Our electricity in the United States comes from a variety of sources. Those sources used to be largely coal, hydropower, natural gas and nuclear. The nuclear panic after Three Mile Island ended new construction of that cheap, dependable power source. Climate hysteria has pushed out coal and natural gas plants, replacing them with supposedly cheap and environmentally friendly solar and wind. Those sources are anything but environmentally friendly, and they certainly aren’t cheap when the subsidies needed to get people to even think about using them are considered. Natural gas prices can fluctuate, but generally there is an abundance and if production was really encouraged, it would be very inexpensive.
This chart shows the clear association between states that use solar and wind more extensively and electricity prices. We are experiencing this first-hand in Minnesota, as our coal plants are gone and huge tracts of land are eaten up for worthless solar and wind plants. There isn’t much sunshine in Minnesota right now, so you can imagine how effective those plants are, and the wind isn’t reliable either. So we end up having to buy power from plants in other states, usually gas or coal plants. It is just stupid. You can see from the chart that Minnesota has the second highest cost increase over the last 15 years, behind only looney-tunes California. On the other hand, states with below average electricity cost increases have stuck with gas and coal and nuclear if they had those plants. (WUWT Post)
The cost of electricity is a factor in where people live, but more importantly, where business and the local economy do well. Especially with the sharp rise in artificial intelligence demand for power, states with high costs are losing out.
