The green activists
have been zealously lobbying Congress and the EPA to change the laws, rules,
and regulations that would make it much more expensive and difficult for fossil
fuel energy producers to survive while passing the higher costs onto consumers,
impoverishing those customers on fixed incomes and taking away disposable
income from the rest.
Green energy
causes electricity poverty around the world. Today the Fraser Institute of
Canada, an independent, non-partisan public policy think-tank released a study
that found that energy poverty is on the rise in Canada.
"Government policies that raise
electricity prices may push some families into energy poverty and further
stretch the household budgets of families already in energy poverty," said
Taylor Jackson, study co-author and policy analyst at the Fraser Institute.
"Because high energy costs take a
large bite out of many household budgets, families across Canada pay the price
when government energy policies boost the cost of electricity," said
Kenneth Green, the Fraser Institute's senior director of natural resource
studies and co-author of Energy Costs and Canadian Households:
How Much Are We Spending?
According to the study, Canadian households that make $47,700 or less
per year are disproportionately affected by energy poverty.
The Fraser
Institute found that in 2013 the three regions most affected by energy poverty were
Atlantic Canada at 20.6 percent, Saskatchewan at 12.9 percent and Ontario at 7.5
percent, with a general 7.9 percentage in Canada. “Between 2010 and 2013,
energy poverty was on the rise in most provinces.” British Columbia had the
lowest at 5.3 percent.
The study
authors also found that the Green Energy Act of Ontario is responsible for the
increase in electricity prices.
In 2013 Der Spiegel warned us that “the
political world is wedged between the green-energy lobby, masquerading as
saviors of the world, and the established electric utilities, with their dire
warnings of chaotic supply problems and job losses.” http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html
In Germany,
the Energiewende, or energy wave
(revolution), was “Chancellor Angela Merkel’s project of the century.” It
turned out to be a flop, although not as bad as her recent policy of welcoming
with open arms of waves of violent Muslims into Europe.
After the
Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, Merkel “quickly decided to begin phasing
out nuclear power and lead the country into the age of wind and solar.” The
government-predicted renewable energy surcharge turned out to be higher than
the 20 percent price hike.
Of all the
companies that must pay the renewable energy surcharge, 2,300 German businesses
with lobbying representation, were able to exempt themselves from this green
energy surcharge by claiming tough international competition.
Der Spiegel said that German customers were
forced to pay 20 billion euros for electricity from solar, wind, and biofuel
plants that had a market price of only 3 billion euros. The
authors explained that this cost did not include “unintended costs and
collateral damage associated with the project.” The costs included the fact
that, depending on weather and time of day, the entire country can face “absurd
states of energy surplus or deficit.” Solar panels and wind turbines can
generate lots of electricity at times and other times zero.
According to
Der Spiegel, more than 300,000 German
households a year had their electricity cut off for unpaid bills. Caritas, a
charity group, called this “energy poverty.”
Sweden, a
heavily forested country, used up its biomass from wood and paper industry
waste to fuel conventional power plants; once it exhausted this source, it switched
to wind farms on land because the offshore ones were very expensive and tended
to rust much quicker.
There is no doubt that Americans have also been affected by
energy poverty. The Institute for Energy Research is citing the case of the
residents in Pueblo, Colorado. The state’s Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act forced
inexpensive coal plants to be closed. Their residential kWh rate has increased
26 percent since 2010 when “the new local utility company in Pueblo replaced
nearly all its inherited cheap coal capacity with wind and natural gas.” Residential
customers, with a poverty rate of 18.1 percent and one third of the population
on welfare, had to pay for the large infrastructure bills when the switch was
made. Wind turbines were added in order to meet the state’s Clean Air-Clean
Jobs Act requirement of 30 percent capacity coming from renewable resources. http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/energy-poverty-coming-america-coal-shuttered-green-power/
At CPAC 2015, during a panel discussion on climate change
and global warming alarmism, Gary Broadbent, representing Murray Energy Corporation,
the largest privately held coal mine in the U.S., highlighted Obama’s “war on
coal” via regulations passed by EPA alone in the last five years totaling
25,000 pages. Quoting Robert E. Murray,
Chairman of Murray Energy Corporation, Broadband said, “Prior to the election
of President Obama, coal provided 52% of the electricity generation in our
country. Today it is 37%. In our judgement, it will further decline to about
30%, at a maximum.”
Enumerating the 411 power plants designated for closure
through 2016, “101,000 megawatts of the lowest cost electricity in America,” CEO
Murray wrote that electricity, generated by coal at the plant cost of 4 cents
per kWh, will be replaced by “Mr. Obama and his appointees” with 15 cent per
kWh electricity from natural gas and 22 cent per kWh electricity from wind and
solar power, not to mention the huge subsidies to solar power from American
taxpayers.
In CEO Murray’s opinion, the Obama Administration has
bypassed illegally Congress, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the
States and their Public Utility Commissions, which are “empowered to regulate
the availability and cost of electricity.”
According to Chairman Murray, while we came within 700
megawatts of reducing loads to 61 million Americans in 13 states during the
Polar Vortex of 2014, “China has been building a new 500 megawatt coal-fired
plant every week for years, [and] burned about 4.0 billion tons of coal last
year.”
