As usual, the mainstream media is losing its collective mind over the idea of taxing solar and wind power, due to a provision included in the thousand pages of the Big Beautiful Bill.
The important thing here is the fact that the pundits whining about it clearly don’t understand what energy is, in the context of public policy. We must begin by remembering that “energy” can mean many things, depending on the issue at hand. If you ask an electrical engineer what “energy” is, he may specifically describe the voltage itself, and how it travels, but not go further. But in a public policy discussion like this, the voltage is only a very small slice of a much bigger pie.
How is the fuel converted into power? How is it stored? How is it transmitted? How much land, machinery, personnel, and security does the process need? How convenient is it to the users who need it? How much energy is lost in bridging that distance?
Sunlight is free; usable solar power is not.
Wind is free; usable wind power is not.
In public policy, therefore, the cost of the fuel is only the very beginning of the conversation. Coal, oil, natural gas, sunlight, and wind are the fuel.
But what does society have to do to convert those raw materials -- those very different types of fuel -- into power in the electric grid that you and I can tap into -- to power our lights, our air conditioning, our refrigerators and our laptop computers?
Coal, oil, and natural gas are not free coming out of the ground, but they are pretty darned close. By contrast, yes, wind and sunlight are absolutely free; coal, oil and natural gas are just almost free. But there isn’t really much of a difference in cost between the two groups, at the source.
The relevant difference is this:
Coal, oil, and natural gas are all relatively cheap to convert into usable energy on the grand scale. Power plants that use oil, coal, and natural gas are all designed to be incredibly efficient for powering an electric grid or for powering vehicles and other engines. The bigger the capacity of the plant, the more efficient it is.
Solar and wind are much more complex. These massive “wind farms” and “solar farms -- huge fields of plastic panels and monstrous towers -- take up enormous amounts of the world’s most precious single resource: land.
Solar and wind generation require far more infrastructure and real estate per unit of energy produced, are infinitely more variable due to weather fluctuations, and have both greater cost and much greater risk of failure than traditional energy sources (coal, oil and gas).
Plucking an individual tax clause out of a big bill to analyze is always a bit of a challenge, until you know all the context around the program.
But we know this much: there are far more solar energy dependence and wind energy dependence in the American energy footprint today than ever before, putting lives and business at risk, and these two sources are devouring ever more precious land that the country simply cannot afford to spare.
The unpredictability of such a solar-and-wind-dependent grid is already causing almost incalculable problems -- such as rolling blackouts and other frequent outages that result in destroyed food at restaurants and grocery stores, manufacturing downtime when factories are without power, lost sales as retailers must shut their stores, lost lives as hospitals or nursing homes can no longer care for their patients. And these problems will only increase, as our dependence on solar and wind increases.
America’s farming and ranching output is already suffering from this shortsighted switch, and that trend is set to continue dangerously into the future unless we take control of it now.
Good farmland -- land that we desperately need for both farming and ranching -- is being wasted on massive fields of cheap plastic solar panels (correction: ridiculously expensive, frustratingly fragile, plastic solar panels) and outrageously massive bird-killing wind turbines of concrete, steel, and plastic.
Much has been said about how this solar and wind equipment is unrecyclable, but nowhere near enough has been said about the permanence of these wind turbines. At least when we finally realize that a solar farm was a stupid waste of prime farmland, we can rip out the plastic junk and plant seed again. But once you’ve sunk a hundred concrete and steel wind towers into huge reinforced concrete footings twenty or thirty feet in diameter and just as deep (or even bigger), that land use is permanent. After decommissioning the wind turbines, you’re never going to be able to plant anything there again.
If we are learning this week that there are some congressmen who recognize this cost, and who are courageously making the case that we should reduce the desirability of this particularly destructive kind of project by raising the taxes on it, well, that is a perfectly legitimate case worth arguing, and it deserves a place in the national debate.
Between our failing schools and failing press, our compromised political lobbies and Chinese influence, and our thoroughly warped system of rewarding bad ideas with tax credits, we have spent a generation unquestioningly convincing the American public that solar and wind power are the wave of the future, without so much as pretending to address their massive problems with environmental destruction, permanently wasteful misuse of fertile agricultural land, shockingly high cost per gigawatt, and propensity for mechanical failure.
Instead of being horrified that there are some in Congress who want us to pay attention to the downsides of solar and wind power, we should be grateful that somebody in Washington actually had the courage to bring it up.
This is a debate that western civilization desperately needs -- the sooner the better.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his most recent collection of public policy essays, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.