On December 14, 2022, the Biden administration held “the first-ever White House Electrification Summit.”
The goal of the meeting, which included officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Climate Policy Office, and Office of Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation, along with leaders of various NGOs, including the American Federation of Teachers, Greenlining Institute, and Rewiring America, was to create a “strategy to accelerate affordable, equitable, and efficient electrification of American homes, businesses, and transportation.” [emphasis, links added]
The same day of the Electrification Summit, the White House released a “rapid innovation agenda” that included President Biden’s goal of “a carbon pollution-free electricity grid by 2035, and to reach net-zero GHG emissions no later than 2050.”
The same document claimed that by “electrifying our homes, businesses, industry, and transportation, the United States can get more than halfway to our goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.”
It also claimed, “Electrification will help enable the United States to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 while improving health, prosperity, and justice for all Americans.”
In April, the New York Times published an article headlined “How Electrifying Everything Became A Key Climate Solution.”
The article, by Nadja Popovich and Brad Plumer, said that “To tackle climate change”, the U.S. will have to quit burning fossil fuels in our engines, furnaces, and boilers, and the “best way to do that, experts increasingly say, is to replace them with electric versions.”
The article quoted Saul Griffith, the founder and chief scientist at Rewiring America, a dark money group, that I wrote about here on Substack on March 19, in “The Dark Money Behind The Gas Bans.”
Griffith told the Times that “All roads point to electrification.” The Times did not mention that Rewiring America is leading the effort to ban the use of natural gas in homes and businesses.
Nor did the Times bother to report that Rewiring America doesn’t disclose its budget or funders. The Times article didn’t contain the word “ratepayers,” and did not include “consumers.”
This lack of rigorous reporting by legacy media outlets is unfortunate. Alas, it’s not surprising. As with much of the rhetoric around alt-energy and decarbonization, [the costs] — and the regressive effect that decarbonization mandates like bans on gas appliances will have on low- and middle-income consumers — are routinely ignored.
But last week, the Department of Energy published numbers that show, yet again, that the electrify-everything push is, in reality, a regressive tax.
The data, published by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, forecasts the “representative average unit costs of five residential energy sources for the year 2023.”
Here’s the punchline: On an energy-equivalent basis, electricity will cost 3.3 times more than natural gas this year.
The forecast found that electricity will cost about $46 per million BTU while natural gas will cost about $14.
The DOE numbers, which should have been published six months ago, gut the claims being made by NGOs, and in the White House press releases, that the electrify-everything push will “lower energy costs.”
To be clear, none of these findings are new. The representative average unit costs published annually by the DOE have consistently shown that using natural gas directly in the home is far cheaper than using electricity.
I wrote about this regressive energy tax in Forbes back in 2021. The DOE’s 2019 numbers can be found here. The 2009 numbers are here.
What’s different now is that the electrify-everything push is being pushed at the highest levels of the U.S. government and by lavishly funded dark money groups.
As can be seen below, four of the groups pushing bans on natural gas have combined budgets totaling more than $800 million per year.
The electrify-everything jihad isn’t just bad for the poor and the middle class. It’s also bad for the climate and energy security.
Read rest at SubStack
The chart of the cost of power per million BTU is misleading. Where we live the cost of power is less due to a lot of hydroelectric power in our energy mix. Despite the lower cost of power, the actual cost of using it is more than the 40% difference between propane and electric power indicated on the chart. As I have stated in other posts, our house has dual electric and propane ability for our hot water. One time I switched to electric and forgot to switch back to propane for three months. The result was our electric bill doubled.
All of the traditional values of liberals have fallen if doing so serves the climate change movement. Liberals have traditionally been the advocates for lower income demographic groups. These groups spend a higher percentage of their incomes on energy. Increasing the cost of energy is truly regressive.
In the 1960’s, Ontario Hydro ran a big ad campaign, “LIVE BETTER ELECTRICALLY”. They had a product to sell. They encouraged customers to install some really bad ideas in their homes, almost all of which were eventually removed and junked. Fifty years later, the same mistakes will be repeated.
The cost of running ones electric furnace, hot water heater, and stove will be zero during those frequent power outages when the grid is powered solely by “green energy”. The costs shown by the DOE for using those appliances in the chart above is based on a grid mostly powered by coal and natural gas. Wait until the grid no longer has those inexpensive sources of electricity.