SURPRISE! Democrats' Green Power Sources Will Crush the Budgets of Lower- and Middle-Class Families

I apologize for using the language of the left. America, of course, has no static class structure. Every day some of "the poor" become rich and some who are rich lose everything and become poor. But I digress: the point of this post is to highlight the effects of the Obama Democrats' green energy agenda.

In short, every form of power they advocate will be more expensive -- in some cases, five times more expensive -- than clean fossil fuels like natural gas.

The cost of generating electricity includes the capital cost, the financing charges, and the production or operating costs (including fuel and maintenance of the technology) at the point of connection to an electrical load or the electricity grid. When determining what new plant to build, a utility company will compare all these costs [i.e., "the levelized costs"] across the slate of available generating units...

...EIA provides an estimate for the levelized costs for each technology it represents in the National Energy Modeling System—the modeling system used to produce the forecasts for the Annual Energy Outlook. These estimates are provided here and in the graph below. The agency provides the costs for dispatchable technologies (such as coal and natural gas) and for non-dispatchable technologies (such as wind and solar) separately because they are not directly comparable...


...If the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining, a dispatchable technology must be available to supply the demand. Thus, non-dispatchable technologies supply energy, but not capacity since they cannot be counted on continually to meet demand...

...An example of this situation occurred recently in California when the state hit its highest demand at 5 pm, when wind was producing a mere 350 megawatts out of an installed wind capacity of 4.3 gigawatts (8.1% of installed capacity). Other technologies had to be called on to supply power at California’s peak load. Wind generation is generally the greatest during the night when demand for electricity is the lowest, so it does little for providing power when that power is most needed...

If the eco-tards are able to fulfill their mission of locking away Americas' vast treasure trove of energy -- estimated to last for centuries -- they will not only cause the price of power to skyrocket. Every good and service will see immense price spikes, from grocery stores to laundromats, as the Marxist left continues its war on capitalism.