Report Confronts Conservative Claims on Solar, Wind

By Alan Neuhauser |

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: “Just say no.”

That’s the slo­gan of some con­ser­v­a­tive law­mak­ers who are urg­ing states to resist a pro­posed fed­er­al rule lim­it­ing car­bon emis­sions from exist­ing pow­er plants.

The mea­sure, the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agen­cy’s Clean Pow­er Plan, would dri­ve up elec­tric­i­ty rates and under­cut reli­a­bil­i­ty, oppo­nents allege.

“The Oba­ma administration’s so-called ‘clean pow­er’ reg­u­la­tion seeks to shut down more of America’s pow­er gen­er­a­tion under the guise of pro­tect­ing the cli­mate,” Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell, R‑Ky., wrote in a March 3 op-ed in the Lex­ing­ton Her­ald-Leader. “States report that the reg­u­la­tion’s man­dates are not tech­no­log­i­cal­ly achiev­able, can­not be imple­ment­ed under rushed time­lines and threat­en both state economies and ener­gy reli­a­bil­i­ty for families.”

The argu­ments echo those by Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty, a polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy group backed by bil­lion­aire indus­tri­al­ists Charles and David Koch. Yet, just like that group’s claim that “there is great con­tro­ver­sary [sic] as to whether glob­al warm­ing is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing,” it’s a nar­ra­tive that may be mis­guid­ed, accord­ing to a report pub­lished this week.

In states that led in renew­able elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion, retail ener­gy prices were ini­tial­ly high­er than the nation­al aver­age, but soon became com­par­a­tive­ly cheaper.

The analy­sis by ven­ture cap­i­tal firm DBL Investors found that states with the high­est pro­por­tion of elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion from renew­able sources like solar and wind actu­al­ly expe­ri­enced cheap­er-than-aver­age retail prices com­pared to states with the small­est shares of green energy.

“Look­ing ahead, retail elec­tric­i­ty prices and the entire elec­tric­i­ty mar­ket are ripe for change,” DBL man­ag­ing part­ner and report co-author Nan­cy Pfund said in a state­ment. “Reliance on renew­ables will con­tin­ue to grow as their costs decline, and as states shift away from a fos­sil fuels focus and move towards a clean­er ener­gy future.”

It’s worth not­ing DBL is a firm that specif­i­cal­ly backs clean ener­gy com­pa­nies. Yet its report – which com­pared the 10 states with the great­est share of renew­able elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion to the 10 with the least – did find a marked dif­fer­ence between the two groups.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it U.S. News & World Report.