With many still living with little to no access to electricity, American politicians are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity with offshore wind turbines on the East and West Coasts.
The U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA) has already documented that offshore wind continues to be one of the most expensive forms of electricity generation.
Energy poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21st century. Electricity is the one of the simplest solutions to improved health, economic opportunity, education, nutrition, and comfort in the developing world, especially for women and girls.
In the world’s poorest countries, there are 11 million children in the world dying every year.
Those fatalities are from the preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth as many developing countries have no, or minimal, access to electricity or to the thousands of products from oil derivatives enjoyed by the wealthy and healthy countries.
The insistence that we should limit future access to electricity, fossil fuels, and the products made from oil derivatives has an even more dramatic cost, because cheap and accessible power, and products from fossil fuels are lifesaving, and one of the best ways out of poverty.
In the poor world, replacing fossil fuels with new intermittent electricity sources like wind and solar power is hard because most people desperately want much more power at lower cost, not fickle power at high cost.
A complex trade-off associated with policy choices of moving too quickly into intermittent electricity from wind and solar is that abandoning fossil fuels will further deprive and/or delay from providing more than 6 billion in this world from enjoying the same products that benefit the wealthy and healthy countries.
In the USA, that high-priced juice will cost ratepayers untold billions of dollars over the coming years. That means higher-cost electricity for low- and middle-income consumers as electricity bills are regressive expenses, meaning it takes up a lot bigger chunk of the budget of a lower middle-class family than it does an upper middle-class one.
The impact will be particularly hard in north-eastern states like New York and in New England, and California, where consumers already endure some of the highest electricity prices in the country.
Read the rest of this piece at CFACT.org.
Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.
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