Green Subsidies More Wasteful Than Previously Reported

Wind power was Britain’s biggest source of electricity in the first quarter of 2023, overtaking natural gas and highlighting the increasingly important role renewables are set to play in the years ahead.

According to researchers at Imperial College London, wind turbines provided 32.4% of Britain’s electricity in the first three months of the year. Gas, a fossil fuel, was responsible for 31.7% of the electricity fuel mix.

Many other media folk joined the celebration. Now comes news of the hangover, and unfortunately the pain is borne by average citizens. Gavin Finch, Todd Gillespie, Eric Fan, Jason Grotto and Sam Dodge reported last week for Bloomberg:

Dozens of British wind farms run by some of Europe’s largest energy companies have routinely overestimated how much power they’ll produce, adding millions of pounds a year to consumers’ electricity bills, according to market records and interviews with power traders.

These extra costs are linked to a growing problem with Britain’s outdated electricity network: On blustery days, too much wind power risks overloading the system, and the grid operator must respond by paying some firms not to generate. This “curtailment” costs consumers hundreds of millions of pounds each year.

Adding to that expense, some wind farm operators exaggerate how much energy they say they intend to produce, which boosts the payments they receive for turning off, according to nine people — traders, academics and market experts — most of whom agreed to discuss this controversial behavior only on condition of anonymity.

In effect, they said, the grid has paid some wind farms not to generate power that they wouldn’t have produced anyway.

One might reasonably ask, if a policy is crazy enough to pay people for not supplying a commodity, why should a non-supplier not charge for the largest possible volume of nothing? In any case, the British regulator called Ofgem now claims that it’s on the case. Emma Powell reports for the Times of London:

The energy watchdog is investigating claims that wind farm operators have overestimated the amount of energy they are set to generate, saddling customers with millions of pounds in extra costs…

A spokesman for Ofgem said: “Ofgem is investigating the alleged behaviour and has already asked the Energy System Operator to look into this.

How about looking into the behavior of politicians around the world who have been selling expensive political fantasies about wind energy for decades?

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The Most Expensive Political Fantasy of All
Our president has succeeded in ruling out of Beltway discussion any reform of the major programs driving federal spending and debt into the stratosphere. But at least one Beltway eminence is willing to acknowledge the financial burden being inflicted on America’s future taxpayers. In a Sunday interview with Scott Pelley on the

 program “60 Minutes,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said:

In the long run, the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path. The U.S. federal government’s on an unsustainable fiscal path… It’s probably time, or past time, to get back to an adult conversation among elected officials about getting the federal government back on a sustainable fiscal path.

That’s the understatement of the year. But unlike Mr. Biden, who tells one whopper after another about his fiscal frenzy, at least his Fed chair is willing to acknowledge that it’s an urgent problem. Mr. Powell added that “we’re borrowing from future generations. And every generation really should pay for the things that … it needs… and not hand the bills to our children and grandchildren.”

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Speaking of Burdens on Our Children and Grandchildren
Jill Tucker reports for the San Francisco Chronicle:

A Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression and remove those barriers to learning…

But two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, student achievement at Glassbrook has fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well spent given the needs of the students, who are predominantly low-income. Two-thirds of the students are English learners and more than 80% are Hispanic/Latino.

English and math scores hit new lows last spring, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and just under 12% at grade level in English — a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category.

Efforts to reach the organization were not successful, with an automated response saying the founder, who also provides the training, was recovering from surgery.

Let’s wish the founder a speedy recovery. Let’s also wish the school’s curriculum a speedy recovery from this disaster. Ms. Tucker adds:

Teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said he supports discussing racism in the classroom, but found the Woke Kindergarten training confusing and rigid. He said he was told a primary objective was to “disrupt whiteness” in the school… He said he questioned a trainer who used the phrasing “so-called United States,” as well as lessons available on the organization’s web site offering “Lil’ Comrade Convos,” or positing a world without police, money or landlords.

Craven-Neeley, who is white and a self-described “gay moderate,” said he wasn’t trying to be difficult when he asked for clarification about disrupting whiteness. “What does that mean?” he said, adding that such questions got him at least temporarily banned from future training sessions.

The end of all such training sessions would be a good start on the path to educational revival.

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Democracy Dies in Five-Minute Meetings
Last week this column noted the effort by Team Biden to keep Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.) off the Democratic presidential primary ballot in Wisconsin. But the power play was deemed too egregious even by the state’s left-leaning Supreme Court. Todd Richmond reports for the Associated Press from Madison:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered state elections officials Friday to include U.S. Rep Dean Phillips on the state’s Democratic presidential primary ballot, finding that Democrats on a bipartisan presidential selection committee who left him off the ballot without a discussion should have at least talked about him…

Phillips argued in his lawsuit that he met the test in Wisconsin law for gaining ballot access that says a candidate must be “generally advocated or recognized in the national news media.” State Justice Department attorneys representing the elections commission countered that the committee has sole discretion to decide who gets on the ballot.

The court found that the committee failed to properly exercise any discretion. Democrats listed Biden as their only candidate and approved adding him to the ballot without any discussion during a meeting that last [sic] only five minutes.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”