Net-zero energy policies in the Pacific Northwest will produce staggering costs to individuals and businesses without providing any meaningful environmental benefits, warns a monumental new research report from Discovery Institute's Reasonable Energy program.
Authors Jonathan Lesser and Mitchell Rolling find that Washington's and Oregon's plan to reach zero energy-related greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will double existing electricity demand at the cost of $549.9 billion, a burden which would be shouldered by Pacific Northwest households and small businesses. The plan will include requiring all new cars and light trucks sold to be electric by 2035, replacing all fossil-fuel space- and water-heating systems with electric heat pumps, and replacing existing fossil fuel generation with wind turbines and solar photovoltaics.
The report shows that prices for virtually all goods and services will dramatically increase, and jobs will be lost as businesses relocate to other states with lower-cost energy.
"The effects on your monthly electric bill are going to absolutely devastating," says economist and report author, Jonathan Lesser. "The average person is going to see their electric bill balloon 450% by 2050. Small business owners won't escape, they'll see their bills going from an average of $600 a month today to almost $4,000 in the next 25 years."
Should Washington and Oregon reach their goal, the resulting decrease in world temperature would only be 0.003°C (or less than three one-thousandths of a degree centigrade), a reduction in global temperature that the report calls "far too small to be measurable."
By contrast, the cost to meet growing electricity demand with natural gas and nuclear power would be $85.9 billion, one-sixteenth of the cost of supplying that electricity with renewables.
The report concludes that the two states would be best served by abandoning these goals, focusing instead on providing reliable and far less costly electricity from new natural gas and nuclear plants.
Praising it as a "groundbreaking report," Discovery President Steve Buri says the report "answers the most basic question about Washington and Oregon's plan to move to a Net-Zero economy: What will it cost businesses and consumers? Sadly – and not surprisingly – it's a question that those promoting the new 'green economy' either cannot or will not answer themselves."
