"Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager from San Francisco... has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding Democratic politicians and pet progressive causes. One of those pet causes had been a push to increase Michigan’s Renewable Energy Standard.
...Current state mandates require Michigan utilities to generate 15 percent of their sales from renewable sources like wind and solar by 2021.
Steyer and his allies sought to increase this to 30 percent by 2030. DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, Michigan’s two largest utilities, decided to go full-appeasement and agreed, sub rosa, to increase the mandate to 25 percent by 2030 if Steyer would end the ballot initiative push.
Steyer consented, and so, without the consultation of Michigan’s legislators, the Public Service Commission, or voters, a useless and expensive program has become even more useless and even more expensive.
Renewable energy mandates like Michigan’s (also known as renewable portfolio standards), force expensive, heavily subsidized electricity on ratepayers and taxpayers while providing few, if any, net environmental benefits.
A 2014 study from the left-of-center Brookings Institution found wind power is twice as expensive as the conventional power it replaces.
Solar power is three times as expensive.
This led the study’s author to conclude that “renewable incentives that are biased in favor of wind and solar … are a very expensive and inefficient way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.”...
Read all.
No comments:
Post a Comment