Wind and solar are bad climate change solutions for Tri-Cities | Opinion

On March 17, I was honored to be on stage as a panelist with Jim Robb, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), talking about the alarming increase in the risk of power grid blackouts.

NERC made headlines last December when it issued a press release along with a stop-light infographic indicating that about half of the U.S. power grid faces an elevated or high risk of blackouts over the next five to 10 years.

I let Robb know I appreciated NERC’s eye-opening infographic, but it may be understating the problem by characterizing the Northwest as having a “normal risk.” After all, in January 2024, we came dangerously close to blackouts, and a postmortem analysis declared the Northwest electric grid and natural gas pipeline systems are at “immediate risk with no margin for the unexpected.”

In its 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment, NERC attributed increasing blackout risks to several factors, including a significant surge in the forecasted demand for electricity and the replacement of dependable coal and natural gas power plants with part-time, weather-dependent wind and solar farms.

NERC is an apolitical organization, so you won’t hear it take sides in the increasingly heated debate over energy policies. So, I’ll be blunt and say what NERC won’t or can’t: Far too many reliable power plants are being driven out of business and prematurely shut down due to energy market distortions precipitated by outsized federal tax subsidies that overwhelmingly favor unreliable wind and solar power.

Yes, you heard that right — the growing risk of power grid blackouts is largely a crisis of our own making, fueled by self-destructive and absurd energy policy choices continually perpetuated by elected officials like Rep. Dan Newhouse and a gang of 21 House Republicans who have been publicly advocating to preserve so-called clean energy tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA).

The same IRA that received a no vote from 100% of Senate and House Republicans, including Newhouse, who in August 2022 said, “It is inconceivable that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle can stand behind a package that is so clearly detrimental to the American people while lying about the climate and economic benefits it will provide.”

Newhouse was right to oppose passage of the IRA’s “Green New Deal” which was characterized as the largest climate investment in U.S. history, authorizing potentially trillions of dollars in cash transfers from taxpayers to private firms.

But rather than acknowledging inherent deficiencies that can’t be fixed with more money, the IRA doubles down on wind and solar as foundational technologies while reinforcing the same political cronyism that is pushing the power grid ever closer to blackouts, while simultaneously driving up the cost of electricity.

Cost increases that are easily predicted and confirmed by actual results in Europe where dogmatic devotion to wind and solar in countries like Britain and Germany has been rightly characterized as “an act of national economic suicide in the name of Net Zero.”

What the European experiment with increasing penetrations of wind and solar on power grids has proven is that overbuilding these technologies to compensate for inherently unreliable generating capabilities, combined with the cost to provide reliable backup generation, means the cost of electricity can be expected to increase more than 5 cents a kilowatt-hour for every 10% increase in solar and wind energy.

Therefore, in the U.S. where wind and solar are 14% of our power mix and the average electricity rates are still relatively low, we can expect average industrial and household electricity costs to rise by over 70% once our grid hits a 34% wind and solar penetration level — roughly where Spain stands today.

And of course, we all aspire to a Spanish-style power grid, like the one that blacked out on April 28. After all, what’s a little catastrophic power loss every now and then when you are busy “saving the planet.”

Today, wind and solar account for less than 3% of primary energy globally and nationally, yet we are already witnessing growing backlash in rural America against the energy sprawl that pits neighbor against neighbor and deepens the rural-urban divide.

Here in the Tri-Cities, we have a front-row seat to the backlash and a case study in what I refer to as “green tyranny,” which is what can happen when you replace environmentalism with climatism, a form of secular religion that worships at the altar of CO2 reduction while ignoring the substantial ecological impacts of energy-dilute, earth-intensive wind and solar farms.

The last thing our community needs is “help” from Newhouse and the IRA pork he is looking to dish out to Canadian-based Brookfield Renewable Partners and other developers eager to blanket Benton County and eastern Washington with wind turbines and solar panels.

An “all of the above” energy strategy that continues to disproportionately promote wind and solar as foundational technologies is not a bold and rational vision. It’s low-resolution thinking, political pandering, and the very definition of crony capitalism.

Federal Production Tax Credits (PTC) for wind farms have been in place since 1992 and have been extended 11 times since their original sunset date in 1999. It’s time for elected officials to stand on principles grounded in climate and energy realism, and to stop with the empty promises of eventual wind and solar tax subsidy phase-outs, which history has proven never actually happen.

And as far as I am concerned, there is no such thing as clean energy, only tradeoffs. As for energy security and reliability, we need a “best of the above” strategy. People’s lives depend on it — literally.

This story was originally published May 20, 2025 at 5:00 AM.