OPINION:
Prices are going back up. According to figures released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation has resumed its climb, hitting 3.7% in August.
This confirms the pain consumers have long been feeling in their wallets. In the past two years alone, monthly electricity bills have jumped 25% while the cost of gasoline skyrocketed 55% across the mid-Atlantic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Why is this happening? Blame the windmills.
One of the world’s foremost developers of windmill projects made a revealing comment in discussing its dismal summer performance. Orsted, a Danish firm, took a $2.3 billion hit to its balance sheet after announcing massive offshore windmill farms couldn’t be built along the Eastern Seaboard at originally anticipated costs. Speaking to Bloomberg, Orsted CEO Mads Nipper said it is inevitable that consumer energy prices will have to increase by double digits.
“if they don’t, neither we nor any of our colleagues are going to build more offshore,” he said.
In other words, windmills can’t succeed without a greater infusion of the public’s money.
On the other side of the country, Washington state’s new cap-and-trade program is doing just that: walloping consumers to prop up alternative energy. The scheme is essentially a tax on the most productive sectors of the economy, charging nearly $60 for each ton of carbon dioxide generated.
That burden is eventually passed along at the fuel pump, on utility bills, and in anything that is made, grown or moved by cars, trucks or airplanes. In other words, the scheme makes just about everything more expensive.
According to the excellent work by the Washington Policy Center’s Todd Myers, that’s equivalent to adding 50 cents to the cost of each gallon of gasoline. He noted that the Washington State Utilities and Trade Commission, or UTC, offered a tacit admission of cap-and-trade’s negative impact on bills for natural gas for home heating.
“The political cost of those increases mean that the Inslee Administration and legislators are denying the increases or trying to hide them,” Mr. Myers wrote, referring to Gov. Jay Inslee.
In approving a request by Puget Sound Energy to recover increased natural gas costs created by the new scheme, UTC commissioners blocked the power company from offering customers an accurate explanation why their bills were going up so fast, claiming that to do so would be too confusing for ratepayers.
Backers of alternative energy don’t want the public to know their power bills have to rise so that policymakers can force power generators to switch away from reliable, abundant and affordable energy supplies.
Almost 10% of the power bills for National Grid customers in upstate New York went toward “climate investments” in 2022. That’s an average of about $9.40 of a $96 monthly bill. In New Jersey, state regulators concluded that the governor’s energy policies would raise rates by 10% to 20% unless people use less energy and buy electric cars.
In an oversimplified world, a windmill appears to provide free energy that harnesses the power of nature. Modern economies, however, do not run on simplistic notions. Windmills have not proved cheaper than traditional and reliable sources such as coal or natural gas, which can operate around the clock. Windmills stop generating electricity when there’s no breeze, making the grid less reliable.
As Americans struggle to make ends meet each month, it’s cold comfort to know that misguided climate policies are playing a major role in their financial woes.
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