Posted on 06/03/2022 4:16:05 AM PDT by MtnClimber
When President Biden talks, there may or may not be any connection between what he says and the real world. Yes, you need to give every politician some leeway, since most of what any politician says will fall in the general realm of political exaggeration or hyperbole. But even within the disreputable category of politicians, Biden can take the lack of connection with reality to a whole new level.
You may have your own favorite among Biden’s preposterous statements. For me, the very most preposterous is one that he has been making repeatedly for the past several months, namely that his energy plans, including expansion of wind and solar electricity generation together with fossil fuel suppression, will save American families the very specific amount of $500 per year each. This claim has popped up in multiple places and multiple formulations. One example came in the State of the Union speech back in March, where Biden said, “Let’s cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combatting climate change.”
It’s just not possible for anyone who thinks about the subject for even a few minutes to believe that building more and more wind and solar generation facilities as our primary sources of energy will do anything other than vastly increase the costs of energy for the American people. Even in the early phases of the process, where wind and solar generation are well less than half of electricity generation (and electricity is then only about a third of total energy consumption), you obviously need full backup from some dispatchable source, almost always fossil fuels, to make your electricity grid work. That means that you will come to have two fully redundant electricity generation systems, when previously you had only one to produce the same amount of electricity. Two fully redundant systems can’t possibly be cheaper than just one. Then, if you insist on phasing out the fossil fuel backup and replacing it with battery or some other storage, you have to add the cost of that storage to the mix. Readers here know that the cost of backing up wind and solar electricity generation with battery storage is truly monumental, potentially a large multiple of the entire U.S. GDP. For more on that subject, see some of my prior posts, for example here and here.
And this is not just a question of models and projections that can be debated. As more and more wind and solar generation facilities have been added to the electrical grid in various places, the inevitable dramatic rise in cost to the consumer has in fact occurred. Steven Hayward at PowerLine in a post on Wednesday reproduces graphs showing the results for two of the most enthusiastic adopters of the wind and sun for electricity, California and Australia. Here is the chart for California:
As California has added more and more wind and solar generation, its electricity rates to the consumer have followed a sharply increasing pattern, up some 58.3% from 2008 to 2021. Even after adding all that renewable capacity, the percent of California’s electricity production from the wind and sun in 2020 was still only about a third, according to a February 2022 Report from the California Energy Commission. Thus California has not yet even begun to confront the challenge of phasing out fossil fuel production and trying to back up its electricity grid with batteries — that will occur when the percentage of electricity from intermittent renewables gets past 50%. But note that dotted red line near the bottom of the chart: the 41 states with “low penetration” of wind and solar generation only had rate increases of 9.5% between 2008 and 2021.
And here’s the chart for Australia:
After declining gradually for decades, Australia’s consumer electricity prices have about doubled since 2005. The doubling coincides with the rapid addition of new wind and solar generation facilities since that time. And as with California, Australia’s generation from the intermittent renewables remains well below 50% of electricity generation, meaning that again the vast cost increases inherent in phasing out fossil fuel backup have not yet begun to hit to any significant degree.
Similar patterns of electricity prices soaring as renewable generation increases can be found in other places with high penetration of renewables, for example Germany and Denmark.
With these data and plenty more like them out there, Biden continues to double down on his assertion of the supposed $500 per family per year “savings” from his plan for green energy transition. In a an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on May 30, Biden put it this way:
A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats.
That line finally got the Washington Post’s “fact checker,” Glenn Kessler, on the job. Kessler’s June 2 piece has the headline “Biden’s fantastical claim of $500 in annual utility savings.” Kessler started by tracking down a White House transcript of the meeting that Biden held in February with the group of utility executives. There was no mention at all of a supposed $500 projected saving in “annual utility bills”:
But when we located the transcript of Biden’s conversation with utility executives on Feb. 9, we found no reference to $500 in utility savings. The figure was also not mentioned in the White House readout of the meeting.
