The true cost of “renewables”.
The true rationale for “renewables” has nothing to do with energy or science - its politics and all politics.
“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” — Candidate Barack Obama,
San Francisco Chronicle interview,
January 17, 2008
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” — Candidate Barack Obama,
Same interview as above
“We’re going to have to cap the emission of greenhouse gasses. That means that power plants are going to have to adjust how they generate power … but a lot of us who can afford it are going to have to pay more per unit of electricity, and that means we’re going to have to change our light bulbs, we’re going to have to shut the lights off in our houses.” — Candidate Barack Obama,
Iowa PBS interview, November 9, 2007
So much for President Obama’s claims to be for an ‘all-of-the-above’ approach — these regulations are designed specifically to kill coal in American electricity generation, which will significantly raise energy prices on American families. This plan is the most devastating installment of the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy: it achieves their cap-and-trade agenda through regulation instead of legislation.
A study released in September 2011 by National Economic Research Associates, Inc. (NERA) paints a picture of the impact of the EPA rules on existing coal plants. The study concluded:
Over the period from 2012 to 2020, about 183,000 jobs per year are predicted to be lost on net.... The cumulative effects mean that over the period from 2012 to 2020, about 1.65 million job-years of employment would be lost. U.S. GDP would be reduced by $29 billion each year on average over this period, with a cumulative loss from 2012 to 2020 of $190 billion (2010$). U.S. disposable personal income would be reduced by $34 billion each year on average over this period, with a cumulative loss from 2012 to 2020 of $222 billion (2010$).
And those are conservative estimates; the NERA economists note that they do not consider several other variables that would likely drive the total costs and losses higher.
Those figures also do not include the costs that the EPA’s CO2 rules will impose on future energy production.