California’s headlong rush to replace its electricity grid with renewable energy has given the rest of the country a preview of the decarbonized future that President Biden and his revived Clean Power Plan envision for America. It isn’t pretty.
Before supply-chain woes and federal stimulus goosed inflation, California’s cost of living already ranked second highest in the nation. Enthusiastic efforts to rely more heavily on wind and solar power—touted as “cheap” sources of clean energy—have only made the state more expensive.
In 2015, President Obama imposed his Clean Power Plan to replace all coal-fired power plants with natural gas-fired plants and renewable energy. California said, “hold my beer” and passed its own Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act with even more ambitious decarbonization targets. To meet those targets, the state issued overzealous, poorly planned regulations that increased in-state electricity generation from wind and solar farms by over twenty thousand gigawatt hours per year. Wind and solar power now account for a quarter of California’s energy supply.
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