By Ryan Fazio, a state senator in Connecticut, for New York Post, December 2, 2023
Electricity rates have increased substantially in recent years.
But if you think your power bill is expensive now, just wait another decade and you’ll be longing for these good old days.
The US, like other developed nations, will see historic increases in electricity demand due to the electrification of vehicles and heating.
The nation is also retiring conventional base-load power plants, which are slowly being replaced by less-reliable green-generations systems like wind turbines and solar panels.
This trend will be far more pronounced in the Northeastern US, including my home state of Connecticut, where I am a state senator and a ranking member of the legislature’s Energy Committee.
According to ISO New England — which regulates power across the Northeast — regional electricity demand will increase by around 70% by 2040.
The region’s largest utility, Eversource, expects their demand to increase by 150% by 2050.
But supply is not keeping up.
Proposed wind farms are suffering from major cost overruns of upwards of 50% — on top of the fact that the price of the original wind contracts was already more than twice the wholesale cost of electricity.
As a result, many wind developers are taking significant hits to their stock price while others are pulling out of the American market entirely.
We all want affordable, reliable and clean energy.
But economic trends — along with an endless array of bad policy decisions — are making this harder to achieve.
To read the full article, click here.
Wind Concerns is a collaboration of citizens of the Lakeland Alberta region against proposed wind turbine projects.