Are Green Pet Projects Delaying the Next Energy Breakthrough?
Joe Biden’s latest spending binge doubles down on decades of failed government policies, propping up the wind and solar industries while entirely ignoring vast areas ripe for potential energy breakthroughs.
Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act pledged to invest $369 billion in so-called “green” energy sources such as wind and solar power over the next decade, giving a windfall of cash to energy types favored by environmentalists. The IRA aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent by 2030.
America already poured almost $450 billion, even more than the amount provided by Biden’s legislation, into “green” energy between 2010 and 2019. Yet solar and wind power provided only 1.5 and 3.4 percent, respectively, of the energy produced in the U.S. in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration. The use of solar and wind power has either temporarily increased carbon dioxide emissions or, at best, been responsible for about 1 percent of the decline in emissions, a process much more attributable to the switch from coal power to natural gas.
Pumping vast sums of money into solar and wind isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, it has been going on for almost half a century, as government favoritism towards these technologies goes right back to the origins of the technologies. (In 1974, an economical solar-power device was the object that drove the plot in the then-near-future James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun.) The solar-energy backers were wrong, and their boondoggle has cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Today, solar and wind power get, respectively, 250 and 160 times the subsidies per unit of energy generated that nuclear-fission power does, according to Forbes.
Most of Biden’s huge bet on solar and wind power won’t pay off. America has long ago built up “green”-energy infrastructure in the low-hanging-fruit locations where solar and wind power make the most sense. This makes these power sources difficult to expand much further. But one beneficiary of Biden’s law will be the Chinese Communist Party, which manufactured 78 percent of the world’s solar cells in 2019, largely with slave labor.
Solar and wind are nearly useless for energy production because, in order for the power grid to function, demand for energy must exactly match supply. This rarely occurs, because wind and sunlight fluctuate with the weather. Power demand is fairly predictable, and conventional power plants, such as nuclear, coal, and natural gas, can adjust output accordingly. Solar and wind power, however, cannot easily adjust output on demand, as they are inherently dependent on external and unpredictable, natural forces. Moreover, the amount of electricity that wind and solar do generate doesn’t coincide with the times of day or the times of the year when energy is most needed.
Theoretically, the supply–demand mismatch could be solved with better energy-storage technology. But the improved batteries that could hypothetically provide a solution to that problem simply don’t exist, and arguably can’t, because when electrons combine with the lithium ions in a battery, they slowly render it unusable. The fact that environmentalists refuse to update their obsolete, decades-old beliefs doesn’t change physics. Pretty much every booster of solar and wind power is living with an early-1970s understanding of technology.
Perhaps the saddest part of the unending funneling of taxpayers’ money toward “green” pet projects is that it distracts attention and research resources from more-promising energy sources, potentially delaying the next big energy breakthrough. Consider fusion, for example. While solar and wind have been stagnating despite the tidal wave of investment Biden is doubling down on, fusion has made staggering gains with only a trickle of money and attention.
Investment in fusion power has gotten less than 1 percent of the funding that “green” sources have gotten, receiving only $4.4 billion between 2010 and 2019, according to a researcher at Stanford University. Biden’s bill provides no additional money for nuclear-fusion research, and much of the current investment into this potentially game-changing energy breakthrough is from the private sector.
Lockheed Martin claimed to have a strategy for building a compact fusion reactor capable of fitting in a flatbed truck in 2014. In 2016, researchers discovered a way to initiate nuclear-fusion reactions in a process called “fast ignition” by using a high-intensity laser, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A 2021 experiment achieved the milestone of igniting a nuclear-fusion reaction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California.
Fusion would be a game changer, as it lacks the public-relations problems that environmentalists have attached to conventional nuclear reactors: The process would generate essentially no hazardous waste and wouldn’t even require hazardous fuel. Operational fusion power would probably be so efficient that it would permanently put most other forms of generating electricity out of business, as it would likely be “too cheap to meter.”
Whether humanity’s next major energy advance ultimately comes from nuclear fusion or another source entirely, one thing is certain: Researchers should take an open-minded approach and explore every possible avenue to more-abundant energy rather than letting the government pick energy-industry winners and losers. Because the government’s track record demonstrates that it almost always picks losers, Biden’s green boondoggle not only is wasteful but may even postpone the next energy breakthrough.
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