[Tell It Right]

I agree with you wholeheartedly, though I question how much the utilities willingly shut down coal plants. Here in Alabama Obama forced a utility company to spend a billion dollars shutting down a coal plant, building a natural gas plant to replace it, and reroute the transmission lines and such to send power from the new plant. Of course, our utility bills went up because of that. Yes, that same utility company every now and then builds a small solar farm here or there and touts its "green awareness". But it's small potatoes.

Maybe that's not the case in other states. I hear in other states it was a big deal (i.e. California and Texas) where they tried to go all-in on "green" energy only for it to fail bigly and have no fossil fuel backbone to fill in the gap.

By the way, I'm all for solar energy at the individual level. Basically, while the Dims make our power prices keep going sky high, I've put 10 kW of solar panels onto my house to free me from some of that burden. Sure, my solar is intermittent and will never fully replace power from the grid. But it moves the needle on my costs enough so that over half of my power is "free" from my solar system (obviously not truly free because I had an upfront cost). That lets me sleep comfortably knowing the Dims can't mess up the energy portion of my budget too much with their extra costs chasing their unicorn dreams of all our needs powered by dilithium crystals covered in tinkerbell fairy dust to save us from the invisible global warming scaremageddon. The extra costs I got from them shutting down the coal plant was the last straw in making me research if it was feasible to generate some of my own power. If they quit jacking up costs and power rates rise at only a reasonable 3% inflation rate from here, my system will pay for itself in a decade. Of course, if they make rates inflate sharper than that it'll pay for itself sooner.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Yes, "willingly" has multiple interpretations.

Utilities somewhat halfheartedly fought the Renewable Portfolio Standards that require that a specified percentage of the electricity utilities sell comes from renewable resources. It was easy to pay just enough lip service to those standards keep the loons at bay. But the companies are no longer run by engineers. The new top execs are lawyers and accountants who readily capitulated to the green crazies.

I spent about 30 years in the industry and saw it transform from a culture of "obligation to serve," engineering excellence, high availability and low cost to a crazy green culture. Fewer and fewer people were willing to say "the emperor has no clothes." The constant infusion of politics into every decision that used to be just technical and economic made me sick and I left the industry.