By Mark Glennon, founder of Wirepoints
Electricity generation from wind energy actually dropped six percent last year in Illinois, putting the state still further behind on its goals for renewable energy production. What caused that? Climate change itself, we are supposed to believe, played a part.
That’s the claim made in a recent Chicago Sun-Times news column headlined, “Will climate change suck the air out of Illinois’ wind power industry?” It was written by authors from Inside Climate News, which also published the column.
It was less windy in 2023 in Illinois, the article tells us, and that was because of big Canadian forest fires last year. And it blames climate change, of course, for forest fires.
The problem with the column isn’t just the shakiness of that theory. Instead, it’s that the column makes no mention at all of the vastly bigger reasons why wind energy is floundering in Illinois. That omission hides the bigger failures..
The 800-pound gorilla squashing wind energy production is the connection problem we explained here.
In a monumental blunder, the federal government and states like Illinois are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build renewable energy sources, but they forgot the cost and difficulty of hooking those projects to the grid. Wind turbine projects simply aren’t in places served by most existing transmission lines.
That problem is recognized by both parties in Congress. None other than Sean Casten (D-Illinois), a leading supporter of the initial subsidies, now admits to how grave the problem is, saying that “80% of the clean energy progress we made with the Inflation Reduction Act will be lost unless we reform transmission and permitting.”
But efforts to fix the interconnection problem have stalled in Congress because the problem is so complex and cost so high. A fix might well cost trillions of dollar nationally (yes, trillions) and some argue the problem simply too complex to solve in any reasonable time frame.
Read more here.