The Patriot Post® · Biden's Green Grid Lunacy

We humans take many things for granted, with breathable air and drinkable water at the top of the list. Not much further down, though, is an abundant supply of cheap energy.

Energy heats and cools our living spaces, and it powers our manufacturing equipment and our modes of transportation. And it does so for relative peanuts. Next time you take your family out to dinner or a ballgame, think about what an extraordinarily small price you paid for the fuel compared to the meal or the tickets.

Yep, due to its cheapness and its abundance, we take energy largely for granted — or at least we did until Joe Biden took office. Recall that on his very first day, he issued an executive order shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline. That 1,700-mile pipeline, which had been green-lighted during the Trump administration, was expected to carry some 800,000 barrels of oil per day from the oil sands of Alberta to the Bakken formation spanning eastern Montana and western North Dakota, where it would be mixed with American light crude and then sent southward to our refineries in Texas. But Biden canceled it with the stroke of a pen, and in doing so he set the stage for a protracted war against fossil fuels and against American energy independence.

This is a self-inflicted wound, a problem entirely of this leftist administration’s own creation. And now, having failed to usher in our “green” energy future, Biden is throwing money at it. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the administration is focusing on building and deploying transmission lines, which transport energy from remotely located energy-producing areas to the more populous metropolitan areas where most of the energy is consumed:

The Energy Department on Thursday announced a new round of grants to tribes, territories and 11 states including Arizona, Florida and West Virginia as part of a $2.3 billion program designed to advance a key piece of the White House’s clean-energy drive. It is a fraction of the amount the government plans to spend on the grid in coming years.

The administration sees strengthening the grid as crucial to getting Americans to adopt greener alternatives such as electric vehicles that rely on the network, especially as harsher weather conditions from global warming make utilities more vulnerable. Increasing capacity also would help transmit the growing amount of wind and solar energy the government is encouraging as part of a shift away from coal and natural gas.

This is lunacy. “Green” energy sources are neither green nor energetic — at least not when we compare their density to those of traditional fossil fuels and nuclear. Instead, these windfarms and solar stations wreck the landscape for minimal and unreliable return, and they resist easy disposal and recycling due to the sheer massiveness of the former and due to the toxic materials used in the manufacture of the latter.

“Nationwide,” as the Journal reports, “renewables now produce 21% of electricity, while coal produces 20%, and natural gas produces 39%, according to the Energy Information Administration.”

Unfortunately for Team Biden, the insufficient density of renewable energy isn’t the only problem plaguing their fantasy of a green-energy future. As the Journal reports: “One of the most elusive pieces of green energy projects in the U.S. isn’t raw materials, labor, or even money. It’s a permit. More than 10,000 energy projects, the vast majority of them wind and solar, were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the end of 2022.”

How bad is this energy permitting process? This bad: SunZia Wind, a 3.5 gigawatt New Mexico wind project that would comprise 900 turbines and would be the largest windfarm in the Western Hemisphere, was green-lighted back in 2006 but only this year — 17 years later — received its permit to start construction. Is that any way to run a country?

Somehow, we don’t imagine the Communist Chinese have a 17-year waiting period for building new power plants. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more self-defeating “partnership” than that of green-energy leftists and deep-state bureaucrats.

Much as the Left wants to ram it down our throats, green energy simply isn’t the answer. As Robert Bryce writes in Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future: “The smartest, most forward-looking U.S. energy policy can be summed up in one acronym: ‘N2N’ — natural gas to nuclear. Natural gas and nuclear power are the fuels of the future because they have high power density, are relatively low cost, and can provide the continuous quantities of energy we need. In addition, they produce lower carbon dioxide emissions than oil and coal and therefore result in almost zero air pollution. N2N means using natural gas in the near term as we transition to nuclear power over the long term.”

The N2N plan, according to Bryce, is relatively simple: Use tax incentives to promote natural gas and nuclear energy; increase oil and gas production; continue to strive for energy efficiency; and continue working on renewables and energy storage technologies, such as batteries and compressed-air storage.

“People have lived and died,” writes author and historian Richard Rhodes, “businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the story of these challenges is the story of humanity itself.”

This is certainly true, but it’s hard to imagine a time in world history when a nation acted with such reckless disregard, such naked hostility toward its own energy interests.

There are many reasons for the American people to vote Republican next year, but perhaps none more important than the twin prospects of energy abundance and energy independence.