The technologies this administration has decided to pick as winners are, quite simply, losers.
The technologies this administration has decided to pick as winners are, quite simply, losers.
A mericans haven’t gotten much out of Biden’s immense spending on solar power besides a shattered power grid and a greatly increased risk of blackouts.
Biden has massively invested in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which pumped $369 billion in purportedly “green” energy sources such as wind and solar power, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which added another $550 billion in new spending for “equitable, climate-smart infrastructure.”
Together, these bills are a windfall for the industries that produce types of energy favored by environmentalists, but there’s surprisingly little in it for anyone else. The IRA massively expanded previous subsidies for solar power, providing, for example, a massive 30 percent tax credit for rooftop solar panels, with various options allowing for even steeper discounts. Today, solar and wind power get 250 and 160 times the subsidies per watt of electricity generated than nuclear-fission power does, according to Forbes. This is in addition to the almost $450 billion America had already poured into “green” energy between 2010 and 2019. For perspective, the entire annual 2025 budget of the U.S. Army will be around $186 billion.
“Since taking office, our administration has made the largest investment in solar energy in our nation’s history,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at a Georgia solar-panel factory last year. She touted the investments the Biden administration has made “to expand American manufacturing and increase demand for clean energy.” “There is a nexus there. When we talk about the relationship between supply and demand, it is real,” she continued, in her characteristic word-salad manner.
However, Biden’s key energy-related and environmental legislative accomplishments have decidedly flopped.
It has been almost two years and two and a half years since the IRA and the IIJA were signed into law. Despite the cash influx, solar provided less than 4 percent of total U.S. electric-power generation in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In another telling example of the administration’s failure, it took $7.5 billion in IRA funding to build just seven electric-car-charging stations. Even Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, was entirely unable to explain this, claiming that EV-charging stations involve “more than just plugging a small device into the ground” because they represent “a new category of federal investment.” Hundreds of billions of dollars spent for very little gain indicate a massive opportunity cost to Biden’s spending.
In his rush to pay back his deeply environmentalist donor base, Biden forgot, or didn’t care, that it’s impossible to economically store power for times when the sun isn’t shining.
In order for the grid to function, demand for energy must match supply. Demand is relatively predictable on both daily and seasonal bases, and the use of conventional power sources, such as nuclear energy and natural gas, can be planned to adjust output accordingly and meet anticipated demand spikes. Peak solar-power generation, however, occurs generally around noon on any given day, when electricity demand is at its lowest. When power demand begins to surge after 5 p.m., as most people return home from work and begin using their appliances, the sun goes down and solar output rapidly collapses. The same thing occurs during winter months, as demand for power spikes while potential solar power declines. Since solar and wind power cannot easily adjust output, they need greatly overbuilt capacity to provide adequate power.
California built infrastructure to produce nearly 47 gigawatts of solar power, giving it enough capacity, theoretically, to supply a quarter of the state’s electricity if it can operate “on demand” like conventional coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. But much of this capacity is necessarily wasted — and downright destructive. Solar power requires expensive and technically challenging energy-storage options to prevent it from being wasted or “dumped” onto the grid, which would cause prices to go negative and force other generators to pay for the privilege of generating electricity. The unpredictable nature of this process makes the electricity grid increasingly unreliable, recently triggering mass blackouts in California during an entirely predictable heat wave.
According to the Institute For Energy Research: “In 2022, the California [sic] wasted 2.4 million megawatt-hours of electricity, 95 percent of which was solar — about 1 percent of the state’s overall annual power generation, or 5 percent of its solar generation as it could not use the power at the time of generation and could not store it.” Last year, moreover, “the state wasted that much power in just the first eight months.” “But throwing away free power raises electricity prices. California’s average residential energy price was 11 percent higher in January 2024 than in January 2023. It also undercuts the benefits of installing rooftop solar.”
California’s surging power prices can, paradoxically, make energy simultaneously too cheap and too expensive. Solar provides just enough cheap power at inconvenient times to make building more-reliable power systems uneconomical, as it’s impossible to compete with the occasional “cheaper than free” power. Meanwhile, strangely, prices overall have soared for consumers. Many states, including California, have new net-metering policies, which essentially force electricity consumers to buy solar power when it’s available, especially from rooftop solar panels. This magnifies the power grid’s problems, contributing to a growing crisis.
Without government support via net metering, solar power is entirely unviable, according to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moreover, that support has incentivized a wave of shady solar companies, such as Sunnova, which — after receiving a $3 billion loan from the Biden administration — was accused of pressuring elderly dementia patients into signing pricey, decades-long solar-panel contracts.
At the same time, to boost demand for solar and wind farms, these policies have led California to aggressively shut down more-reliable, nuclear and coal-power plants. The promotion of green energy has tremendously damaged California’s electrical grid, placing the state at serious risk of mass blackouts to go with the current rolling ones.
The technologies the Biden administration has decided to pick as winners are, quite simply, losers.