Completely neutral polling from the Canadian Renewable Energy Association or CanREA finds that oh heh heh what’s this? “Canadians recognize that more electricity will be needed to meet future demand, but they aren’t prepared to write a blank cheque… affordability was Canadians’ top priority for new electricity supply, ahead of reliability, how quickly new supply can be built, economic growth, energy security and reducing emissions.” Gosh. And why would that be? But never mind, because CanREA provides the completely neutral assessment that “Wind and solar can provide competitively priced new electricity, while battery storage can help match variable generation with demand and support reliability.” So pay no attention to soaring costs and declining reliability as governments gamble on unproven energy sources. It’s all in the mind. Or someone else’s empty wallet.
Indeed, with the US midterms coming up, Heatmap had the gall to headline “The Battleground Districts Where Electricity Bills Have Surged the Most” and say “September bills in competitive Republican-held districts have risen by a median of 21% between 2024 and 2026.” On which basis you might suppose that voting GOP in a swing district was a good way to pay more for power. As they apparently believe since they also write:
“looking over the past 12 months, bills in competitive Republican-held districts have risen twice as fast as those in competitive Democrat-held seats (8% vs 4%). Overall, 22 of the 29 Republican-held House seats in active play this November are in places where electricity bills have risen more than 10% since Trump’s election.”
Colour us naïve. But perhaps it’s because these districts are in blue states subject not to the evil orange climate troll’s malicious ignorance but to the pure and noble initiatives of, oh, say, New Jersey’s Democratic governor and legislature like New Jersey’s 7th District, the first one they profile. Or Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor and legislature like Pennsylvania’s 10th, the second. Or New York’s Democratic governor and legislature like New York’s 17th, the third.
The usual suspects are still saying the usual stuff. Bloomberg Green, for instance, reports that “Clean Energy Is Poised to Set New Records in the US”. Which of course proves nothing except that governments are hipped on the stuff, especially as:
“There’s a clean energy bonanza underway in the US, with record volumes of renewables forecast to be installed this year – and then again in 2027, according to BloombergNEF. However, the rapid advance for solar and wind developers is being propelled by a rush to claim expiring federal tax credits.”
Wait, if it’s such a hot investment why would loss of some special tax credits spell the end? Maybe not such a recipe for low bills, is it?
Certainly not in Britain where, Net Zero Watch reports, “Households face debt ‘doom loop’ as energy bills rise”. The doom loop being something only people profoundly ignorant of economics could fail to foresee, and duly did. What happens is that more and more people can’t afford their power bills at all, and the suppliers are required by the same state that kept investing in “cheaper” alternatives and pushing up prices to add surcharges to customers not yet too broke to pay, thus driving them into the delinquent camp:
“According to The Telegraph, unpaid debts already add £67 a year to the average household bill under Ofgem’s arrangements. That figure could rise to £100 if arrears continue to increase, adding further pressure to households already struggling with energy costs.”
And they add drily:
“The warning raises questions about how quickly the Government’s promised reductions in energy costs can provide relief.”
About as fast as the last 10 times, we’ll wager. So tell us again how it’s big bad conservatives who push up energy prices? Though to be fair in Britain the allegedly conservative Boris Johnson was a major villain in this story, because in office he acted like a left-wing radical. (And to keep being fair, and borrowing a phrase from Maj. Dennis Bloodnok, he may not have been acting.)
The transition isn’t exactly a recipe for energy security either. And yes, when Britain’s Energy Secretary recites talking points about how “I’m 100pc confident that [the lights] won’t go out this winter” any sane person would run out and buy a portable generator. Especially since Bjorn Lomborg just pointedly pointed out that with this vast green energy transition:
“Currently, batteries can power the US for less than 18 minutes”.
And if you’re into the supposed simple physics of climate, he adds:
“To avoid blackouts, solar and wind need months of storage, costing trillions/ Fossil fuels don’t need storage because they are their own storage”.
In which regard we have to note Heatmap complaining that:
“Net Power Surrendered Its Clean Dreams to Data Center Demand/ The zero-emission pioneer is doing the dirty work for the AI boom.”
Now they do have a point in that:
“Net Power was founded to pioneer a new form of natural gas power plant with zero emissions, but it has given up on that technology and recently acquired 10 natural gas reciprocating engines that it plans to co-locate with a data center on the site intended for its first commercial plant.”
But they also miss the point:
“‘We believe the clean piece is important,’ Net Power CEO Danny Rice said during an August earnings call when he announced the company’s pivot to building unabated natural gas plants. ‘But just as it’s always been, it will only come at scale once society’s basic energy pillars of reliable, affordable power are fully in place. Power demand is outstripping supply today.’”
And um yes? Sound of penny dropping? Or roof if you knock out the “basic energy pillars” of “reliable, affordable” stuff that actually works?
An alert reader forwarded us the Manhattan Contrarian post from Oct. 18 “When Ignorant Ideologues Take Control Of Major Economic Decisions” and while we take issue with the pejorative use of “ideologue” to mean a person suffering a mental disease whose only visible symptom is that they do not immediately adopt our opinion when we shout it at them, we agree with his point about politicians in New York and elsewhere:
“who know nothing about how an electrical grid works ordering that the existing functional generation system shall be replaced within a few years by a new system based on intermittent generation from wind and sun.”
And we also endorse his analogy between their theories and Mao’s murderous “Great Leap Forward” with its crackpot innovations in agriculture:
“Places like California, much of Europe, and Australia are in the grip of the same fantasies. Just build enough wind turbines and solar panels and close down the dispatchable fossil fuel generation, and everything will work just fine. It’s not a lot different from a person who has never grown a crop ordering that you double your yield per acre by planting twice as many seeds.”
Of course nobody dared tell Mao he’d been wrong and millions had died because if they had, millions plus them would have died. In democratic societies you can say it. But like Mao they’re not the ones going without, they still can’t heeeeear you, and they blame Trump because wind is neither reliable nor affordable and he was against it.
As the Contrarian observed in an Oct. 21 followup “The New York Times Shows Democrats How To Run On ‘Energy Affordability’”, the evidence is clear. He himself had earlier:
“cited easily-available data from the federal Energy Information Administration showing that, among the contiguous 48 states, there is a sharp divide between states run by Democrats – which have the highest prices – and those run by Republicans – which have the lowest prices. The six states with the highest prices consist of California plus five Northeastern states that have joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in an effort to intentionally drive up their consumer electricity prices. The twelve states with the lowest prices are all solidly Republican with the sole exception of purple Nevada (where the Governor is a Republican). Prices per kWh in climate-obsessed California and the Northeast are double and more the prices in many Republican-run states.”
He then dissects the Times technique of picking a sad tale of two people with high energy bills in red Oklahoma, blaming them on climate change making air conditioning more necessary, and implying that it’s because Republicans are skeptics, without checking almost any of the facts in the story from actual temperatures in Oklahoma to energy prices and usage to whether a couple running one AC unit could really be spending $500 a month on it. As he writes:
“The Times is treating its readers like fools, as usual. How can Democrats possibly run on the issue of ‘energy affordability.’ It’s easy — by focusing on emotional stories that in reality have nothing to do with ‘skyrocketing’ energy prices, and by leaving out (or lying about) all the key facts. Meanwhile, there absolutely is evidence of skyrocketing electricity bills in blue states like New York and California, but for obvious reasons the New York Times chooses to ignore that evidence. After all, we wouldn’t want to slow down our ‘climate leadership’ agenda.”
Not until they’ve spent all our money, anyway.
