05-12-25 Interview - Amy Oliver Cooke - Green Energy is Expensive and Unreliable Energy

GREEN ENERGY IS EXPENSIVE AND UNRELIABLE ENERGY And Amy Oliver Cooke writes about it here for Complete Colorado. This is my favorite part:

Environmentalists appealed to consumers by saying wind and solar would save ratepayers money. From the outset, Governor Polis refused to provide a detailed cost analysis of his plan while rejecting Independence Institute’s 2017 projection that the transition could cost $45 billion. Polis insisted the Institute’s estimates were inflated and modeled a plan that wasn’t even his. Yet, Polis never offered an alternative figure, saying, instead, he knows it will be less.Fast forward to 2024. The Colorado Energy Office’s (CEO) Ascend Analytics report offered an acknowledgment and a sobering warning: Polis’s wind, solar, and battery-only system would require 69,000 megawatts of new capacity by 2040 and still “barely meet reliability targets.” At $61 billion, it’s also the most expensive scenario studied. That figure doesn’t even include the billions of dollars needed for transmission costs. The total system cost will be far greater.Once again, the Institute did the math. The total system cost for Polis’ plan, including storage, necessary overbuild, backup, property taxes, and utility profits, new wind and solar costs $280–$319 per megawatt-hour, compared to $32 for existing coal and $40 for gas. Wind and solar costs aren’t just expensive—they’re economically destabilizing.

Amy is on the show to discuss at 1pm, but you really should watch her great show with Jake Fogelman called Power Gab here.