Green energy not ready for prime time

L et’s hope we can all learn something from this week’s experience that green energy is most certainly not ready for prime, as evidenced in the near collapse of the electrical grid throughout the Midwest.
    As a polar vortex descended on middle America, unprecented freezing temperatures dropped all the way south to the Texas coast. As temps fell, use of electricity to heat homes and businesses in the south went up.
    In Texas, which boasts of getting 40% of their power from wind energy, windmills froze up, cutting out a major source of power generation. Guess what—ongoing blackouts and complete power outages have crippled the state.
    How ironic that a state that produces so much oil and natural gas can’t fend for itself in this crisis.
    Just two weeks ago in this column we predicted that new “green” energy proposals by the Biden administration would push gas prices higher and higher. (Which is already starting to happen.)
    This week, that same “New Green Deal” agenda showed us just how unrealistic it is for the U.S. to abandon energy generation with coal and natural gas.
     All of these lofty goals of carbon-free generation are no more than a fallacy without reliable storage or the development of other fuels sources.Perhaps it’s time to re-develop nuclear eneregy production in our country.
    Look at our neighbors to the west in Colorado—they have banned any further use or mining of coal for the purpose of coal-fired energy generation after 2030. Tri-State Generation and Transmission has already started to decommissioning coal-fired plants and will retire two more major coal-fired plants by 2025.
    Ironically, a big share of that energy generated goes to the west coast, where they experienced a near collapse of their electrical grid last summer.
    It’s easy for the New Green Deal supporters to talk a big game about solar and wind energy and all the new jobs that will be created along with it.
    But it’s going to be a lot tougher when there’s no reliable backup sources of generation when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow.
    Perhaps if Washington would have to suffer right along with us regular Americans, there might be a more common-sense solution to this problem and all the other problems are country faces.
    We need to learn from this experience before we sell out future generations with ideals of the New Green Deal.