in reducing carbon emissions. The only way forward, she says, is for the federal government to spend heavily on converting 90% of electric capacity to renewables, which she claimed it can do by 2035 with no trade-offs at all.
Even if such thinking were not Utopian fancy, it would still risk relying on unreliable sources of energy without stable ones to back them up. Both Texas’s windmills and its gas pipelines can be winterized for the future, but no one can make the wind blow harder at times of peak demand.
In California, where the adoption of renewable energy has been a more consciously ideological choice, consumers pay between 60% and 100% more for their electricity than the national average. But worse than the cost is what consumers get in exchange for paying more. California has the nation’s least reliable electrical grid, with more than twice as many outages as any other state, including Texas and New York, between 2009 and 2018. Last September, one of the state’s utility companies was reduced to begging customers to set their air conditioning to 78 degrees or higher and turn off all large appliances. Rolling blackouts are simply an accepted part of life there, even though it’s 2021.
There is nothing wrong with adding wind turbines to a state’s electrical capacity. But both Texas and California serve as reminders that wind and solar will never be able to produce the consistent, reliable stream of electricity that a growing economy needs.
Fortunately, this is not a debate anyone will have to have. Emissions-free electrical generation using natural gas has become commercially viable and is reportedly already slated for use in four new power plants.
Ideally, this technology will end scares about global warming while obviating the conversion of the nation’s generating capacity to inconsistent sources such as wind and solar. The U.S. won’t have to give up its newfound status as an energy exporter, which would restore Vladimir Putin’s Russia to its former dominant position. All such benefits depend, however, on policy being determined by logic and measurable benefit rather than by reflexive adherence to prevailing green orthodoxies, as was the case in the pointless and damaging shutdown of the Keystone XL pipeline.
One would hope Biden could recognize a gift when he sees it, and that the die-hards he has appointed to his own administration won’t prevent him.
