NYT: Republicans Raising Energy Prices By Shunning ‘Clean’ Energy

Did you know that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy there is?

The sun, after all, is FREE for all to use! Wind? It blows without our needing to do a thing at all!

You have to admit, “renewable energy” blows, although not quite how they meant. 

We’ve been lied to for decades about wind and solar reducing electricity prices, which will continue to rise because $550 billion of wind, solar and other green crap subsidies remain in the Big Beautiful Bill. https://t.co/V9VVrNqkrw pic.twitter.com/sAciatelrB

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) June 4, 2025

The New York Times is working hard to convince us that Trump’s attempt–and that is all that is happening now, because a lot of Republicans are pitching to keep much of Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” spending, and we will have to see whether they manage to do so when all is said and done–will increase energy prices.

It’s all based on the myth that renewable energy is practically free–and it is, if you exclude all the costs associated with it. 

Some renewable energy really IS inexpensive–Canada has low energy prices because it relies heavily on hydroelectric power to the tune of 60% of its power generation, but good luck building big dams in the United States. But if you look at wind and solar, they are “cheap” only because all the expenses necessary to actually use them are excluded from the calculations. 

And, of course, there are the massive subsidies, which hide the actual cost.

The cost of electricity is rising across the country, forcing Americans to pay more on their monthly bills and squeezing manufacturers and small businesses that rely on cheap power.

And some of President Trump’s policies risk making things worse, despite his promises to slash energy prices, companies and researchers say.

This week, the Senate is taking up Mr. Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, which has already passed the House. In its current form, that bill would abruptly end most of the Biden-era federal tax credits for low-carbon sources of electricity like wind, solar, batteries and geothermal power.

Repealing those credits could increase the average family’s energy bill by as much as $400 per year within a decade, according to several studies published this year.

Even the subsidies don’t really reduce the costs to consumers, as a quick tour of Europe will demonstrate. Germany has been on a tear building “renewable energy,” and now has the highest electricity costs of any industrialized nation. In addition to the high cost to consumers, the country’s economy has stalled and is deindustrializing because, well, it is way too expensive to build anything there. 

The UK? What awful policy have they not implemented? It, too, has skyrocketing costs. Spain? They can’t even keep the lights on. And without France’s nuclear power, the whole European grid would groan and the lights would go out.

There are few things so expensive as free or government-subsidized goodies. 

The studies rely on similar reasoning: Electricity demand is surging for the first time in decades, partly because of data centers needed for artificial intelligence, and power companies are already struggling to keep up. Ending tax breaks for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries would make them more expensive and less plentiful, increasing demand for energy from power plants that burn natural gas.

That could push up the price of gas, which currently generates 43 percent of America’s electricity.

On top of that, the Trump administration’s efforts to sell more gas overseas could further hike prices, while Mr. Trump’s new tariffs on steel, aluminum and other materials would raise the cost of transmission lines and other electrical equipment.

These cascading events could lead to further painful increases in electric bills.

“There’s a lot of concern about some pretty big price spikes,” said Rich Powell, chief executive of the Clean Energy Buyers Association, which represents companies that have committed to buying renewable energy, including General Motors, Honda, Intel and Microsoft.

A study commissioned by the association found that repealing the clean electricity credits could cause power prices to surge more than 13 percent in states like Arizona, Kansas, New Jersey and North Carolina and lead to thousands of job losses nationwide by 2032.

Notice who is funding these studies? Companies that made stupid commitments to use 100% “renewable energy.” This is just another way of saying “hey, we want our free money.” 

“Given rising energy demand, it is imperative that any modifications to the tax code avoid worsening the economic pressures that American households and businesses already face,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, wrote in a letter with three fellow Republicans in April. Repealing some tax breaks “would translate into immediate utility bill increases, placing additional strain on hardworking Americans,” they wrote.

Well, if Lisa Murkowski says so, it must be true. 

Now it is true that electricity demand is surging and that, at least we are being told, the explosion of data centers will put us in a position where demand will exceed supply. But if you take a look at what data centers are doing to ensure that they get a reliable supply of energy, it’s obvious that none of these companies actually believes that “renewable energy” is cheap or reliable. They all have generation capacity based on fuel because they can’t afford to have the lights go out. 

All those fields of solar panels are for show. Nice enough to have when the sun is shining, but useless as tits on a bull when you need 24/7/365 uptime. 

They’ll build those massive fields of toxic waste leeching panels, but it’s there for the subsidies and for the hoi polloi to rely on. 

Spain, anyone?

Electricity prices WILL rise in the coming years, but that has everything to do with the idiotic NetZero policies American industry has been laboring under for years. You can’t build new power plants in a month, and given environmental regulations, you have a hard time building them at all. 

One solar project is 17 years into its environmental review. It’s like they want us to freeze in the dark or something. They call it “degrowth,” as if becoming poorer is a good thing. 

In the real world, there are trade-offs, resource constraints, cost-benefit analyses, and no free lunch. At some point in the future, there will be fusion power, geothermal plants at scale, and maybe even pixie dust to power everything. But all that requires progress (or magic), and progress requires economic growth. 

Which requires reliable power. There is no such thing as a wealthy country that is energy poor.