Our electric utilities are responsible for delivering electricity to us.
They are regulated monopolies (no competition), and guaranteed an 8-12% profit by law.
The more they spend, the more they bill, the more they make. After all, a fixed percentage of a bigger number is just a bigger number.
It's in their best interest to bill us more, not ours.
The dirty secret is that wind and solar make our electric rates go up.
In theory, as a standalone source of electricity these methods should be inexpensive. Though that is only due to huge taxpayer subsidies, essentially our own money from a different pocket.
The theory falls apart though, because while wind and solar might be low cost, they are paid what higher cost electricity providers get paid. In reality, there are no real savings.
This should be changed, but that’s a discussion for another time. What’s important is to understand how wind and solar increase energy costs now.
Think of an electric grid like a busy family with two gas cars.
The cars are used to deliver people to where they need to go and get home again.
Electric grids are charged with delivering full-time electricity to our homes, grocery stores and hospitals.
Just like this busy family needs to have their cars available and working all the time, our electric systems need to work all the time to serve us.
For the sake of the analogy, let’s assume this family buys an additional car, one that is somehow wind-powered.
Like adding wind power to our energy grid, the family is thinking they will save money because wind is renewable.
But this new wind powered car will only drive when the wind is blowing, just like a wind tower only produces electricity when the wind is blowing.
Only about 30% of the time.
The family can’t use the wind powered car a whopping 70% of the time.
They cannot rely on it to get to work or home from soccer games.
Now let’s consider solar.
The family buys a solar car that works the same way solar panels do.
It barely goes anywhere for the first or last hour of the day, because the sun is not high enough in the sky. It doesn’t work in the dark at all or on rainy days, just like solar panels.
They find that they cannot take it to work very often because they can’t get home when it gets dark, gets cloudy or rains. It does work for them during the long sunny summer days. But hardly at all in the winter.
This family now has four cars they are paying for. They can’t get rid of their gas-powered cars because the wind and solar ones aren’t reliable.
Now, their car costs have gone up dramatically because they are paying for four cars instead of two. This is the fundamental problem of continuing to add more wind and solar to our energy grid.
Politicians and climate alarmists want us to keep adding these "green" energy sources that don’t work all the time. Because they are pretending that they can replace full-time sources.
But we have to keep the full-time and pay for the part-time.
Though we don’t think about it, electricity is a component in the production of almost everything.
As its overall costs rise, so does everything else.
One major difference between this analogy and an electric grid is that natural gas or coal plants must be kept running all the time.
They must be able to add electricity to the grid when the wind dies down or the sun sets.
It takes time to heat water enough to turn giant turbines that make electricity.
Particularly cold water.
If you need boiling water at a moment’s notice, you will need to keep it boiling all the time. This is what electric plants have to do. They don’t get paid to do this.
They could be selling this electricity to the grid but aren’t allowed to because wind and solar have first dibs.
Keeping the boilers hot all the time and selling electricity part of the time drives up the per unit cost of natural gas and coal.
Which sends more money to wind and solar producers.
Paying for full-time energy sources like coal, natural gas and nuclear electricity while also paying for part-time unreliable wind and solar is going to cost at least double.
Add expensive batteries, and all the costs of transmission to get wind and solar electricity from the countryside or halfway across our nation, and it will make our electric bills at least triple.
We can’t afford that. All to supposedly to solve a problem that may or may not happen 100 years from now.
There has to be another more affordable, reasonable solution.
Frank Lasee, is a former Wisconsin state senator and former member of the adminstration of Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis.
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