When Kessler asked the White House for the source of Biden’s number, he was then referred to a report of something called Rhodium Group that projected an approximate $500 per household saving by 2030 not from lower utility bills, but largely from consumers switching to electric cars. Putting aside for a moment whether consumers switching to electric cars could save anybody any money as the government strives to destroy the electrical grid, Kessler points to these obvious flaws in Biden’s statement:
But he didn’t hear that [$500 figure] from utility executives. And the report he is citing is not about household utility-bill savings. Most of the claimed savings comes from the reduced cost of driving. And the estimate is for 2030 — when he would no longer be president, even if he served a second term.
Kessler then awards Biden four Pinocchios. And that’s without even figuring out that Biden’s plan to add more wind and solar to the grid is guaranteed to make electricity prices soar.
Energy prices would go down under Xao Bai-Dung’s plan the way health insurance costs went down under 0bamacare.
I use nuclear energy...
The fix is in. Everything generating power no matter what the fuel, increases in price.
Meanwhile as Bloomberg reports China will build 150 nuclear plants in the next 15 years. So China will have cheap and plentiful and clean electric energy while we build expensive whirligigs to kill birds.
What we are witnessing is the collapse of the new information-age economy compared to the “old” economy of making stuff, you know, like energy.
The main thing the information age has produced is information warfare. Widespread availability of information [good exercise plans, how to change your brake pads and where to buy them, where to get specialty tools delivered - virtually overnight] is a valuable thing. Infecting it with disinformation [where masks and don’t go to work, get your 17th fauxi non-vax shot because well to stop the spread] is a huge liability.
Who knew that Alex Jones was a prophet and not a nut job?
I use nuclear energy...
The fix is in. Everything generating power no matter what the fuel, increases in price.
Energy costs will go down to zero because there won’t be any with these idiots dicking around.
Shouldn’t the headline read “Biden’s Puppet Masters’ Most Preposterous Lie”? Anyone who thinks that Biden is running this country is delusional.
“The fix is in. Everything generating power no matter what the fuel, increases in price.”
Worse—”Migrants” increase demand!
During 2021, U.S. retail electricity prices rose at fastest rate since 2008Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook
In 2021, the average nominal retail electricity price paid by U.S. residential electric customers rose at the fastest rate since 2008, increasing 4.3% from 2020 to 13.72 cents per kilowatthour (kWh), according to data from our latest Electric Power Monthly. This increase is similar to the change in the U.S. Consumer Price Index, which was 4.7% in 2021.Prices for most types of energy commodities rose significantly in 2021, including the cost of power generation fuels, especially natural gas, which helped push electricity prices higher in 2021. The cost of natural gas delivered to U.S. power plants in 2021 averaged $4.98 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), more than double the $2.32/MMBtu average recorded in 2020. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51438#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20the%20average%20nominal%20retail%20electricity%20price,to%20data%20from%20our%20latest%20Electric%20Power%20Monthly.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for electricity are 426.36% higher in 2022 versus 1913 (a $426.36 difference in value)....according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $100 in 1913 has the same "purchasing power" as $526.36 in 2022 (in the CPI category of Electricity). https://www.in2013dollars.com/Electricity/price-inflation
For sure--Ron Klain does the thinking for the demented imbecile--even tells Faux Dr Jill when it's time to change Joey's diaper.
What the Dems and Biden/Obozo White House fail to admit is that they are the ones who are causing the inflated gas prices, funded the Ukraine War. Gas prices are the function of supply and demand and Putin got the funding for the Ukraine war when Biden destroyed the supply of Crude and gave the entire European oil supply to the Russians when he inked the Russian/European pipeline giving Putin 1 billion dollars per day to fund his war. American gas prices are going much higher because of all this lack of supply side oil economics.
Yes, but anyone who thinks Biden was ever someone who should run the country is also delusional.
Yes, but anyone who thinks Biden was ever someone who should run the country is also delusional.
His war on America is a complete disaster.
Here’s the way to cut spending on energy. It depends on using less of it, way less. Your standard of living must drop. Given the chouce between food and energy, food wins. Rampant inflation and hunger results in expenditure on energy going down, and use of energy going WAY down.
This is his vision, or that of his puppet masters since he’s a potato.
bkmk
It's intentional. Need more government to address the disaster.
Bkmk
Them alleged 81 million voters, yeah....
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