President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have made historic (i.e. expensive) taxpayer investments in green energy. His administration has paired these expenditures with ill-conceived regulatory proposals to electrify Americans’ cars , green appliances , and much more.

Biden aspires to rid the power sector of “carbon pollution” by 2035. However, meeting this benchmark would require a stunning, and likely unattainable, acceleration of green-energy infrastructure construction. And, of course, taxpayers will be the ones paying.

In the last two decades, the U.S. has constructed 70,000 megawatts (MW) of solar photovoltaics and 141,000 MW of on-land wind (through 2022). By contrast, the Department of Energy hopes by 2035 to amass 900,000 MW of solar photovoltaics and 500,000 MW of on-land wind generation. This would constitute 13-fold and 3.5-fold increases in solar and wind, respectively, in just more than a decade.

Once generated, green electricity requires transmission lines to reach consumers. A glaring problem is that America lacks too many of these transmission lines. The New York Times reports that, “Already, a lack of transmission capacity means that thousands of proposed wind and solar projects are facing multiyear delays and rising costs to connect to the grid. In many parts of the country, existing power lines are often so clogged that they can’t deliver electricity from wind and solar projects to where it is needed most and demand is often met by more expensive fossil fuel plants closer to homes and businesses.” To meet Biden’s 2035 benchmark, America must more than double transmission capacity, according to a federal estimate .

Additionally, green-energy infrastructure requires far more square mileage than fossil-fuel-generated electricity. To meet Biden’s benchmarks, “In total, the amount of land needed for wind and solar, even if the solar is co-located with wind turbines, will be larger than the area Montana and North Dakota combined,” writes economist Jonathan Lesser. He adds that the necessary footprint transmission lines “is larger than the combined areas of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.”

The only way Washington can further this breakneck and seismic shift is with something else that’s green: Taxpayer dollars. Therein lies the economic incongruity of the environmentalist position. Clean-energy facilities, i.e., wind and solar, can function as reliably and cheaply as fossil fuels, environmentalists say, but only a pirate’s ship of taxpayer-funded subsidies can induce industry and consumers to adopt them.

This contradiction resolves itself immediately when one realizes the truth that clean energy often can’t compete without subsidization in a free market. “Since sunlight and wind are, by definition, impossible to dispatch at will, the obvious critical issue is in how to fill gaps of unavailability,” the Manhattan Institute’s Mark Mills told Congress. “There are only two ways to do so: Maintain or build additional conventional, dispatchable back-up capacity, or build lots of electricity storage.”

Both strategies cost far too much, Mills explained. Obtaining the material components of batteries presents further substantial barriers. And the proof is in the Welfenpudding : Since 2011, in Germany, a state-imposed green transition (dubbed the Energiewende) has drastically inflated consumer energy prices and cultivated significant political backlash .

What’s more, subsidizing green-energy projects, like most other government handouts, costs taxpayers far more than environmentalist advocates assert. For example, the Democrats gifted corpulent tax credits for a cornucopia of environmentalist priorities, including green energy, electric vehicles, biofuels, and more in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Congressional Budget Office tagged the total price of these handouts at $391 billion over a decade. This proved a gross understatement. A Goldman Sachs review this year found they would instead cost $1.2 trillion, and would, moreover, “drive” $3 trillion in capital toward climate investments. Such overruns should surprise no one. Officials serially underestimate their projects’ costs due to political and emotional incentives.

Conversely, policymakers should not block green-energy technologies from competing freely with fossil fuels. Markets, not regulators, can best determine wind and solar farms’ place in the American economy. Fossil fuel advocates ought to have confidence in the relative utility and profitability of their favored energy source. But deregulatory efforts (i.e., removing the green-tinged static from market signals) will almost certainly ensure fossil fuels continued reign as the primary energizer of the American economy.

David B. McGarry is a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.