The “rush-to-green” policies of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats are based on a false premise that intermittent power generation can meet energy demand in the United States. This belief, and its forced reliance on China for the components necessary to implement the policy, is detrimental to Americans’ standard of living as well as our safety.
As the chairman of the House Energy, Climate, and Grid Security Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, most of my colleagues and I support renewable energy from sources like wind, solar, geothermal, and, potentially, hydrogen. We also support clean, renewable energy that comes from one of the oldest sources of energy production — hydropower.
Renewables will be a part of our energy matrix, but they must work in tandem with always-on baseload power generation. This is due to renewables’ ability to only generate power intermittently, not 24/7/365. From households to municipalities to manufacturing, America relies upon always-on, always available electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Currently, renewables cannot provide that always-on, always-available energy that our nation requires. In its “rush-to-green,” the administration forced certain energy generation, like coal and natural gas, to be taken offline or made it extremely difficult to operate.
The Biden administration hampers coal and natural gas power generation through excessive regulation, slow permitting and the failure to allow the buildout of delivery infrastructure like pipelines.
Meanwhile, the administration is using subsidies to fast-track renewable projects like wind and solar, picking them as winners in the energy market despite their clear disadvantages compared to conventional power generation.
This is a problem, even for people who like renewables, because of two words — intermittent and dispatchable.
Wind and solar are intermittent producers, generating electrical energy when the wind blows and the sun shines. Dispatchable energy sources are those that are readily available to be ramped up or down to produce power to meet demand — ergo coal, natural gas, fuel oil, hydroelectric generation and, hopefully soon, small modular reactors.
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